Second Humble Indie Bundle Does Even Better Than The First

from the but-it'll-never-work-twice dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about the "Humble Indie Bundle," which was a group of indie video games available in a bundle on a pay-what-you-want basis (and with a nice charitable component). The bundle got a lot of attention, and they were able to bring in $1,273,588 in just two weeks. After it was all over, one complaint I heard was that such things were clearly a "one-off" that could never be repeated. Well, recently, the Humble Indie Bundle 2 came out, and with plenty of time to spare, it's already made more money than the original. Also notable, just like last time, it was Linux users who are still paying a significantly higher amount on average -- contrary to the typical claims that Linux folks just want stuff for free....

Filed Under: humble indie bundle, pay what you want, video games

Some Final Stats On The Humble Indie Bundle

from the slice-the-humble-pie dept

BigKeithO writes in with some more followup, including some more results numbers from the Humble Indie Bundle experiment that we've written about a few times, involving some indie developers bundling up a bunch of PC games in a "pay what you want" pricing scheme. The program went on for two weeks, bringing in a grand total of $1,273,588. $833,630.69 went to the developers (or $166,726.14 to each), while the EFF got $183,601.47 and Child's Play got $188,578.04. I'm sure some will knock these numbers, suggesting that they're significantly lower than what some big name EA game would get, but you have to remember that these games were a bit older and weren't likely to get that many new purchases. On top of that, in two weeks, that's a pretty good sum of money for some indie developers on older games.

The other interesting tidbit, as many noted, is that despite suggestions from some that the "open source" world are folks who "just want stuff for free," the average amount paid by Linux users ($14.52) was significantly higher than those paid by Mac ($10.18) or Windows ($8.05) users. Obviously, averages are only so useful, given that they can be skewed by outliers (anyone got the medians? standard deviations?) but it's still information worth pointing out. All in all, a very interesting experiment, with some great results for those who participated.

Filed Under: business models, humble indie bundle, indie video games

Humble Indie Bundle Hits One Million In Sales... Goes Open Source

from the something-special-each-day dept

We were just talking about how the Humble Indie Bundle of video games continued to exceed expectations by doing things to make fans like them even more -- such as adding more games to the bundle after people had already bought -- and comparing that to EA's strategy of limiting the resale market with coded content. One strategy involves exceeding expectations and giving people reason to be excited (and reasons to be happy to spend) and the other... does not.

As the official "one week" Humble Indie Bundle offer comes to a close (though, they'll still keep offering it afterwards), it's nice to see that the effort easily soared past the $1 million mark (including over $300,000 going to charities -- including the EFF). But, beyond that, Wolfire continues to make things even cooler for people. First, it open sourced one of the games, and followed that up by announcing that three others are also going open source (World of Goo is remaining closed, as is the late addition of Samorost 2). Once again, the focus is on doing things that excite the community, build loyalty and give people a reason to want to buy, rather than making people feel guilty or annoyed about buying.

There really are tremendous lessons here for anyone building a business today: focus on ways to delight your customers, rather than pissing them off; and focus on giving people real reasons to buy, rather than just feeling entitled to define the terms under which they buy and looking for ways to limit those who want to interact with you in a different manner.

Filed Under: business models, humble indie bundle, open source, positive experience, video games