They probably shouldn't put the average amount paid so far on the website. The idea is to get people to pay what they think the games are worth, not what other people think the games are worth.

Here's how I would have done it:

http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/deep-disc...

Anyhow, the idea was to simplify the workflow and simultaneously abuse the power of defaults and user psychology. I also intentionally ditched some parts of the offer which I don't think add business value, such as fine-grained control on the split.

(I'd A/B test including "65% of people pay this much" on the #1 step, probably with a subtle yellow highlighting.)

Haha of course. I thought "wow this is great, who is this? they're worth talking to in the future" then see that it's you patrick. Every time..

The fine grained control makes me feel like I have more say in the process, even if in the end I'll probably just split evenly.

I don't think the find-grained control adds any business value, but I think they put it in there for people who had already paid for some of the games, since some of them are fairly popular. World of Goo did a pay what you want approach a few months back.

"Stick it to the man" makes a great bullet point.

Still, it's a good idea to put some number for anchoring, and the current average is not a bad one. And a number that seems to come from other people could be more influential than a "recommended contribution".

Edit: As others point out, there are already some other anchoring points on the page, so having an average lower than those may be hurting them. It might have been wiser to make the "Top contributors" tab the default (or only) tab in their realtime stats display.

Funny, when I saw that I thought it was genius. Nobody wants to be a cheapskate so by showing the average you encourage people to put in a price above the average. Over time it will trend upward. On the other hand, maybe people will enter in a value just under the average. Right now it is reporting $7.97 as the average. Let's see where it ends up.

I also notice in the promo video it has the average right next to the entry form. On my form it defaults to 29.95 and says "For instance: 10, 20.50, or 100.00." as help text. It seems like they played around with the form a bit.

This is the type of thing that could benefit from a nice A/B test. Might be hard to run on a very public one-time promo like this though.

For me, I made sure to pay something above the average so I feel more generous than the average. If other's think the same, the average will naturally grow :)

I upvoted you, but I'm not entirely convinced. The creators of this site seem to know what they are doing: they told the "retail" price of the bundle in the second paragraph, then subtly suggested reasonable price points (the lowest being $10) in the form. Maybe they are expecting the $1 to $5 crowd to pay something closer to the average?

Agree, they should have left only the "$80 value" as anchor price(plus that strange list of suggested prices). Btw, i i remember right the developer of World of Goo already did this, so i guess there is a tested rationale behind the choice to show the average and that list of suggested prices.

I don't usually buy things on the internet. Mainly because it requires money in a PayPal account or similar, and it's very hard for me to get that (I have some dollars from a freelancer work, but it's a hassle to transfer between my bank account and PayPal).

If I had heard only about a "indie game bundle" containing those titles, I would probably have run straight to The Pirate Bay. But this one caught my attention.

The devs are willing to give five high-quality games for whatever I want to pay. The guy even sang a song for the advertisement, for god's sake.

I loved the ad. I loved the bundle. I even loved the website.

This selfish pirate is reaching for his wallet. I will not pay the full $ 80 sum (though more than the average, for sure), but I'm one that would probably not have paid a penny otherwise.

If you are worried about the process, don't. After filling the short form and login in my PayPal account, the email with the download page was sent instantaneously.

Their bandwidth is excellent and all downloads are direct (no login, download token, download code, wait time, bandwidth limit or whatever).

Haha...on the "no middle man" logo is that a condom (as in don't get screwed by the man) or a bomb. Can't tell :)

Well executed idea!

That looks like a tie for me.

Maybe they should combine the old Shareware model with this one. And make it all very easy. Like you download the full game and in the end of the first level, this payment stuff pops up where you can just pay whatever you want to proceed (whatever you think it is worth).

The point is, I really don't know what these games are about and how much they are worth.

These games all have a demo version.

