THQ Humble Bundle ends at $5,097,373 (THQ President contributes $10K) | Hacker News Reader

THQ Humble Bundle ends at $5,097,373 (THQ President contributes $10K)

humblebundle.com

38 pointspdknsk36 comments

This is over 50% of their market cap of $9.6M, and looks like it caused at least a little bump in their share prices: http://tinyurl.com/bwzblvy

Not all of it goes to them, though. I allocated all of my purchase to charity.

I donated 90% to THQ. The way things are going over there, they need all the charity they can get.

Especially if we still want to see Saints Row 4...

I would dissociate "publisher" and "assets". Even if THQ dies their assets will be passed on to someone else. You rarely see IP completely disappear, just like you do not always see factories being demolished when a company bankrupts. Honestly this is probably better at this stage to see THQ go bankrupt since they have been poor at managing their assets, and let someone else take control and hopefully make more money out of their assets.

> I would dissociate "publisher" and "assets". Even if THQ dies their assets will be passed on to someone else. You rarely see IP completely disappear

Maybe not disappear, but end up in a legal limbo (eg split up to multiple parties), or in a vault of some insurance/investment company which has no interest or clue to do anything with it. While I can't now recall any specific examples, iirc there has been cases like that before.

idk how the Interplay breakup eventually landed, at least some IP managed to get out.

A little bump being +25%

I had no idea that THQ was in such dire straits. Looking at their Humble portfolio, they have a diverse set of technologies here. It's a real shame that they aren't able to monetize them better. When you look at other publishers, they tend to stick with a single technology, but THQ never had that huge AAA hit that they could keep iterating on cheaply to print money.

CTG Engine, 4A Engine, Essence Engine, GeoMod Engine. There's a lot of technology here. (2 internal) 4A is probably their most advanced.

If I were them, I'd focus on making a CoD clone with the 4A Engine. Perhaps the graphical superiority could appeal to a more hardcore audience that would fill out as GPU technology catches up.

They tried a CoD clone in Homefront, and it did not do very well.

Not having played it, I thought that most of the criticism went to the game's short length rather than the engine.

I would agree with this. I felt that the game was well done, engaging, and fun....but unfortunately it just stops right when the story starts to really heat up. The ending definitely had an unfinished feel for me.

That might be part of their problem. Instead of making a big AAA game they keep reinventing the engine. It seems most really successful game studios have 1-2 engines that they're very good at producing good games on. They may update often but it's rarely an entirely new engine. (See Valve, ID, etc.) Making a new engine for every game can't help their delivery times.

Which makes you wonder, if they are really engine folks, maybe they should be an engine company?

Possibly, I don't know much about the engines behind THQ's games really. To become just an engine company requires a well rounded and adaptable engine. There's probably some market for a superb niche engine but that is a weak position to put yourself in as a company.

They might be reinventing their engine so often because they can't get a good future-resistant engine out of it.

Don't forget that not all of that goes to THQ. There's the default split but I can't find what that was for this bundle. It's 70% to the devs for the Amnesia Fortnight. (Might be higher than normal though)

I know that this wasn't meant to save THQ, but considering the flagship titles that were made available, that amount of money is not very impressive.

It is a drop in the ocean relative to the development costs of those games.

Most of those titles would have made more in their first day on store shelves.

EDIT: Also worth mentioning that the THQ president might have donated 10k in order to push up the average price.

Considering the games are between 1 and 8 years old, I think the amount raised is decent enough.

Also, it would appear as though the THQ president was attempting to get people to match / beat his top donation: https://twitter.com/Jason_Rubin/status/278920299909636096

Agreed. While the games might have made more when they were 1 day old, they are not one day old.

The whole thing has also garnered some positive press and upwelling of positive feelings towards the studio.

A brief calculation assuming: - first 100 000 purchases without THQ president intervention between 3 and 5 dollars - 10k intervention at 100 000 point - subsequent purchases made above average pricing seem to indicate the 10k THQ "push" made the average price jump 10 cents at least (conservative estimation), providing a resulting boost in profit of 70 000 dollars (again, conservative estimation, probably).

http://www.codeskulptor.org/#user7-h9oPfIQh4l-0.py

Somehow I do not think the Humble Bundle should allow the creators/publishers to modify the average price since it's more or less like insider trading in the stock echange: once you modify the average price you reap the profits - it's highly unethical and here it clearly shows the 10k expense from THQ president made a 60k profit for THQ.

