Humble Indie Bundle Closes on a High Note

It was a deal that had plenty of people talking. A “Pay What You Want” deal was launched a while ago now and the sale is now over. The results are definitely great.

Note: This is an article I wrote that was published elsewhere first. It has been republished here for archival purposes

The deal would last a little over a week. A pack of games for whatever the price you set. In the first 24 hours, the Humble Indie Bundle managed to get a little over a quarter of a million dollars. Since our initial report, the story spread like wildfire and the deal scored over a million dollars in less than a week – thus beating out, well, everyone’s expectations.

The deal was extended, but is now closed and the results are just as impressive as our earlier reports. The deal earned a grand total of nearly $1,275,000 dollars with close to 140,000 contributors pitching in. While we previously reported that the pot was sweetened, that wasn’t the only things that were happening during the sale.

On the back of the bundle’s overwhelming success, Wolfire also made a couple of their games open-sourced. One of those games that went open source was Lugaru and within hours of the release of the source code, a patch was released by someone which allowed Windows users to play the game (not previously possible).

If this taught anyone anything, it’s that respecting your fans can yield positive results. Instead of putting DRM all over games, Wolfire took the opposite rout and open sourced some of their games and let people set the price and the results were amazing. One things for sure, these developers actually “got it” and did what other developers seem to think would never be possible, let alone successful. One can only hope that this experience can help set a more positive future for other game developers.

Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.