The Humble Indie Bundle or Humble Bundle is a collection of independently developed video games that was originally offered on sale from May 4 through May 11, 2010. The collection, initially consisting of five games—World of Goo (2D Boy), Aquaria (Bit Blot), Gish (Edmund McMillen), Lugaru (Wolfire Games), and Penumbra: Overture (Frictional Games)—and later joined by a sixth game, Samorost 2 (Amanita Design), was offered in a "pay-what-you-want" manner, allowing buyers to decide how much they were willing to pay, as little as $0.01, for the package. Purchasers were also able to set how they wanted their money to be distributed between the developers and two charities, Child's Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The games were available for Microsoft Windows, MacOS X, and Linux-based systems, and were digitally distributed without digital rights management (DRM) controls. The sale was able to raise over US$1 million within the week's offering, with nearly US$325k being donated to the charities; as a result of hitting the marker, the source code for four of the games was made available under the GNU General Public License. The idea for the Bundle was from Jeff Rosen of Wolfire Games.
Rosen describes the inspiration coming to him through similar sales of bundle packages on the Steam platform and from a recent teaming with Unknown Worlds Entertainment to offer a bundle based on their Natural Selection 2 game. Influence also came from a previous "pay-what-you-want" sale for World of Goo upon the titles first anniversary; over 57,000 copies of the game were purchased during this sale, generating over US$117,000 after considering PayPal handling fees. Rosen by this point was well connected with other independent developers, for example his brother David is listed as being a game tester for the Penumbra series, and Penumbra's composer Mikko Tarmia is now contributing to Wolfire Games' upcoming game project Overgrowth.
The porter of Lugaru to Linux was Ryan C. Gordon, who was also responsible for porting Aquaria to Linux. With his close ties to these independent developers, as well as Ron Carmel of 2D Boy, Rosen was able to assemble the package, taking advantage of merchant sales systems offered by PayPal, Amazon Payments, and Google Checkout to minimize the cost of transactions and distribution.
Rosen also sought to include charities in the bundle, allowing the purchaser to choose how to distribute the funds between the developers and charities. Rosen believed Child's Play was a worthwhile cause that brought video games to hospitalized children and helped to fight the stigma of video games, while he selected the Electronic Frontier Foundation to support their anti-DRM stance. The means of "pay-as-you-go" would allow purchasers to simply give the money to the charities, but Rosen felt this was not an issue and would "consider that a success" of the sale.
Midway through the sale period, Wolfire Games was approached by Amanita Design studios, who wanted to help contribute to the cause in their own way, by donating their game Samorost 2 to the bundle, allowing those that already had purchased the bundle to further download that title. Furthermore, three studios offered a further incentive for purchasers during the sale, in that if more than US$1 million was raised by the effort, the source code for Gish, Penumbra and Lugaru would then be offered.
I love the Indie Bundle, never missed one. Where else can I support Child's Play, my personal pet charity; the EFF; support indie devs AND get cool indie games for cheap. I think every one (or at... more
I love the Indie Bundle, never missed one. Where else can I support Child's Play, my personal pet charity; the EFF; support indie devs AND get cool indie games for cheap. I think every one (or at least every gamer) should participate. Dude, you get to pay ANY price you want. ANY PRICE (but try not to be an a-hole, at least pay more than a dollar, I say no less than $4-5, but still, it's a lotta bang for your buck)! The newest bundle is out, go now!