The games are World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, Penumbra Overture

edit: removed some incorrect info

EFF and Child's Play are actually charities that your payment is split with.

you're right, i was just copying the bar across, my bad

In a vacuum, the Humble Bundle can't really be called a success. As I'm writing this, assuming equal split, each developer and charity gets an average of $1.09/purchase - hardly a windfall, though I'm sure the actual numbers actually favors the charities more.

But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. I wonder how much attention the involved studios'll get for future projects as a direct result of this? Aquaria, especially, has been out for quite a while now - this can probably be more accurately considered a way of breaching access to any possible remaining audiences before launching their Next Big Things.

You are thinking about it wrong. Digital copy distribution is basically free. With your $1.09 each party gets 30000 dollars. How is getting 30000 dollars for a quick sale not a success?

Don't forget that these games are already "old" in terms of the normal gaming market. They already had their heyday.

This is such a great idea. I donate to charity regularly anyway and I'm a sucker for games. Now I can have both!

I ended up paying $100. Most of the money went to Child's Play but the devs still got $20 and the EFF $10.

The video could have been a little better while showing the games. I had to rewind a lot of times to view all the 4 squares for each game. Nevertheless, awesome offer and rap song :)

Average contribution of $8.64 for 5 games or $1.72 per game.

It's a nice PR move but that's just disgusting I'm sorry.

Well I just purchased it for $10 and I already own 2 of the games. And the other's I never would have considered buying if it wasn't for this bundle.

And I'm pleasantly surprised with gish so far; already checking out the developer's site to see what else that have on offer.

Other people might be paying that average and are only interested in 1 or 2 of the games in the bundle.

You can't just say a blanket "5 games or $1.72 is disgusting".

It's disgusting in the sense that it's a horribly poor valuation of their work by consumers - each of those games is worth approximately half a latte.

The sad part is it'll be celebrated as a victory because they'll gross a lot of money and it's "money they wouldn't otherwise have" ... unless they set their own price and reached a tiny fraction of the consumers that'll buy their games today.

Which they have done before now, and will continue to do after. You seem to assume that these are brand new games being rolled out with this pricing scheme - all of them are over a year old, some 3 or 4 years. Do you really believe that they would make the same amount by continuing to sell old indie games at their own prices and without a buzz-generating promotion?

It can't be a poor valuation of work, unless you subscribe to a labor theory of value. Our current economic system does not.

Things are only worth what people will pay for them.

That's true, except the bit where there's plenty of evidence to support the theory that people are willing to pay more than a dollar and change for a game.

But you don't know if these people would or not. Also, I've payed $50 for a game in the past, but I'm not sure that I would any more.

These people maybe not... but how does that matter? The 6,000 people that bought the pack are just a tiny portion of the gaming market.

The thing is that by making the prices so low (as low as one feels comfortable paying for them), they increase their sales number by much thus helping counter the low price.

Without this event there would be close to no sales since some of these are pretty old games. 40$ * 10 sales is much worst than 2$ * 1000 sales.

The iPhone app store runs on the same idea.

Jeff Atwood also wrote an article about that : http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/08/software-pricing-ar...

Heh, it's even less than that if you leave it distributed evenly between the developers and two charities.

$8.64 is $2.88 for the developers or about 58c/game.

It's a little better for the developers than that... like $1.23 per game:

"By default, the amount is split equally between the seven participants (including Child's Play and EFF), but you can tweak the split any way you'd like."

I don't even play games and gave them some money and I will most likely never play any of these game, other than probably just check them out once. I can only hope there are others like me who would never spend a dime in any form of games.

What is disgusting about it? $1.72 per game is more than $0.00 per game. They are making money the easiest way possible here. Everyone can simply download the games without paying a dime, but so far more than 30000 people decided to send them money and the counter is at almost 250000 dollars.

Depending on the total sales, they may get more than a MacHeist bundle.

A few friends have been approached for MacHeist and only offered $1-10k depending on the bundle. A friend went through with it and got $2k cash and a few little extras for giving away his app to 400,000 people.

