Hacker News Reader

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 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.

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.