On the positive side, I got the humble bundle early for the minimum, and they have given me all the added games later. This has happened the past 3 bundles for me. So, in that respect, when I buy early before they add games (which happened each time) I end up with all but the initial average one, even though I didn't beat the average price.

edit to add "even though I didn't beat the average"

Thought I thought it was pretty weird how it went up by $1 suddenly, which I thought maybe because happy hour was on and a lot people all waited to buy now or something but than after happy hour it dropped back to to 5.71 which makes no sense.
Btw how do you know the average was $4.5?

Someone should post this at NeoGAF. Someone there is bound to care.

Simple maths. The widget on their page has real-time "total money" and "bundles sold" figures. Divide the first by the second and there's your average. It wasn't precisely $4.50, but the post which contained the exact figure I arrived at (as well as my working) was deleted by the admin of their facebook page. The true average according to the first two figures is $4.43 ($4.434503478810879), so there's still more than $1 discrepancy. Interesting the average is now listed as "Current BTA price" rather than an average like it used to be, so I suppose to a certain extent it doesn't actually say average anywhere, just "BTA price". The fact that they saw fit to delete my post and block me is dodgy though.


Well anyone with an account there is welcome to post this there as far as I'm concerned. I don't have a NeoGAF account though.

Dodgy bastards

I've been on the waiting list to get onto NeoGAF for a while now. I should have just registered the first time I found out about that forum years ago.

They wouldn't care. None of them post about the Indie Gala anyway, game news sites are pretty wary of unknown bundles. I've seen Groupees mentioned all of once on Destructoid, and that's about it.

When I had the Face Kickers all over me for "slandering" their scammy advertising, I emailed every big site I knew of but not one picked it up. I don't think they would bite on this either.

Didn't DIYGamer or some other indie site cover the story? I don't think those "big" sites are the best places for people to get their indie game news anyway. Most people go to IndieGameMag or similar.

It's pretty obvious that the BTA price is not the realy average.
Before The King's Crusade was announce, the BTA was around $4.00 to $5.00. The BTA has already shot up to $5.7X at the end of the day as the announcement came, and stay there. I personally don't think the average can change so rapidly considering this bundle did not sell that fast, nor that many units.
Then during happy hour, it was $6.71, then back to $5.71 now.

Which one, Face Kick or the Gala? IGM/DIY did mention the IFK thing in passing but they emailed me and decided to largely stay out of it.

For the Gala, I've pointed out before that the Indie Gala isn't all that indie, but an editor politely disagreed as he thought the studios involved were "pretty indie" even if 1C or BitComposer or whatever was publishing every game in it. They might respond differently if someone pointed out the shady BTA thing, but generally I find IGM prefers to stay upbeat and promotional, and generally avoids investigative stuff.

I don't understand why such conspiracy. Can't they just say "5.71 is minimum price for bonus games" instead of average? Blatant lies like that sure are not giving im any good publicity.

Try posting something about this fixed 'average' in the chatbox, and I guarantee it will disappear within the hour. I've tried it several times over the last couple of days with a 100% success rate.

Ironic really - IG haven't found a spare moment to communicate with us for days regarding the (late) final bonuses, but they're able to find time to monitor their shoutbox.

It's not really a huge deal and the bundle was great, but if IG were a bit more honest and a little more responsive I'd feel much better about buying from them.

Exactly, the IndieRoyale doesn't try and pretend its minimum price is an average. The fact that they're censoring valid criticism is now making me suspicious of how genuine they are in their charitable intentions.

Yeah, that's the thing. They just feel untrustworthy to me now.