YAY! Immediately purchased!

I love me my Humble Bundles.

Uplink has background music, or at least it did last time I played it.

too bad, I only want Aquaria and I'm broke...

DRM free Defcon and Aquaria = $6 purchase. I already own everything they have out on Steam, as I am big fans of their work. Defcon was actually my first steam purchase, a preorder at that! Amazing deal, cannot say enough about defcon. One of the best multilayer strategy titles out there.

Are bundles really harming indie devs? Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software stated that his games sold around 5000 units each (pre Steam and iOS releases, he sells a lot more on those). 5000x20USD could support maybe one or two devs (plus moderates costs) if they could pump out a game every year. Now, that's 100,000USD for sales, now assume you've made some sales and the HIB nets you another 100-200k in sales. You doubled your previous take and did something for charity.

I don't see how that couldn't be a win for a lot of indie devs. Will it be perfect for them all? Probably not. However if it was screwing these guys you'd be hearing stories about it, like you hear about businesses claiming to get screwed by Groupon.

If you look at most HIB games they've already sold for several months or longer on their primary channels. Hell, Braid had been out for some time and monetized on XBox Live Arcade and Steam (dunno about PS3, probably there too). That had to be just pure gravy for that guy, even if he only got 80k out of it.

I think you're vastly overestimating how many sales indies get even on primary sales channels, especially after the initial release press (however little there may be) has died down a bit.

Oh my, oh my. You risk a head explosion, sir!


And some addition to "humble bundles hurt developers". Well, it may hurt devs who don't want to participate in these. But maybe that's the whole point? Maybe indie games are just "made" for being sold in pay what you want way?

If devs always get much more money on selling their games in humble bundle, maybe they should stick to it instead of setting some riddicilous price nobody wants to pay?

Indie devs often have to set higher prices for their products because they don't expect much sales in the first place, so they want to maximize the profit on single copy.

But maybe PWYW system is much better for them and they begin to realize that as 100 devs already contacted indie royale bundle.

lol @ no-heart captcha

Yeah, but PWYW will not work without major exposure in the news outlets etc., effectively turning the HIBs into a monopoly, crazy as it is. Because as a small dev, you have absolutely no chance of generating as much publicity as the HIB can.

I think they're shooting indie development in the foot. People are already experiencing a "bundle fatigue", with both HIB and IR going like crazy lately, and they are effectively pushing the general expectations of indie pricing to a level that simply is not sustainable in the long run.

So far the only game I've played after purchasing this bundle is Uplink for 70 min., and I'm liking it. I could see how the game can get repetitive (it's pretty easy at level 3 ;p) but it never hurts to become king of the hacking world. I do wish they'd patch the part where I have to keep re-setting all my call bounces after every hack attempt, though.

BTW, the game does have music. :) Nothing spectacular, but it works pretty well.

You have the point. I think some other indie bundles will grow up, though. The second initiative, indie royale is famous already, after launching 2 bundles so far?

Such initiatives don't need much PR cause they spread on their own like a viral campaign. In most cases, you just need to inform IGN or some other gaming sites and you have some publicity by that. Then it spreads automatically.

At least i hope it would look like that.
About my first humble bundle (which was second hb) i've learned from friends, not from commercials or articles.
Also, involving charity is a great thing in humble bundle.

afaik you can save your connection preset (save button on the map) and restore it whenever you want.

sadly going to pass have all the games i want already and saving for next indie Royale pack

I've bought exactly one HIB so far, and I don't feel like a sinner at all. It's just that I have a large enough backlog as it is and in most cases, all the games I'm interested in these bundles I already own. And I do not intend to buy things I do not want or need, no matter how cheap they are.

Sure, no worries.

I bought them all, except first and second HIB (and 3nd HIB I got with the 3rd one) - but there always was a game that looked interesting enough. Not that I have time to play them.

That sure is true for the games that have already been released and have sold some copies. I think it's really similar to Steam's sales then when you get a lot of "seasoned" content for a good price.

What worries me is the previous bundle where Voxatron debuted. I think this could lead to HIB becoming a sole monopolist on the market and with other indie bundles (right now it's IRB) being significantly less popular (= less revenue) the indie devs would compete for getting spotlighted there. On the other hand customers would eventually start treating HIB as a primary indie supplier, damaging the devs that did not make it to HIB even more. This reminds me of the iOS AppStore where you have the Top 100 games / apps that generate a ridiculous amount of revenue and the rest is given the scraps.

Something tells me that with the direction HIB is heading now (eg. Humble Tips) it will transform into a full fledged digital indie store, something that could compete with Steam and GoGs (I think there were some plans of a indie-only digital distribution too).