Humble Bundle pay what your want for charity.

D

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/05/the-greatest-indie-game-sale-ever-and-how-it-came-to-be.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

Quote:

A group of indie developers are selling a package of their games which includes some of the biggest independent games on the market. Gamers can name their own price—from 1¢ to $1,000—for a pack of games that would go for around $80 if sold separately. Anyone who buys the package can feel better about themselves as well; customers can send any amount of their purchases to two major nonprofit groups.

The sale, nicknamed the "Humble Bundle" by the studios involved, is certainly epic. The games included in the package are World of Goo, Gish, Lugaru, Aquaria, and Penumbra Overture. Each of these titles has proven to be a solid hit, and the fact that five separate studios are working together to make them available to gamers for however much they wish to spend is unusual. As Jeff Rosen of Wolfire explained to Ars in a recent interview, the close-knit sense of community among indie developers is largely responsible for the sale's existence.

[continues for ages]



http://www.wolfire.com/humble

World of Goo is amazing, the other games also sound really fun but the thing I like the most is just this promotion idea. I splurged and got it twice(though theoretically you could buy it once and install it on as many computers as you want), once for myself and again as a gift. Paid $25 each time.


I have strong opinions on what game distribution and design should look like, this is me putting my money where my mouth is. As the Ars article says at the end: There are worse things you can spend between $.01 and $80(or more if you are so inclined) on.

From another forum didn't see it here.

pwd

Saw this on the bargain alerts forum.
Nice offer. I'll get it later.
I'll be choosing the 100% to developers option, personally. Not sure what to make of the EFF, and ChildsPlay almost exclusively gives help to places in wealthy non-European countries.
Nice to see that they are making a bit of money on it, and people aren't completely taking the piss generally, since the average payment is over $7. Good exposure and PR too.

Shiminay

Childs Play was set up by Mike and Jerry at Penny-Arcade and is what gave Boards.ie the idea for the Santa Strike Force . If you don't know who the EFF are I strongly suggest you educate yourself as the internet will become a horrible, horrible place without people like them to highlight the wrongs that need righting.

This is a great opportunity for a bargain and to do a good thing. Everyone should

pwd

Child's Play is a nice idea yes; I'm not knocking it. It's a good choice of charity for Canadians and Americans to donate to, the same way as SSF is a good choice for Irish people.

I got the jist of what EFF is about alright. I'd just want to read more about them, to see if they are effective and rational in their specific aims and approaches, before forming an opinion on them. I won't do that in the next few days though, and the offer expires in a week.

I'd like to see small development companies continue to do ok, when they produce decent quality products. Personally I'd prefer to support that than I would the charities they list.

johnny_ultimate

Nice package, paid $15 and split it each way. Would have paid a little more if I hadn't World of Goo already, plus I've only heard of two of the other games. Good idea though, these kind of sales are a nice idea and do tend to work - I'm pretty sure the World of Goo 'pay what you feel like' sale raked in a lot of money for the creators. If the developers have made their money, nice to see them giving something back to gamers and charities.

However, I think the best thing about this sale is the three format option. More developers need to do this!

Amalgam

The Humble Indie Bundle

http://www.wolfire.com/humble?l=charity

Offer is valid for another 4 days.

---

I donated to this tonight, as little or as much as you feel the games are worth to you.

You have donation choices of : Child's Play, EFF, Game Developers.

I ticked for the money to go to the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation).

Not too shabby. Nice way to get World of Goo if you haven't already, along with four other games.

You don't need Paypal, I payed through Amazon. Google Checkout is available too. Very quick and easy.

---

Here are the games:

World of Goo - http://2dboy.com/games.php

Aquaria - http://www.bit-blot.com/aquaria/

Gish - http://www.crypticsea.com/gish/

Lugaru HD - http://www.wolfire.com/lugaru

Penumbra - http://www.penumbragame.com/game.php

---

Here's the download screen that greets you after a payment has been made.



---

The games are self standing, no serials, DRM or fidgeting of any kind. Just install and play.

Monotype

Yeah, I saw this on another forum and in the gaming bargins, but probably worthy of its own thread. I already have world of goo (which I still haven't got around to playing!!!), but penumbra looks interesting, so I got it mainly for that and it's a good cause and drm free. B-)

Also the second penumbra game is $5 if you get ^^ this thing, and their next game is 50% off.
http://www.penumbragame.com/buy.php

madrab

lugaru seems wierd, anyone played it?

Amalgam

Not yet, working my way through Penumbra at the moment, a very spooky game, the creators really know how to give a player the willies..

