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Humble Bundle #3 is Live

humblebundle.com

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Re: Humble Bundle #3 is Live

#82
post #17

vvvvvvv is awesome by the way. You can try it here (assuming you have flash installed/enabled): http://www.kongregate.com/games/TerryCavanagh/vvvvvv-demo

snagged in this bundle after mostly ignoring it despite people raving. i played Metal Storm on the NES and nothing i saw from vvvvvv looked like it trumped that, but i plan to try it out. i'm sure it has more charm that doesn't come through in most people's videos demoing it.

Re: Humble Bundle #3 is Live

#83
post #40
post #10

The average is less than 5 bucks. That's simply pathetic. If I remember correctly, it was a couple of bucks higher in the earlier editions.

I don't think so. At the time of writing, they're close to a $100k in sales with many more days still to go. If you multiply that by the average developer share you'll end up above $10k per indie dev (that number also is going to go up significantly over the next days). That makes Humblebundle a nice bonus for developers who already invested their time into making these games. Equally important, it gives them exposur…

Wow, "3 hours ago" they were under $100k? They're at $235k now. $40k/hour in sales ain't too shabby. It's amazing watching the total-revenue number grow.

$26k in sales per dev (and counting) ain't too shabby either. Good on them.

Also, heh, how many names do you recognize out of the top 10 contributors list?

Re: Humble Bundle #3 is Live

#84
A commenter on habrahabr.ru+ noticed (http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/gdev/124990/#comment_4110999) that there are Russian black marketers buying bundles for $ 0.01 and reselling for around 50 rubles ($1.50) that, unfortunately, may drive the average price down. Supposedly, people who can't be bothered to get a credit card or Webmoney account buy from them.

I'm worried how the pay-what-you-want model accommodates this behaviour? I hope clients buying directly for a reasonable price will always outnumber the black marketers or people intentionally buying for $0.01 to cause loss, but I don't know for sure.

+ habrahabr.ru is Russian IT news blog filled in large part with content translated from Hacker News.

Re: Humble Bundle #3 is Live

#86

Lame question: What techniques are used to show real-time stats like that on a web page? I assume those are truly real-time, anyway. I'm no web developer, but this feature really strikes me as cool in this particular instance. I rarely fancy overly-busy web pages, but these stats seem very nicely executed; interesting in and of themselves, yet clean and nice visual presentation.

They're constantly requesting a JSON file about once a second. Example contents, formatted: http://pastebin.com/uMv7d8xS

Seems like excessive transfers. I achieved a "real time" counter by having requests return a start value and a rate of change per second. The GUI would then update every second with the estimated values. My AJAX requests would happen much less often and update the start and rate of change.

Re: Humble Bundle #3 is Live

#87
The promo video is fantastic. Reminds me of those car demolition show commercials: THIS WEEKEND...CARASAURAUS REX...THE FIRE BREATHING...CAR EATING...ROBOT MONSTER DINOSAUR! Live at the civic center, tickets available now!

Re: Humble Bundle #3 is Live

#88
post #84

A commenter on habrahabr.ru+ noticed ( http://habrahabr.ru/blogs/gdev/124990/#comment_4110999 ) that there are Russian black marketers buying bundles for $ 0.01 and reselling for around 50 rubles ($1.50) that, unfortunately, may drive the average price down. Supposedly, people who can't be bothered to get a credit card or Webmoney account buy from them. I'm worried how the pay-what-you-want model accommodates this be…

Since there's no DRM you can't help it if people are buying one key and then burning a bunch of CDs, but that won't affect the average price much. Seems to me that if they're selling license keys for $1.50, the best way to counter this is to change the download screen title to:

    Thanks for purchasing the Humble Indie Bundle #3 for $0.01!
... if the customer thinks that's fair, so be it, but it might at least encourage the "resellers" to pay slightly more.

Alternatively, I don't think setting the minimum payment to $1 would be at all incompatible with the "pay what you want" slogan & worthwhile if it eliminates the payment fees problem.

(But what would I know? I've bought all four, and last time 'round I felt like I got my money's worth just out of Braid.)

Re: Humble Bundle #3 is Live

#89

These bundles are all great. I keep pointing them out to my non-gaming friends as much as possible. I've dumped my consoles in the last year and moved to finding 'indie' game devs like these because, as the old saying goes, 'It's not about graphics, it's about gameplay'[citation needed] and I don't care how many polygons you can throw at /next big game/ it is almost invariably yet another FPS.

> I've dumped my consoles in the last year and moved to finding 'indie' game devs like these because, as the old saying goes, 'It's not about graphics, it's about gameplay'

Ironically, this is pretty much what made the Wii such a success in the Moms & Dads demographic ...

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