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
Maybe the Humble Indie Bundle will finish and they will switch to another form of sales, but they are not stopping selling the games.
Only the code is being open sourced. I presume this means that the graphics, sounds and other resources will stay closed. Thus, if you want the games, you will need to buy them.
You are allowed pay just a penny, no one is stopping you, but don't you think it is a bit... not-nice? The payment services will take that penny in charges (maybe even more? Don't know who gets stuck with negative, but you are possibly causing indie devs and charities to LOSE money.), plus you are going to cost Wolfire some bandwidth on top of that.
You can't play Lugaru all the way through. "We have included enough of the game data to run the demo version. Please note that the game data is not under the GPL, and forbids commercial redistribution." from http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Lugaru-goes-open-source
I don't think the numbers mean much. After all, this stunt was based mainly on advertisement for the bundle page, and such advertisement seemed to be focused on techie websites (hacker news, slashdot, reddit). There is also the "finally, games for linux!" novelty that may or may not wear out quickly.
$250000+ just from Linux users is hardly meaningless. And even if it is just a matter of novelty, the results of this experiment could still influence other developers to start porting their games, and break the chicken-and-egg problem that prevents Linux from being a good and popular gaming platform.
Over a million dollars, wow, pretty amazing! According to the JSON file, each of the developers will be getting $130,000+, right? I'm sure they will be eating a nice success steak tonight... or a fatty veggie burrito for the vegetarians, heh.
And I'm sure a lot of entrepreneurial minded folks here on HN are taking note of this as well. A million dollars gross in 7 days for a bundle of indie games. Who knew? Let the gold rush begin, eh?
On the one hand, it's not an easy stunt to reproduce. These are great games at a massive discount in a well-publicized event. Not surprising you can make money at that.
On the other hand, none of these games are very new. Games are usually like movies: a lot of sales in the opening weeks followed by a quick convergence to zero as they fall off the radar. A million dollars is not a lot of money split seven ways and then split again among developers. But I'm sure it's great for games headed for the bargain bin.
Certainly there are a lot of games out there great enough in their day to be worth playing even now that technology has moved on. HOTU is evidence enough of that. A service that sold only hand-picked classics, polished for modern platforms, at cheap prices? Yeah. I'd buy that.
"Games are usually like movies: a lot of sales in the opening weeks followed by a quick convergence to zero as they fall off the radar."
Is that still true though? I can see this being the case with physical copies having to fight for top shelf space in stores, but it may have changed a bit with online distribution channels. A few month old games that get a price reduction, or classics that get a special campaign price, regularly go to the top of the Steam sales list for a couple of days. Especially those who have gained a positive word of mouth reputation online. Long tail phenomenon?
"HOTU is evidence enough of that"
Hordes of the Underdark? puzzled. Oh, Home of the Underdogs.
:)
We have already gotten several offers to purchase the bundle's source code and I hear from other developers that they are getting requests for another promotion.
That was the "business model" used for Blender: The company developing it was bankrupt but the creditors allowed open-sourcing the software for a one-time fee of 100k.
This is a really interesting approach. I've been reading http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/ for a while now and the whole DRM argument there has been that there's realistically a threshold on how much you make on a game before it pretty much becomes readily available to pirates and/or the initial sales interest is just gone anyway and the rest is not a reliable source of income. Something like that. So an approach which provides an incentive to maximize early sales during a brief period with a statistical understanding of what the target sales are and a reward to the public for getting there is really cool. It sort of embraces the piracy constraint and optimizes for being profitable in light of that.
Imagine if the maker of some new, high-budget PC game called "DRM GoreShooter" decides that they will be in good shape if they make $5 million in the first three weeks of sales and past that point they won't really be profitable anyway (DRM or not). They want a profit better strategy than trying to use DRM to extend the window of pre-piracy sales out to week four or five, which might or might not work anyway. So they sell the game with something physically in the package that's really cool and you can only get in the first few weeks and they let you report in your product code, one time, for credit on Facebook or wherever for you having sponsored the development of the next game and been a generally cool person paying for quality entertainment. Would that be a better approach? It might ultimately result in the same money, but could be done as a way to cost less or at least provide a great marketing push and build good will in the fan-base.
My argument would work better if I had any idea how much it costs to develop, maintain and manage a per-title DRM strategy, I suppose.
I can see the Penumbra engine being used to build some 90's style point-and-click adventure games in first person 3d, if someone was so inclined. Maybe even something along the lines of Myst. However those genres are probably dead for a reason.
