The Humble Indie Bundle
May 12th, 2010 by Macguffin in UncategorizedIf you haven’t heard, there is currently a thing called the Humble Indie Bundle. It’s now officially a Big Deal. No pun intended.
The HIB, as we’ll call it, consists of all the following games: World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru, Penumbra, and Samorost 2. They usually have a sticker price of something like $100.
Remarkable Thing One: All these folks got together and said, pay us whatever you think it is worth. You can go and get all this for as little as $.01.
Remarkable Thing Two: You can then split the money you pay up between the developers and two charities – The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child’s Play.
Remarkable Thing Three: The bundle was on sale for about a week, and now has been extended a couple days further. To date, they have had almost 125,000 separate contributiors and made over $1,140,000 in revenue, about a third of which is going to those two charities. Several of the developers are also now releasing their games as open source, with Lugaru already out there.
Holy crap.
As Jay Barnson pointed out on the Rampant Coyote blog, they’ve shown how powerful some indies working together can be. Without no marketing budget to speak of, they’ve galvanized over 125,000 people to pay money for their game. These numbers don’t even include the pirates downloading it off BitTorrent and such! Repeating this exact thing event would be difficult (if not impossible), but this should encourage all of us indies to be audacious and to try big things.
Another big thing to note is, they were really frigging smart about this. They set up something that was pretty easily doable with out-of-the-box technology + the web skills they possessed. For a minimum time investment, they set up what may turn out to be the most significant business event to date for game dev indies.
I’d encourate everyone to go buy the Humble Indie Bundle. If nothing else, you’re getting some seriously kick-ass games at whatever price you think is a good one.