Business 101, if incremental costs are low, go for higher volume. The incremental cost of selling 1 more copy of the game suite are basically zero. Cents or perhaps even fractions of a cent. Thus, it makes sense to ignore per-transaction revenue and concentrate on total revenue. If you're able to make 2x or 10x as much revenue even though the per customer revenue is smaller you've still made more money at the end of the day.

Indeed, you've made more money and more people are using your product (many of them paying less than they would otherwise).

In business terms this is called a WIN/WIN situation.

(Consider all the products which used to be expensive but are dirt cheap today. Do you think it's "disgusting" that you pay your ISP a minuscule fraction of what you would have paid per byte per month back in the dialup era?)

I would have bought it, yet the Amazon checkout refuses to let me pay using my Amazon gift card balance. It seems to want me to buy via credit card. If there is a way to buy it using my gift card balance I don't see it.

Ah well, and I was willing to give the developers $20 or so.

Seeing analogpixels.com being one of the top 10 donors made me wonder: How many people would donate more if the current top 10 paying people got a link to their website/product for the duration of the sale?

Wonderful! I just bought them for 50$! I only know of Gish and World of goo since I've played the demos and never got around to buy them, but now I just can't miss this incredible offer!

Watch the video! So worth 2 minutes of your time.

It rhymes!

Try submitting $0. Hilariousness ensues.

edit: Yes, I would have bought it for $0 if they let me.

I know and love both World of Goo and Gish. Any reviews or recommendations on the others?

to be honest they're all pretty cool. Aquaria is an Independent Games Festival winner. Lugaru is sick if you're into awesome fighting rabbits. Penumbra: Overture is highly rated across a bunch of gaming sites including metacritic.

Lugaru is reminiscent (at least to me) of the Redwall books. It has awesome combat and you shouldn't miss it.

Aquaria is an amazing adventure game that is somewhat reminiscent of Metroid in how you explore the environments. The environments are beautiful and the game play is fun.

Penumbra Overture is a horror game that has scared me more than any other horror game I have played. It has an incredible atmosphere and is definitely worth the play through. The game ends on a cliffhanger, but the sequel is even better than the original, so I would recommend getting both.

I like this model. Surely the developers behind these games are going to get some new fans and customers.

As an anecdote, I played World of Goo at a friend's once. He copied it on my USB stick and I played more at home. A few months later there was a "pay what you want" promotion for just World of Goo. I bought it to support the developers, even though I had already finished the game and there was nothing new to play with. It's a great game and I recommend it for a few hours of fun.

I think they're going to get a huge influx of pathological users who mostly pay amounts which would amount to 80% off the face price of the cheapest game in the bundle.

...who almost certainly wouldn't have bought the games anyway. The exposure that some of these sales bring is immense, partly because they're novel. Who cares if a large percentage of people get the games for really cheap? They could easily get it for free at The Pirate Bay.

The total is going up by over $300 a MINUTE right now.

This is by far the biggest argument in favor of the "pay-what-you-want" model. It's an efficient way to capture customers that would have been priced out of your product. The other edge of the sword is the tendency of customers with the cash to skimp.

> ...who almost certainly wouldn't have bought the games anyway.

Exactly. I just paid $15 just because I thought it was a neat idea. I don't know if I'll even play the games since I don't really play video games much any more these days. If I do, I won't spend much time on them, and I definitely wouldn't have ever purchased them. So my money to them is 100% money they would never have had otherwise.

"who almost certainly wouldn't have bought the games anyway"

exactly. I bought World of Goo when 2D Boy had such an offer. And i had not heard of the others. Now after the video i want to try Lagaru HD

I'm not sure what you mean by "pathological users", though isn't 20% better than 0%?

In general, you will find that a very small fraction of your user base constitutes a huge portion of support requests. A fraction of this fraction has entitlement issues and simultaneously believes you are trying to cheat them (dimestore psychology: because they know they'd cheat you if they could get away with it). Those are pathological users.

