IndustryGamers' GDC coverage is sponsored by Perkins Coie Interactive Entertainment Practice.
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The Humble Indie Bundle was one of independent gaming’s big success stories of 2010. Fittingly, the bundle founders, John Graham and Jeffrey Rosen, opened the Independent Games Summit at the 2011 GDC with a look at how the Humble Indie Bundle succeeded, and how it failed.
Customers had the option to name their own price for a bundle of indie hits available on Windows, Mac, and Linux DRM free. Further, customers could choose how much of their purchase was given straight to the developers, how much went to the bundle founders, and how much went to charities Child’s Play and Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Graham and Rosen were originally inspired by the reaction to Steam sales on community site, Reddit. Rosen explained, “Every time Steam put a bunch of games together and lowered the price, it was the top story on Reddit. We thought, ‘we could do that.’”
Further convinced by 2DBoy’s earlier success with a pay-what-you-want promotion for World of Goo, Graham and Rosen determined that the key to the Humble Indie Bundle being a success was to impose as few hurdles as possible between customers and their games.
“This is a mistake many people make. Before letting the customer give them money they are asked for emails and passwords and all sorts of information,” said Rosen. Not requiring any kind of login to purchase the game “is what made the bundle really successful,” Graham agreed.
Not required to log in, some customers figured out a way to purchase over a thousand copies of the game for $0.01 each, damaging the live average on the site. “Why do they do this?” Graham asked rhetorically, baffled. “I don’t know. Perhaps they really like these games.”
Further, despite the pay-what-you-want model, pirates were quick to capitalize on the DRM-free games. The pair estimated that the site suffered from over 25% piracy.
“And that is just through our site,” Rosen stressed. “That doesn’t include torrent downloads. In fact, if you search on Google for ‘Humble Indie Bundle’, Google auto-fills your search to ‘Humble Indie Bundle torrents.’”
The pair detailed the way they dealt with the piracy. Frustrated, Rosen put up an anonymous survey on Twitter, asking those who pirated the game to tell them why.
“We got a lot of responses,” he said. “The most common excuse was that they lived in a country where credit cards were rare or they couldn’t access the various checkouts.”
Rosen and Graham appeared skeptical at this excuse. They wrote a blog post offering to purchase the game for people who were unable to purchase the game themselves, and ended up selling another twenty-five copies. Communities like Reddit, too, filled with people offering to purchase the game for others. Yet, the piracy continued.
However, the pair stressed that despite the piracy and the exploitation, the Humble Indie Bundle was a remarkable success, making over $250,000 in the first 24 hours and going on to make $1.2 million in total across 138,813 sales—averaging at over $9.00 a purchase.
The pair took what they learnt to make the Humble Indie Bundle 2 an even greater success, adding Steam codes for all the games and a “bundle within a bundle” that gave the games of the first Humble Indie Bundle for free to anyone who purchased the second bundle for higher than the average. Along with the option to download the bundle legally via torrents and big name games including Braid and Osmos, the second bundle generated $500,000 in the first 24 hours and has gone on to make $1.8 million across over 230,000 purchases.
Perhaps the most telling sign of the Humble Indie Bundle’s success was the need for the creators to enable a ‘Value Adder’ that allowed people who have already purchased the bundle to give more money. “People wanted to add more to their purchase without lowering the average, so we added this function and raised a further $30,000,” said Rosen.
Various other takeaways the pair noted were that people would pay twice as much when buying the bundle for themselves than when buying it as a gift; Gmail users are more generous than hotmail users; and over half the bundles’ revenue came from Mac and Linux owners. “We recommend that all developers consider supporting Mac and Linux,” they said. Rosen also highlighted their deep penetration into the Linux press simply on account of supporting Linux as a huge plus in the bundle’s exposure.
In total, the two bundles have generated over $3 million, a third of which has gone to charity and enough of which has gone to the Humble Bundle company to keep it running for a potential third bundle in the future.
