Humble Indie Bundle hits $1m, goes open-source, gets 4 day extension

There'll be a lot of good, necessary beard-stroking over the next few weeks to figure out exactly what the organizers of the Humble Indie Bundle -- a six-game pay-anything collection that's just managed to top a million dollars in sales in a week -- did right, because it's something that seems it could and should be repeated. The nitty gritty: as of the time of writing, nearly 116,000 people have donated nearly $1.05 million, nearly 31 percent of which will be going to the Bundle's selected charities the EFF and children's hospital focused Child's Play. Full techie stats are available here, but that amounts to roughly $137,000 to each developer in a week, all of whom had seen sales of their years-old games dwindle. To celebrate the landmark, the devs are extending the sale for the rest of this week for any latecomers, and are beginning to make good on their GPL-licensed open source promise, beginning with Wolfire's Lugaru HD. Gish and Penumbra will soon be following suit, and Aquaria has made the surprise announcement that they're coming on-board with the open source promise, as well. See Wolfire's breakdown at the top of the project's page, their tech stats here, and click here to continue to donate to the cause. The Humble Indie Bundle [Wolfire]

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Anonymous

#20 is why *nix will never be more accepted. Geez how annoying.
dculberson

Finally got around to buying this, don’t know why I didn’t do it earlier.

I absolutely LOVE the no-DRM download. I made the mistake of buying a Pop Cap game once, and used three of my “activations” just getting it to work on one machine. I’m done with abusive software, they taught me a good lesson there. (Namely, don’t buy from Pop Cap.)
Anonymous

Before you donate, keep in mind these are PC games, and may have hardware/software requirements you can’t meet.

Lugaru won’t launch at all. Says something about incompatible displays and borks.

Penumbra tells me I should change the game’s resolution, but never opens the screen that’d allow me to do that — it just crashes.

Aquaria works, it just isn’t very good — sloppy play control, stiff animation, baffling controls — indie doesn’t have to mean ‘amateur’, but it does here.

Gish, Goo, and Samarost all work properly and are wonderful, so I still think my $15 was well spent, but caveat emptor.
Daedalus

Awesome. I got Goo for the Wii, but since I’ve been without a TV for a while, I haven’t been able to get it. I’ve also heard wonderful things about Aquaria (and about 2 hours into the game, they do bear out!). I fully plan on hitting the rest.

I’m super-stoked they’re releasing the source code. These will be the perfect things to cut my programming teeth on, now that I’ve been dabbling in Java/Python/Lua/C++ for a year. Can’t friggin’ wait to reverse-engineer these bad boys, polish up my knowledge, and then go on as a designer. The HIB is the perfect thing at the perfect time for me.
dsac86

Great to see this be such a success. I bought the pack, and though I’d already enjoyed World of Goo a lot on my Wii, I’m looking forward to trying out some of these other indie gems. I’ve already started playing Gish (which is quite fun as well), and will likely dive into Aquaria soon.
Anonymous

Linux compatible? I’m in.
igpajo

They’re not just PC Games…not sure if that’s what you meant. I bought yesterday and I’ve played Goo, Gish, Samarost, Aquaria and Prenumbra on my Apple with no quirks at all. Aquaria is a bit odd but I think that’s part of the charm of it…figuring out what you’re doing as you play…kind of like Samarost. Sometimes not knowing what to do is the intriguing part of it. It’s what draws me in sometimes. Prenumbra…now that one’s driving me a bit crazy with the controls. That game would be perfectly suited for the Wii, with it’s motion based controls. Feels awkward on the mouse.

But as the bundle goes, I love the fact that you get a link that allows you to download it to whatever platform you want. I’ve got 1 mac and 2 PC’s in the house and it’s cool that I can “legally” download any of the games to any of my computers. That’s the way it should be.
Would have paid a little more if I could have gotten a code to download World of Goo for my Wii too. I’ve come so close to dishing out the $15 in Wii bucks for that one. Now for the same price I’ve gotten so much more. Glad this was a success. Let’s see more of this model please!
Anonymous

I got this, and have been playing a good amount of World of Goo. I really wanted to play Aquaria too but it runs really, really slowly on my computer.
AllisonWunderland

My Cyber-Geek Lexicon Navigator must have totally crashed. I don’t understand about most of the acronyms here, and the titles leave me clueless.
- 13tales
  
  @AllisonWunderland
  World of Goo, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra: Overture are what we Cyber-Geeks call “computer games”. Top quality, highly original, independently developed ones, in this case ;P Go to the Humble Indie Bundle page, cough-up $5 for charity, and try them out. It’ll all make sense pretty quickly.
  
