Humble Double Fine Bundle is available now | Hacker News Reader

Humble Double Fine Bundle is available now

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72 pointsJepZ24 comments

All these bundled game packages are turning games into something like trading cards rather than games.

People I've heard from say that they never get around to playing the games, but they buy them in bundles like this because they can get a bunch of games cheap, and maybe someday they'll have a chance to sit down and play them.

Like a Baseball card. You buy them up when you have some extra money, or got them as a gift, and you store them away, maybe someday they'll have value. Right now, their only value is that they are in your collection at all. (Pokemon/Magic/Whatever)

I'm an indie game developer myself, and it's interesting to me because it seems like people have become accustom to buying games because they heard about them instead of because they want to PLAY them. I'm totally guilt of this myself. I've spent many bucks myself on iOS titles just because of the hype, play them once, and that's it. Most times I feel like a real sucker for falling for it. Rarely do I get a gem.

I'm usually the edge-case for stuff like this, don't really expect anyone to agree :)

That's a pretty common argument especially when Steam sales come around. People will buy everything at a steal then possibly never play them. I think the idea behind it is, what's the risk/reward? If I buy it and never play it, I'm out $5. If I don't buy it and it haunts me so much that I buy it after the sale, I'm out $35. How much is $5 worth to you? It might be the difference between impulse buy or putting some thought into it.

I know I buy into Humble Bundles if there's even one game I like (or have heard I will like) that's packaged into it. It's worth the price of admission. Having the other games is a safety net of sorts. If they're in my collection, I can play them anytime I want (even if that day may never come).

Helping indie devs is just a side effect ;)

When Steam for Linux came out, I actually ended up playing one of the games from the very first Humble Bundle I'd never even really looked at at the time and enjoying it, so it's certainly not totally pointless to have extra games lying around.

You may be interested in Professor Bogost's analysis of this: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6595/persuasive_games_...

Were they were like baseball cards! ("You know, I would be rich if only my mother hadn't rm'd my three digital copies of Braid.") At least with baseball cards you might expect some to increase in value. I hardly ever play games anymore and yet I'm still drawn to these sales. I could probably not buy another game for years and still find something to play if I forced myself to reach the end of the ones I currently have.

You have to remember that these bundles and sales are not launch events. Psychonauts is an 8 year old game, for example.

One of the biggest challenges of selling games is the sharp falloff of sales after release. The genius of things like the humble bundle and steam sales is that they leverage the low incremental cost of digital delivery to allow for game sales at vastly reduced prices long after release. And it works. These things generate millions of dollars of revenue. And they also put games in people's hands, allowing people to enjoy great games that they might have otherwise ignored due to the release date. Certainly not everyone plays all of the games they buy this way, but I think that's not a bad thing. The same effect happens with books, for example. People may buy a book that sits on their shelf for a very long time before it is read, if ever. And that's ok if it means that the reduction in price of the game (or book) has enabled thousands upon thousands of people the ability to enjoy that work who wouldn't have before.

I'm not a developer, but I love indie games.

We are living in a Golden Age. I dropped maybe $10 on Minecraft back in Alpha. We are buying desert island games for the price of a latte.

I think I bought To the Moon for $3. Maybe $5. And the next time it went on sale I bought it 5 times to give away copies.

Or Binding of Isaac, I think I paid 1.25 for my first copy. And I am closing in on 300 hours there.

Price is no longer a discriminator for great games. You can plop down $5 and get Steam keys for 5 to 8 games. If even one of them has good reviews, you can afford to take a risk on the rest. I was tempted by my conditioning (sponsored by modern retail) to say that the other games in the bundle are practically free.

So a good strategy to find your best new games is wait for the bundle, buy 10, cherish 1. If you can stand not to play on release day, you will gain a lot of solid gold and an enormous backlog. If you're going in with eyes wide open, it's a win win for players and developers.

As a side note, if you've never read this interview with Tim Schafer about the release of Psychonauts you owe it to yourself to do so, it is epic: http://v2.razputin.net/index.html@page=razputin%252Ffeatures...

Any comments from the HN crowd on Brutal Legend (the beat-the-average bonus)?

Played through it on Xbox 360 when it first came and I had a lot of fun with it. A lot of people criticized double fine for throwing in RTS elements that weren't present in the demo, but I thought it was pretty fun all around.

I played the demo on XBox 360 and I thought it was pretty fun. It's a bit cheesy but a basic, fun hack and slash. It's especially good if you like Jack Black.

It's an excellent game, but the ending sequence was quite frustrating, at least on the 360.

I loved Brütal Legend, Jack Black was so funny and the whole setting of Metal Covers was so beautiful.

The game was absolutely great, fun, great music.

I have watched the intro sequence with Kabbage Boy so often, it's one of the best intros of a video game ever.

Watch it! Get it! Play it!

I really hope they finally fix the MD5 signatures on the Psychonauts FLAC soundtracks. The game and soundtracks were already included in the HIB4 with mismatching signatures and they haven't fixed it yet :(

Note that they've just released a new patch for Psychonauts on Linux, if you have it from a previous bundle or buy it now. It's dated 2013-05-06. I'm downloading now so I haven't tested it yet.

I'm hesitant to even spend $1 because the Linux versions are probably poorly ported and barely functional, as was the case before with UE3 based games featured in the HIB.

Double Fine has their own engine, they don't use Unreal.

Psychonauts runs great on my distro, Linux Mint 14. I'm even using a 4 year old Nvidia card. I'd trust them.

It doesn't work at all in my depressingly inadequate onboard Intel, although the Windows version runs (with low resolution graphics) relatively well.

Two firsts here that I can see: physical goods and relatively high reward tiers.

the first time they did the Humble Weekly deals, they had a physical reward for buying just Bastion.

It's quite smart to have the t-shirt level. I suspect the $70 fixed order price not only includes a healthy profit but also pushes up the average purchase price, yielding greater revenue for the "beat the average" tier.

Man, I could watch Tim Schafer videos all day. That guy cracks me up. I was pretty much sold by the video alone.

Totally! I didn't back Double Fine Adventure, but I go watch the Kickstarter video every few months because it is hilarious.

"Oh, sorry. I didn't see you there. You caught me indulging in one of my many impressive hobbies...I'm a man of many passions. Drumming. Skydiving. Like, charity or something?"

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