Full 3D, very polished for an 'Indie' game. To give you an idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4q3vnPUUqw

Monotype

Does the glowstick last forever? It's good fun, I haven't played an adventure game in a long while, but maybe I should have considered not choosing the hardest difficulty setting since those zombie dogs are nearly impossible to kill.

Let us know what lugaru is like, if you give it a go. It does look weird.

PS: Thanks for merging the threads, mods.

tman

Happily paid $10 just now knowing that it'll go directly to the developers:)
I would have chosen the charity split option, but they seem a little bit too northern American focussed

Amalgam

EXTRA GAME EXTRA GAME EXTRA GAME.

An email was sent out with information on an extra game added to the list of people that donated.

Log in with your code to get: http://www.amanita-design.net/samorost-2/

Dear Humble Bundle supporter,

I have a small announcement you might be interested in. This morning, I was talking to fellow indie studio Amanita Design. They wanted to donate to the Humble Indie Bundle too -- but in a unique way. They decided to donate their award-winning, cross-platform game, Samorost 2, to the bundle! It is really a great game, and I encourage you to go download it on your updated Humble Bundle key page.

Please consider telling your friends about this awesome new contribution to the Humble Bundle!

The response to this bundle has been incredible! Take a look at the real-time statistics box next time you are on the page. I am truly... humbled.

Jeffrey Rosen
Wolfire Games

Amalgam

Well.. good news, they broke the $1,000,000 (1 million US dollars) point.

As a 'gift back', some or most of the games are going open source, basically free for anyone to do anything with the source code provided. There are some limitations to the above.

I don't think the compiled games will be provided, just the code. That's my understanding of it.

I loved the premise of this. I hope there's something similar in the future.

http://www.wolfire.com/humble?l=charity

Text taken from site.

Humble update: open source extension (5/11/10)

The Humble Indie Bundle experiment has been a massive success beyond our craziest expectations. So far, in just over 7 days, 113,255 generous contributors have put down an incredible $1,025,120. Of this, contributors chose to allocate 31.03% to charity: $318,136 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child's Play Charity. I have made a page for the full breakdown including credit card fees in a JSON format here (json).

Now it's our turn to give back. As of 5/11/10, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra Overture pledge to go open source. We are preparing the sources right now and will be releasing them ASAP. We spent last night preparing Lugaru and it is almost available now. The code is still a little rough (no Visual Studio project yet, for instance) but hopefully with the help of the community we can rapidly make it more accessible to everyone.

Note, the games will be "free as in 'free speech', not as in 'free beer'": see each license for the full, finalized details as they come out very hopefully this week -- stay tuned. It is the underlying code that will be made available to everyone.

Feel free to continue donating to charity, to the developers, or any combination thereof below. We will still be distributing humble bundles to anyone who contributes.

pwd

bought the bundle for $10 to devs only

Pugsley

madrab wrote: »

lugaru seems wierd, anyone played it?

Very very fun game, but very hard to get into. The animations and graphics are pretty dodgy but theres a huge amount of skill in it, even though it only has very few buttons to use. Everything is based on counters, reactions and timing. Do the tutorial, play a few of the missions, do the tutorial again (you will inevitably forget some wee bits), then play through the missions.

Very good game though, it's rewarding when you get good enough to start taking on 5 or 6 enemies at a time, whereas when you start any more than 1v1 usually ends badly, and all without any form of levelling up system, it's all just player skill. On one of the later missions you have to fight a den of about a dozen werewolves, pretty damn hard, even with a sword.

Syferus

Just a pretty awesome note for anyone who bought this bundle - check your email inbox as the guys behind it have stuck a deal with Steam and everyone who bought the bundle is being sent a code to reedem the games on Steam.

Fantastic service and it only makes me wish I gave even more for the bundle!

tman

Aye, I've just redeemed it myself:)
For some reason World of Goo isn't showing as giftable even though I already own a copy on Steam, but not too fussed about that!

Looking forward to part 2 of the bundle, which is mentioned in the email

Monotype

I wonder which email address I used. Handy, I might add them, but have all the DRM-free installers backed up, so hopefully I'll never need it.
Aquaria turned out to be an amazing game. I was hopeless at lugaru. You'd need days to get around all the moves.

gizmo

tman wrote: »

Aye, I've just redeemed it myself:)
For some reason World of Goo isn't showing as giftable even though I already own a copy on Steam, but not too fussed about that!

Looking forward to part 2 of the bundle, which is mentioned in the email

Just because you buy two copies of something on Steam doesn't mean the other one is automatically giftable unfortunately.