  I wonder if Steam would consider adding a “Pay What You Want” option for developers and publishers on their service who would like to sell that way? It might prove to be an interesting way to boost indie game sales relative to big-name big-money titles (whose devs I can’t exactly see making use of such an option…)
  I wonder if they’d consider implementing an optional charity-donation as part of their checkout process?
- Brandon Boyer
  
  Sorry, Allison — I’ve linked all the individual games and acronyms mentioned, after leaving them off the last couple posts!
pimlottc

Actually, users /paid/ over a million, of which roughly a third was earmarked for EFF and Child’s Play. I wouldn’t call the remaining amount that went to the developers “donations”.
Griffin

Uh… Macs ARE PCs, and I’m pretty sure he meant PCs in general with that comment, now just windows PCs.
insert

I just bought it. $10? Not bad at all.
eosjack

Just for kicks, as of the time I clicked the stats link the average donation amount per platform breaks down like this:

Windows users: 7.96
Mac users: 10.18
Linux users: 14.56
igpajo

*slaps palm to forehead….

Good point. Didn’t think of that. I tend to think Windows whenever I see PC.
defunctdoormat

I bought it over the weekend after I heard about it being available for Linux. Good games, well developed for Linux? Thank you!

I actually already have Goo, but supporting people to develop for Linux is important, in my mind. They need to know there’s a demand out there.

Samorost 2 is part of the bundle now, too. (already mentioned on BB.) Added at the last minute, during the sale over the weekend. It’s not a very long game, but I like the art work in it.
JetPackTuxedo

I just got around to installing the other two. Penumbra downloads an installer in an executable text document that is easy to run.

Lugara, on the other hand, downloads as a .bin, which took me about 15 minutes of tinkering to figure out. Here is what I did.
Open a terminal
~$ file /path/lugaru-full-linux-x86-1.0c.bin
~$ chmod +x /path/lugaru-full-linux-x86-1.0c.bin
~$ /path/lugaru-full-linux-x86-1.0c.bin
Rodney

If they’re not going to take the trouble to make it as easy to install these on Linux as on the evil twins of Apple and Windows I can only hope the Ubuntu kids put ‘em up for sale in the Ubuntu Software Center.

Half of the people I know could figure out how to install these.
Rodney

If they’re not going to take the trouble to make it as easy to install these on Linux as on the evil twins of Apple and Windows I can only hope the Ubuntu kids put ‘em up for sale in the Ubuntu Software Center.

Half of the people I know using Ubuntu couldn’t figure out how to install these.
- bersl2
  
  I haven’t bought the bundle, but I have Lugaru, and (IIRC, that is) it self-extracts into the home directory if necessary and runs just fine.
- Jamie Sue
  
  Damn straight I couldn’t install them! That’s the reason I have Ubuntu, because it was the “easy” Linux to learn. And I’m still trying to work it out.
  - JetPackTuxedo
    
    I’m running ubuntu as well. World of Goo downloads a .deb that gets unpacked by the package manager. I doesn’t get much easier than that.
    
    Aquaria downloads an installer that runs itself, but I couldn’t get it to run in 1600×900 resolution and the lower resolutions were really laggy.
    
    Gish and Samorost 2 both download as archives, just unpack them to your desktop or something and find the binary file (or SWF in the case of samorost) and run it.
    
    I have only tried the other two on my windows machine, so I’m not sure about them yet, but if you would like I ca report back with instructions for them.
orwellian

I donated/bought the games yesterday. I’m a linux user and quality games in and of themselves are worth buying, but the change to get games and donate to EFF? Sweet.