Not to be ungrateful, but any chance that we'll get soundtracks with these as well?
The addition of FLAC soundtracks was great..and for anyone who hasn't checked it out the Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP soundtrack is _amazing_, as is Bastion's.
If they don't add them, and you're still craving the soundtracks:
http://dbsoundworks.bandcamp.com/ has a few Super Meat Boy soundtracks. You'll probably want the Digital Special Edition. (I physically have a signed Double CD copy, and it is glorious.)
I've been listening to the Bastion soundtrack on repeat for the last week :-). I feel like it very much fits in the style of Firefly, but maybe that's just me.
That's actually out of date. Magnatune got all the music together for an album (with a great cover) they released later that year: http://magnatune.com/artists/braid
Not implying that they don't deserve it (they absolutely do), but I'm blown away by how lucrative this is for the developers. With some reasonable assumptions, it looks like the original 5 developers have already made $300,000 each.
Quite a payday for games that have already been released for a while. I think (from my rough calculations) that's about what Braid made on its opening weekend.
I was just thinking how not lucrative it is. When it's all said and done a 500k check for "free" down the road ain't bad, but it's not terribly impressive either when you consider these games truly are the best of the best. It's even less valuable if much time was required to port to Linux as is often the case.
Gamers have shown that they are willing to pay a whole entire dollar per game for some of the absolute best indie games released in recent years. I find that far more depressing than encouraging.
There's a reasonable argument to be made that the devaluation created by Humble Bundle and perhaps Steam sales cause more harm than good in the long run. Of course there's a reasonable argument they do more good than harm as well. It's interesting to consider but impossible to prove either way.
>Gamers have shown that they are willing to pay a whole entire dollar per game for some of the absolute best indie games released in recent years.
That assumes that people don't already own some of the games, and that they actually want all eight of the games. For instance, I already own Braid, Limbo and Psychonauts (and paid $10+ for each of them), so when the bundle came out I paid my $10 for Bastion and Sword and Sorcery (and I was only really interested in Bastion). Of the additions announced today, I already own Braid and SMB.
I think it's a lucrative week for the devs, but I think a bigger issue is that when you offer games so cheaply you significantly reduce your potential purchasing base for the future when you essentially give it away. That being said, I've seen plenty of stats which show game sales slow to a crawl very quickly unless you push it up with significant sales - it's not like 'work' software where a big sale can significantly decrease your perceived value (imagine if Adobe sold it's Creative Suite for 75% off once a year - no one would ever purchase at full price again!). Gamers are an impatient bunch and are prepared to pay full price for something they're really excited for.
You have to try and find out whether the increased volume generates more volume than it potentially removes in lost future sales, and I tend to think that it does - especially for games like Bastion which had a huge marketing effort when they were on Xbox Live Arcade which would have given them a lot of full-price exposure.
> ... you significantly reduce your potential purchasing base for the future ...
It isn't quite that bad. You do get a whole bunch of money and customers at once. Is it better to have one dollar today from a customer than getting 5 dollars in several months time, from the same customer and have to spend all those intervening months doing marketing and other things to try and get the customer? Consider the price a discount for not having to spend the effort to get the customers.
You also get more certainty over your future. eg if you get a cheque today for $500k then you know how much you can spend making your next game. Getting the usual daily dribbles instead makes it far harder to plan for the future.
And of course you can add your game to multiple indie bundles over time so you do get multiple bites at the cherry so to speak.
Oh yes, of course. Like I said, these games are all several years old and have, I think mostly run their course in terms of full price sales, so I don't think these bundles significantly affect these game's future sales, and getting exposure to lots of people opens up opportunities for sales of sequels/future games.
Still, it'd be worth doing the maths on - if your game is still selling well, putting it in a bundle would be foolish.
Deep discounts don't "devalue" games, they bring in massive increases in revenues when done correctly. For example, in a particular experiment that Valve performed a 75% reduction in price resulted in a factor of 40 increase in gross revenues. It's hard to argue with numbers like that.
Oh I'm well aware. I work on games that have sold on Steam and have been featured in both daily deals and prominently featured during their blowout summer/winter sales. The massive increased revenue on those days is undeniable. The question is what happens to user behavior over the long term. I'm personally guilty of not buying a new game because I know it'll be deeply discounted in the very near future. I know many others think the same way now.
A $60 title being discounted to $15 and seeing a 40x revenue spike is pretty cool. One of the most amazing indie game packages of all time earning a team of devs less than $1 per bundle sold is somewhat worrisome to me.