I have repeatedly found personally, and talked to other software developers, that increasing your price drives pathological users away and decreasing your price (particularly dramatically decreasing your price) draws them in like flies.

I do not think it is obviously true that selling 8 games for, e.g., $1 is better than not having that sale. If folks offered me the option of participating in a similar deal, I would decline. In addition to customers paying essentially nothing but requiring disproportionate support, I would be worried about auto-commoditizing my software offering. Why pay $30 when I've publicly demonstrated that I consider it to be worth less than a buck?

On a related topic: dangrover's comments about participating in Macheist are a great read, regardless of your feelings on the matter.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=945869

I think you'd be justified in doing a refund-only support model here. Game doesn't work on your machine? Happy to give a refund!

Can you explain to me how the developers of World of Goo, who field the support requests for WoG, are going to refund the bundle price despite a) having not actually received the bundle price and b) having no direct commercial relationship with the customer which would let them click the Refund button in Paypal?

Prior arrangement with the organizers of the deal. I just don't think that this is a big problem.

You have a point regarding pathological users, but this promotion also draws in people who might have already played or heard of one or two of these games, and are willing to drop $30 or $40 to check out the remaining ones.

Also, even a cost of $1 incurs the friction of the transaction. That ought to turn away a significant percentage of the freeloaders, who probably paid 0 on pirate bay a long time ago anyway.

"Why pay $30 when I've publicly demonstrated that I consider it to be worth less than a buck?"

I think that's where the charity comes in. I see a generous indie developer giving to a good cause, not one admitting their goods are worthless.

In general I see what you're saying.

They're making less per game than they would charging a lousy buck on the appstore. Given all the ways they can make whole dollars, as in plural, per purchase I'd say it's not better than 0% at all.

This is free advertisement for indie developers, who have a very hard time getting publicity. Not only does it pay off in the short term (many of these are users who I can promise you would never have bought these games for anything more), it also pays off for the companies in the future. Wolfire, the creator of Lugaru, is currently working on the sequel, Overgrowth, which they have been funding exclusively by using preorders of the game. If someone buys Lugaru here and enjoys it, they may just preorder Overgrowth, which will net them more money.

It's the same with Frictional Games (creators of Penumbra) and the game that they're funding through preorders, Amnesia.

It seems like pretty expensive advertising actually - a normal sale makes them $x minus the ad or whatever that brought them the customer. Now $x is somewhere between $0 and $1.58 where it used to be up to $20 minus whatever advertising.

They're not making more they're just selling more.

World of Goo did the same thing a while back. They made an incredible amount of money and reached a large amount of people. Yes, many people paid 1 cent, but they still made more than they would have otherwise.

Read the attached article, it's their response to their sale: http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/

Exactly. I mentioned this in my original post above. They already know whether the "pay what you want" sale works or not.

Not disputing they're going to make a lot of money from this, obviously when they wake up tomorrow morning they're each going to have tens of thousands more than they had when they woke up this morning. In that sense it "works".

But relative to other models the "pay what you want" is a terrible failure - any of those games could have singlehandedly grossed $30,000 to $60,000 from the number of sales they've had today, and that's going to lose a big chunk to advertising but still make them a lot more than $1.66 a sale.

Could have, assuming that the people who paid $7 would have still payed $20. This just isn't the case.

It's been the case for many, many years and remains the case today as well.

Appstore-like pricing is the exception, not the rule.

I think you misunderstand. It's not true that everyone who paid $7 would pay $20.

No it's you who misunderstand.

That some of the 6000 purchasers today would not pay $20 is irrelevant, others would and others from the remaining millions of game players would too.

You also disregard that I already factored in a 50% - 75% discount - the prices I put assumed a $5 - $10 price on sale.

Okay, we're talking about two totally different things.

Cheers.