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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

I think you might need to read this: http://www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video-game-economic...

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.

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

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.

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIsajVs2uL8 (starts a 1:00).

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.

I never would have bought any of these games if it weren't for the bundle.

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