You have to realize there are people (like me, for example) who never (well almost never!) buy games at full price. I either look for used one, or wait for discounts. I have no urge to play most of the games - I do make an exception once in a while, like when a new GTA comes out. But that's it.
I mean it's the same for every product. The first computers were ridiculously expensive before becoming ridiculously cheap. It's all about the cycle of "early adopters" then reaching the mass market. If you want to reach the mass market with your games, it's much easier to do so by lowering your price. Doing TV marketing works, too, but it costs so much money it's not even for the same league of games. You can only do TV if you expect to sell several millions of it.
Anyway, back to my point: not all gamers want to spend 60$ in the first place. Some won't. So they will either buy your game at 5$ or never buy it. The rest is all about lost opportunities.
Agree with this.. I may be an extreme case, but I never buy games, veryVERY rarely play games at all, and I've bought three of these bundles. Too good of a deal to pass up for even the possibility of future enjoyment :) (I pay like $10 or so).
Seems like the people that play games would have already bought and enjoyed the most appealing of these sometime in the past couple years. If they see this bundle and take the opportunity to pick up the ones they didn't care as much about on discount, that's a win for the developers. And for people like me who would never buy or play them otherwise, I get it cheap and the developers get at least some money from me (and an email address to market to :)).
Doubt there's many hardcore gamers who've passed on the full price games in favor of waiting years for these to be bundled and discounted. So these bundles seem like an amazing way to eke out a couple hundred thousand extra dollars from an audience that you wouldn't otherwise have reached.
Yes it would be nice to make more money per sale but that metric is misleading and not necessarily relevant. We know from over a century of economic study that demand and price are not independent variables, in fact they are tightly related. The humble bundle model of selling games well after launch and letting buyers set the price strikes me as a fantastically effective way to both capture consumer surplus and to increase demand. The incremental cost of each sale is incredibly low compared to the total revenue, so per sale revenue isn't as relevant as total revenue.
I find your '$1 per bundle sold per dev team' metric disingenuous because it glosses over that a lot of those single dollars will be from buyers who have already paid full price for that teams game
At the end of iPhone and iPad versions of World of Goo there is interactive animation which basically tells you that it's impossible to have quality games if price is 99c.
Actually, you're right. I wasn't thinking of it in terms of "best of the best." No doubt that's what these games are. I was thinking about from the perspective of, maybe, a one man team that would be delighted to see even $100k in the lifetime ROI.
No trying to be offensive but Indie Developers, might be the only ones at this particular point in time, to make a difference with their creations, in a field that looks so stale. I believe they deserve their reward, if not more, from the current bundle.
Being a gamer my whole life, it's sad to see how the industry has been in a rut ever since the PS2 era. As of late however, it's very interesting to see how indies are picking up what the big companies left during the SNES era. Also noteworthy for those who are just beginning tojoin the indie game scene, there are some nice games out there that haven't been in a humble bundle yet:
look for games by nifflas, cactus, jon mak, kenta cho and auntie pixelante.
Thanks for those. This reminded me, though - I play indie games for their originality, so I'm always sad when I see ones that aren't very different from what came before. Specifically, I really wish indie game devs would stop focusing so much on making new takes on platformers - it seems like they make up a disproportionate number of indie games, probably because they're less ambitious endeavors than strategy games or other types. But, I and many of the others who are no longer buying AAA games because they're looking for something new are sick to death of platformers, regardless of whether it has a new twist on gravity control, or time control, or beautiful artwork, or some other unique twist. It's still a platformer, and the core gameplay is usually not actually different despite the twists. Maybe I'm just not the target market, though.
Some wonderful counterexamples to this plague of platformers - Hammerfight (in a previous bundle), Starfarer, Lugaru (previous bundle), Bastion (current bundle), Plants and Zombies.
Hammerfight in particular is one of the most entertaining indie games I've played in years and totally unique, I highly recommend it.
On the other hand, as a platformer fan, I have absolutely loved the glut of indie platformers -- from the beauty of Braid and An Untitled Story to the hardcore stylings of Super Meat Boy, VVVVVV, and Distorted Travesty, it's been a glorious last few years for me.
Really, I think a larger issue are the iOS-to-PC ports that just don't have much gameplay depth. Swords and Soldiers and Snuggle Truck are bad in that regard.
haHA! So you're the reason they keep making those :-D I guess I've just shifted to being fan of other types... most arcade games can't hold my attention well anymore either, and I'm not deluded enough to think that's true for other people. Agree on the recent trend in games that have very little gameplay depth... there have been some notable exceptions (Game Dev Story, King of Dragon Pass), but for the most part, I'm pretty depressed about the state of iOS gaming.