You assume the president's purchase came fairly early at the 100k mark. Later the delta from his donation continues diminishing rapidly. Any later than half way through and the delta is less than 2.5 cents and following the rest of your assumption gives them only 10k. Not to mention that the money is split between the donation options. (Default split on the Amnesia Fortnight is 70% to the developer, which I think is higher than the normal default)

Taking that into account the numbers vary too wildly to begin speculating on. And beyond that it also raises large amounts of money for charity.

The highest donation up until very recently was $1,650.01. MUCH later than the 100k mark.

I'm fairly sure that the $10k purchase was made towards the end of the bundle. I was check on it fairly often, and didn't hear about it until after the bundle was finished (the highest purchase was ~$1,650, and I'm reasonably sure that was still the highest purchase with <24 hours to go)

Well, THQ ended up getting a little money from me that they would not have otherwise. I had some slight interest in the Red Faction series, but the other games weren't even on my radar. But it seemed like a good deal, so I picked it up in the hopes that I'll get some use out of all of them.

I'm personally counting that fact that HIB V manage to pull in more money ($5,108,725 http://support.humblebundle.com/customer/portal/articles/281...) as a win for those of us upset that this offer moved away from Humble Bundle's DRM-free roots.

But HIB VI managed to pull in only $US 2m and HIB V had Psychonauts. So I think this is actually not a win. It clearly shows that big titles draw the money whether they have DRM and Windows-only doesn't even matter. (to add to it: Psychonatus was DRM-free but the Linux port was totally broken when released.)

And to game companies it's certainly interesting as well. It shows a great way to make some additional money off some older titles and get some PR. I wouldn't be surprised if we see similar offerings in the next year.

(I hope that if it happens: id does a true HIB and uses this as an opportunity to release Rage for Linux.)

Psychonauts was in HB V (and was unfortunately dreadful, awful controls, bad camera, terrible graphics, potential to have been great). Bastion was the real gem in that bundle, such an amazing game. That bundle was a lot better than 6 and packed with great games, with Sword & sorcery, Super Meat Boy, Limbo and Lone Survivor. That bundle was brilliant.

HB6 was disappointing, too many platformers, Torchlight was repetitive, SPAZ was the only game I really loved in that pack. It even had two brick breaking games in it, a genre dead (and deservedly so) since the 90s.

Sorry that was I typo I meant HIB V. Yeah, HIB VI was a disappointment and Vessel was only finally released for Linux two days ago.

you're probably alone with that opinion

psychonauts is one of the best games of all time, being released in 2005 on xbox it looked amazing, the artdirection is still great on the pc port today and with controller it plays amazing.

while bastion is good it's nowhere near the quality in writing, creativity and gameplay

In my opinion, Bastion is one of the best games I have played in a long long time. I really enjoyed its writing, creativity and gameplay. The soundtrack is utterly amazing to boot.

Personally I loved everything about psychonauts (played the original xbox version), except the game play. Story, art, writing etc. etc. all amazing, and all rate among the best ever seen in a game. Unfortunately the actual gameplay let it down.

I agree that Psychonauts writing and creativity is better than Bastion, I found Bastion to be a better actual game all around.

The bugs in the Linux port let me down. I played quite a bit of Psychonauts and enjoyed it. Certainly some things are annoying (like finding those arrow heads). But the biggest disappointment was that the game was constantly crashing and you had to look up the bugtracker (at least there was a public one) for workarounds and wait for the few patches that were released.

Bastion was a fun game but not really creative.

I personally bought it because of Amnesia. Super Meat Boy was a surprise.. haven't played other games.

Funnily enough I love Psychonauts and find SPAZ boring, so it shows how different people enjoy different things! I imagine the more successful bundles are due to the amount of more mainstream games that everyone can play.

The games in HIB5 were better known

Bastion, Amnesia, Limbo, Psychonauts, Super Meat Boy, Braid

were all popular titles. (* were in previous bundles)

The only game I knew from HIB6 was Vessel and that had no complete Linux port (released two days ago) and OSX port (currently in QA). Torchlight seemed to have been popular as well but I didn't know it.

They should have probably changed the line up a bit. But I don't know how they plan the bundles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Bundle#List_of_games_of...

I wonder if he gave 100% to THQ.

95% charity (THQ included?), 5% Humble tip.

http://twitter.com/Jason_Rubin/status/279014483085631488

Charity is Childs Play and Red Cross. What president would lump his company in as charity?

It was a joke re: THQ's precarious situation.

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