The third Humble Indie Bundle has received over 105,000 purchases in just under 17 hours on sale, with more than $500,000 paid out in total for the five included indie games.
Buyers have spent an average of $4.74 each on the new bundle, as of this writing, with Linux users leading the pack with an average purchase price of $10.94. Mac users are averaging $6.31 in payments while Windows users make up the majority of total payments despite a $3.82 average purchase price.
This is the fourth bundle offered by the group to package a group of indie games together for a price set by the buyer, but only the third with the Humble Indie Bundle moniker. Popular indie titles Crayon Physics Deluxe, Cogs, VVVVVV, And Yet It Moves and Hammerfight are included this time around.
The bundle is set to run for another 13 days, and past bundles have seen extra games and features added to the line-up once total sales reached $1 million. The first three bundles have brought in at least $2.7 million in sales as of April.
Here we have 3 humble bundles. Linux users make up 20-25% of the buyers and pay on average double or more than Windows users. Why don't more "AAA" games come out for Linux? There is clearly a market for them.
@Ephriam: the problem is that people *have* tried to produce AAA games for Linux... and failed to make any money.
The Humble Bundle series has worked because it's unique enough to catch people's attention: it's got a novel "pay what you want" pricing system, the games are available across all three major platforms, buyers can choose to donate their payment to Childs Play and/or the EFF *and* source-code for at least some of the games in each bundle has been made available.
At a stroke, you've attracted the attention of people looking for a bargain, people looking to contribute to a children's charity, people wanting to make a political donation and people who want to make a political statement about open-source endeavours.
As a result, there's a good chance that a significant percentage of the people who buy these bundles haven't actually played any of the games - and/or already own some of the titles. I'm one of them, though it's more due to lack of time than anything else - I need to stop posting stuff on Gamasutra ;)
Certainly, if you look at the thread on Ars Technica for the current bundle, there's plenty of comments along those lines:
"I'll buy it as an excuse to donate to the charities again, but the game selection doesn't interest me much this time around."
"So I guess I finally bought the bundle as an excuse to support devs and charities rather than hunker down with games for hours"
"Gotta say I favor their last bundle more than this one, but I "bought" it anyway to show my support for the indies, the Humble Bundle people and Child's Play (I already donate to the EFF separately)"
"I'm not *always* so cheap; I already had all three of the FrozenByte games on Windows, and donated for the bundle to show my appreciation for the new Mac versions"
All told, the Humble Bundle occupies a very unique niche and should *NOT* be used as a metric when assessing the health of the Linux gaming market. Linux simply doesn't have the desktop penetration to be a viable mainstream market.
Beyond that, there's also issues with performance - the open-source drivers for ATi/Nvidia are lucky to reach 80% of the performance of the proprietary drivers. There's also issues with configuration and compatibility; there's enough variation between the various distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, SUSE, Gentoo, etc) to cause significant problems with running the games; four of the five games in this bundle are reported to have problems; for instance, VVVVVV and CPD both require a specific library which isn't available on Fedora. Between the two, getting a game to work under Linux can consume significant resources, and this just isn't justifiable given the size of the market.
The Humble Bundle series has worked because it's unique enough to catch people's attention: it's got a novel "pay what you want" pricing system, the games are available across all three major platforms, buyers can choose to donate their payment to Childs Play and/or the EFF *and* source-code for at least some of the games in each bundle has been made available.
At a stroke, you've attracted the attention of people looking for a bargain, people looking to contribute to a children's charity, people wanting to make a political donation and people who want to make a political statement about open-source endeavours.
As a result, there's a good chance that a significant percentage of the people who buy these bundles haven't actually played any of the games - and/or already own some of the titles. I'm one of them, though it's more due to lack of time than anything else - I need to stop posting stuff on Gamasutra ;)
Certainly, if you look at the thread on Ars Technica for the current bundle, there's plenty of comments along those lines:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/07/humble-indie-bundle-return s-with-five
-new-games-already-topped-500000-sales.ars?comments=1#comments-bar
"I'll buy it as an excuse to donate to the charities again, but the game selection doesn't interest me much this time around."
"So I guess I finally bought the bundle as an excuse to support devs and charities rather than hunker down with games for hours"
"Gotta say I favor their last bundle more than this one, but I "bought" it anyway to show my support for the indies, the Humble Bundle people and Child's Play (I already donate to the EFF separately)"
"I'm not *always* so cheap; I already had all three of the FrozenByte games on Windows, and donated for the bundle to show my appreciation for the new Mac versions"
All told, the Humble Bundle occupies a very unique niche and should *NOT* be used as a metric when assessing the health of the Linux gaming market. Linux simply doesn't have the desktop penetration to be a viable mainstream market.
Beyond that, there's also issues with performance - the open-source drivers for ATi/Nvidia are lucky to reach 80% of the performance of the proprietary drivers. There's also issues with configuration and compatibility; there's enough variation between the various distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, SUSE, Gentoo, etc) to cause significant problems with running the games; four of the five games in this bundle are reported to have problems; for instance, VVVVVV and CPD both require a specific library which isn't available on Fedora. Between the two, getting a game to work under Linux can consume significant resources, and this just isn't justifiable given the size of the market.
Ubuntu Software Center and Gameolith are actively seeking Linux versions of games.