Braid has a pretty cool narrative going for it as well, not just the time control mechanic. Have you played it the whole way through?
I really wanted to like hammerfight, but I had some mouse sensitivity problems that kept popping up. Do you know if it was made in flash? Definitely felt that way to me. They cane up with a fun mechanic for a game and built a cool world around it, which I can definitely appreciate.
Yeah, I think Hammerfight is a pretty finicky game. It worked well for me (built in mouse-sensitivity buttons on my mouse helped a lot), but if it hadn't, I don't think it would have been very fun. If you get it working well, though, it's an absolute blast.
You should give Braid another go if you have the time, I played it on and off for months before finishing. In terms of games that make you actually think about what they're saying, I've yet to find a better one. "Art games" excluded because they usually aren't fun.
They're offering a product people are quite willing to pay for. Drm, hassle-free, hand-selected[1] indie titles is valuable, and donation models, especially "suggested donation" models have long been used in the right circumstances to get better returns than transactional-style sales when you're offering something people actually want.
Users don't have to wait another 5-10 years for the programs to end up on an abandonware site, and the original developers actually get the proceeds. Win-win.
[1] I realize there's likely politics and negotiation that happens in the background when arranging the humble bundles-- the point is that there's a level of endorsement here attractive to players who may not have much time and energy to spend trying out indie games.
I believe Psychonauts is being delayed due to its massive size. I would not be surprised if there are technical hurdles for packaging it that need to be overcome for the Ubuntu team. We've actually received some support messages that certain file systems cannot actually contain a 4.5 GB file, which is a new one to me!
These new games, on the other hand, should be finished tonight.
Super meat boy was already there but cost some 6 dollars or something. Ubuntu software center seems like an alpha.
I am glad you guys integrated with this because I want the software center to be a successful product but are you as frustrated by it as the users are?
Well, if you are on a FAT32 file system (e.g. often used for SD cards, USB Keys etc.), then you cannot store files which exceed 4gb in size if IIRC. Please correct me if I am wrong!
I've added the previous games to my Steam account, can I add these new ones which have just been added also? I'm not home to actually try this yet but it would be awesome to have these new games managed by Steam also. Since I purchased this bundle previously I'm wondering if that is possible.
I'm not even interested in these games but I went ahead and ordered a bundle for $8.50 just because I'm a huge fan of pay-what-you-want concepts and the Humble Bundle execution of this concept is awesome.
I don't consider myself a huge wuss but I'm still only about half way through Amnesia -- make sure you play late at night with the lights off and good headphones on.
That's what I think as well but this is the fifth Humble Bundle and it's not even the official announcement, simply an addition to the original deal. I'm just a bit surprised this is of interest to so many HNers.
The Humble Bundles are the only reliable source of high-quality Linux-compatible games that I'm aware of, so I expect them to continue to get a fair bit of attention.
Though I voted this submission up because of its informational value. I saw it before I got an email about the update.
The fact that these are all compatible with linux and mac substantially increases their interest for a lot of people here, I think. HB's make up a pretty big percentage of my game purchases on my mac.
This may be the fifth one (actually more, if you count the Bundles that were developer-specific) but this time around the games in it are excellent. It's probably the best of their bundles ever. And the new games only add to that.
Any love for those of us who already bought this? I don't want to pay twice, especially considering the only other game I want that I don't already have is Super Meat Boy.
I just checked my download page, and the new additions are showing up even though I bought several days ago.
According to the front page, the new ones are for people that paid more than the average. If you have bastion but not the new three, then perhaps they were based on the average when added to the bundle. That's likely gone up, so if you paid less than the current average but more than the average when you paid you might not have gotten them.
You get the new games if you paid more than the average when you originally purchased. I paid $7, which was a bit more the average when I originally bought the bundle (day 1), and the new games show up in my account.
No. You get them if you paid any amount before they were added. I had payed well below average (buying foreign currency is currently very hard in my country) and I got the games added.
Also, from a recent interview with the guys from the bundle[1]:
RPS: Is there any temptation to have it be so you only get the extra games if you up your payment to above the average?
Richard Esguerra: No, I don’t think so. That’s not been discussed as an option, but it has been communicated internally that that would be gross. It feels like a bait and switch, you get penalised for buying earlier. That doesn’t make any sense for customers. If there’s anything that we’re super-rabid about, it’s about gamers – it’s about the gamers’ experience, about how awesome the experience of participating in a bundle is. Getting to pay what you want, getting to choose where the money goes. We want all that to be as awesome as possible, so we really try to avoid experiences where people will feel like, “Oh, why did I buy this when I did.”
