Comment by listic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by listic | Hacker News Reader

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A commenter on habrahabr.ru+ noticed (http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/gdev/124990/#comment_4110999) that there are Russian black marketers buying bundles for $ 0.01 and reselling for around 50 rubles ($1.50) that, unfortunately, may drive the average price down. Supposedly, people who can't be bothered to get a credit card or Webmoney account buy from them.

I'm worried how the pay-what-you-want model accommodates this behaviour? I hope clients buying directly for a reasonable price will always outnumber the black marketers or people intentionally buying for $0.01 to cause loss, but I don't know for sure.

+ habrahabr.ru is Russian IT news blog filled in large part with content translated from Hacker News.

Since there's no DRM you can't help it if people are buying one key and then burning a bunch of CDs, but that won't affect the average price much. Seems to me that if they're selling license keys for $1.50, the best way to counter this is to change the download screen title to:

    Thanks for purchasing the Humble Indie Bundle #3 for $0.01!

... if the customer thinks that's fair, so be it, but it might at least encourage the "resellers" to pay slightly more.

Alternatively, I don't think setting the minimum payment to $1 would be at all incompatible with the "pay what you want" slogan & worthwhile if it eliminates the payment fees problem.

(But what would I know? I've bought all four, and last time 'round I felt like I got my money's worth just out of Braid.)

They seem to have cottoned on to this: if enter a price of less than a dollar, you need to fill out a re-captcha.

    Orders under $1 must authenticate with reCAPTCHA to help cut down on costly abuse.

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