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