The Humble Indie Game Bundle
wolfire.com
wolfire.com
Edit: As others point out, there are already some other anchoring points on the page, so having an average lower than those may be hurting them. It might have been wiser to make the "Top contributors" tab the default (or only) tab in their realtime stats display.
http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/deep-disc...
Anyhow, the idea was to simplify the workflow and simultaneously abuse the power of defaults and user psychology. I also intentionally ditched some parts of the offer which I don't think add business value, such as fine-grained control on the split.
(I'd A/B test including "65% of people pay this much" on the #1 step, probably with a subtle yellow highlighting.)
I also notice in the promo video it has the average right next to the entry form. On my form it defaults to 29.95 and says "For instance: 10, 20.50, or 100.00." as help text. It seems like they played around with the form a bit.
This is the type of thing that could benefit from a nice A/B test. Might be hard to run on a very public one-time promo like this though.
If I had heard only about a "indie game bundle" containing those titles, I would probably have run straight to The Pirate Bay. But this one caught my attention.
The devs are willing to give five high-quality games for whatever I want to pay. The guy even sang a song for the advertisement, for god's sake.
I loved the ad. I loved the bundle. I even loved the website.
This selfish pirate is reaching for his wallet. I will not pay the full $ 80 sum (though more than the average, for sure), but I'm one that would probably not have paid a penny otherwise.
Their bandwidth is excellent and all downloads are direct (no login, download token, download code, wait time, bandwidth limit or whatever).
Well executed idea!
The point is, I really don't know what these games are about and how much they are worth.
edit: removed some incorrect info
But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. I wonder how much attention the involved studios'll get for future projects as a direct result of this? Aquaria, especially, has been out for quite a while now - this can probably be more accurately considered a way of breaching access to any possible remaining audiences before launching their Next Big Things.
Don't forget that these games are already "old" in terms of the normal gaming market. They already had their heyday.
I ended up paying $100. Most of the money went to Child's Play but the devs still got $20 and the EFF $10.
It's a nice PR move but that's just disgusting I'm sorry.
$8.64 is $2.88 for the developers or about 58c/game.
"By default, the amount is split equally between the seven participants (including Child's Play and EFF), but you can tweak the split any way you'd like."
A few friends have been approached for MacHeist and only offered $1-10k depending on the bundle. A friend went through with it and got $2k cash and a few little extras for giving away his app to 400,000 people.
Without this event there would be close to no sales since some of these are pretty old games. 40$ * 10 sales is much worst than 2$ * 1000 sales.
The iPhone app store runs on the same idea.
Jeff Atwood also wrote an article about that : http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/software-pricing-ar...
And I'm pleasantly surprised with gish so far; already checking out the developer's site to see what else that have on offer.
Other people might be paying that average and are only interested in 1 or 2 of the games in the bundle.
You can't just say a blanket "5 games or $1.72 is disgusting".
The sad part is it'll be celebrated as a victory because they'll gross a lot of money and it's "money they wouldn't otherwise have" ... unless they set their own price and reached a tiny fraction of the consumers that'll buy their games today.
Things are only worth what people will pay for them.
Indeed, you've made more money and more people are using your product (many of them paying less than they would otherwise).
In business terms this is called a WIN/WIN situation.
(Consider all the products which used to be expensive but are dirt cheap today. Do you think it's "disgusting" that you pay your ISP a minuscule fraction of what you would have paid per byte per month back in the dialup era?)
Ah well, and I was willing to give the developers $20 or so.
edit: Yes, I would have bought it for $0 if they let me.
Aquaria is an amazing adventure game that is somewhat reminiscent of Metroid in how you explore the environments. The environments are beautiful and the game play is fun.
Penumbra Overture is a horror game that has scared me more than any other horror game I have played. It has an incredible atmosphere and is definitely worth the play through. The game ends on a cliffhanger, but the sequel is even better than the original, so I would recommend getting both.
As an anecdote, I played World of Goo at a friend's once. He copied it on my USB stick and I played more at home. A few months later there was a "pay what you want" promotion for just World of Goo. I bought it to support the developers, even though I had already finished the game and there was nothing new to play with. It's a great game and I recommend it for a few hours of fun.
It's the same with Frictional Games (creators of Penumbra) and the game that they're funding through preorders, Amnesia.
They're not making more they're just selling more.
Read the attached article, it's their response to their sale: http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/
But relative to other models the "pay what you want" is a terrible failure - any of those games could have singlehandedly grossed $30,000 to $60,000 from the number of sales they've had today, and that's going to lose a big chunk to advertising but still make them a lot more than $1.66 a sale.
Appstore-like pricing is the exception, not the rule.
That some of the 6000 purchasers today would not pay $20 is irrelevant, others would and others from the remaining millions of game players would too.
You also disregard that I already factored in a 50% - 75% discount - the prices I put assumed a $5 - $10 price on sale.
Cheers.
I have repeatedly found personally, and talked to other software developers, that increasing your price drives pathological users away and decreasing your price (particularly dramatically decreasing your price) draws them in like flies.
I do not think it is obviously true that selling 8 games for, e.g., $1 is better than not having that sale. If folks offered me the option of participating in a similar deal, I would decline. In addition to customers paying essentially nothing but requiring disproportionate support, I would be worried about auto-commoditizing my software offering. Why pay $30 when I've publicly demonstrated that I consider it to be worth less than a buck?
On a related topic: dangrover's comments about participating in Macheist are a great read, regardless of your feelings on the matter.
I think that's where the charity comes in. I see a generous indie developer giving to a good cause, not one admitting their goods are worthless.
In general I see what you're saying.
Also, even a cost of $1 incurs the friction of the transaction. That ought to turn away a significant percentage of the freeloaders, who probably paid 0 on pirate bay a long time ago anyway.
The total is going up by over $300 a MINUTE right now.
Exactly. I just paid $15 just because I thought it was a neat idea. I don't know if I'll even play the games since I don't really play video games much any more these days. If I do, I won't spend much time on them, and I definitely wouldn't have ever purchased them. So my money to them is 100% money they would never have had otherwise.
exactly. I bought World of Goo when 2D Boy had such an offer. And i had not heard of the others. Now after the video i want to try Lagaru HD