Braid, Super Meat Boy, and Lone Survivor Added to Humble Indie Bundle V
humblebundle.com
humblebundle.com
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.
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.)
http://spacerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/lone-survivor-orig... is the Lone Survivor soundtrack.
And the Braid soundtrack was linked elsewhere in the thread, but for completion's sake: http://magnatune.com/artists/braid
http://braid-game.com/news/2008/08/the-soundtrack-to-braid/
tl;dr version: it's all existing licensed music that the Braid guys don't have rights to distribute
Edit: it was actually released in 2009, not 2008.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 $1 per bundle sold is somewhat worrisome to me.
I mean it's the same for every product. The first computers were ridiculously expensive before becoming ridiculously cheap. It's all about the cycle of "early adopters" then reaching the mass market. If you want to reach the mass market with your games, it's much easier to do so by lowering your price. Doing TV marketing works, too, but it costs so much money it's not even for the same league of games. You can only do TV if you expect to sell several millions of it.
Anyway, back to my point: not all gamers want to spend 60$ 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.
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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIsajVs2uL8 (starts a 1:00).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm simply noting that many indie game studios would kill to have this kind of revenue.
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.
These new games, on the other hand, should be finished tonight.
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?
1) An example of an unusual pay-what-you-want business strategy that is EXTREMELY successful
2) An example of a successful start-up (Humble Bundle Inc.)
3) Cheap, "independent" games
Though I voted this submission up because of its informational value. I saw it before I got an email about the update.
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.
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.”
[1]http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/06/07/humble-bundle-v-a...