Just when I thought it was safe to turn on my computer again, I stumbled upon a link to The Humble Indie Bundle.
The H.I.B. is an experiment in freemarkets, a political statement, and a charity to boot. Here's the deal: five independent game developers offer one of their titles as part of the bundle. The bundle is sold with a pay-what-you-like model. Even more provocative, the purchaser is offered a series of sliding bars to determine precisely where his or her money goes. The money can be distributed among a) the Child's Play charity, b) the Electronic Freedom Foundation, c) the developers themselves, and d) the Humble Indie Bundle site itself. If you want, you can give all of the money to charity, or the developers, or divvy it up however you want.
But again, you name your price for these games...which usually sell online for around ten bucks each. And (this is starting to sound like an advertisement), if you pay above the current average, they toss in another set of games to boot!
It's also been an interesting study in human behavior to watch the site's numbers. They post how much people are paying and break down the data into sets.
For instance, they've made $1,132,074.62 at the time that I'm writing this. That's from 232,663 transactions...so the average payment is a little under five bucks. Then you find out that the average Windows user is only donating $3.89...the average Mac user is donating $6.71...and the average Linux user is donating a whopping $11.67. (Very few people evidently think these games together are worth the retail price...but they all think they are worth owning.)
Windows users pay below the average while Macusers pay above average. This sort of makes sense given that Mac users obviously are willing to spend more money on technology. But Linux users, people who are using an OS that is freeware, pay the most. It seems clear that Linux users want to make a statement, rewarding people who are willing to trust the consumer by making their games available for virtually nothing. (The games are also DRM-free, so you could be a jerk and make copies of them if you wanted...but the H.I.B. crew assumes that jerks don't win in the software market.)
Obviously, I bought the bundle already.
Fortunately, most of these games fall under the "casual" category, so I can jump in, play for a few minutes, and then go back to work. And they are all really good games. My favorites in this third bundle so far are Crayon Physics and VVVVVV. Crayon Physics is an "incredible machine" type game where you draw in the machine parts using a crayon, VVVVVV is a retro call-back to C64 games. (And if you donate above the average, you also get Braid...which I would say is probably the best game in the collection. It's very artsy-fartsy.)
Anyway, given the kinds of people who still read this blog, I thought I'd let you know about it. You can pay as little as five bucks to get $110 of games.
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