Board 8 > Humble Bundle V [Psychonauts] [Bastion] [Limbo]

(+) Yeah! (+)

Got my email and the keys. The bundle is amazing needless to say, and to make things better they typically add ridiculous perks such as previous bundle games at later dates. If I hadn't just quit my lab job I would have gladly paid more than I did. Every single game is top notch (except LIMBO, I really don't care for LIMBO and already bought it).

Oh and if you guys haven't seen the trailer for the bundle, check it out!

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Notyou

Just watched the trailer. That was great.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

If the only reason you do something is because a law tells you to, then you're really not much of a human being. You're far too much of a coward to count as one.

Being a law-abiding citizen is not the same thing as "only doing things because the law says so."

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SubDeity wants to vote for Calvin Coolidge. [Evil Republican]
Play Der Langrisser.

A++ trailer

Was expecting the usual guy with his terrible impressions, got something way better

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Ginhyun
http://i.imgur.com/15vH5.gif

Wow.

I would totally buy this if I didn't already own almost all of it >_>

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Nonsense. "Testing" is for when you're still guessing--and now, I have no need to guess. -- Agatha, Girl Genius

Ok I got the bundle but I didn't get a code though.

Should I be worried? The other ones never lagged for me so I'm kinda confused.

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VI is not afraid of 7.
Because if 7 8 9, VI ate 7.

they have support staff you can chat with if you have concerns

From: masterplum | #039
If your sole sense of morals is to avoid punishment then...
I'm not too well versed in such terms, but wouldn't such a person be described as a sociopath?

Anyway I already have alla dese games so no money from me.

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SuperNiceDog didn't have to reconcile his name...
But Dauntless Hunter is now MrGreenonion

I think the bundlers recognize that if they say "pay what you want, minimum zero dollars", some people will pay zero dollars.

There's nothing amoral about doing that.
1) they're earning money from this overall, otherwise they wouldn't be releasing more bundles
2) you might not have heard of these games/developers before, and will likely be enticed to go out and purchase other games by the same devs. Companies spend a lot of money on advertising. This is another form of advertising.

When someone gives out free samples at the supermarket, is it amoral to accept, because it's costing stop & shop (or whatever) money to give you the container and to pay the worker to stand there giving people stuff? No.

To be honest i usually pay a recommended price for these, but i already have bastion & psychonauts. in other bundles i've bought the same game multiple times so i won't feel bad paying five or something for this one.

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You did indeed stab me in the back. However, you are only level one, whilst I am level 50. That means I should remain uninjured.

From: banananor | #061

1) they're earning money from this overall, otherwise they wouldn't be releasing more bundles

That doesn't mean it's okay to cost them money.

2) you might not have heard of these games/developers before, and will likely be enticed to go out and purchase other games by the same devs. Companies spend a lot of money on advertising. This is another form of advertising.

To an extent this is true, but not entirely. Humble bundles are where games go to die- it's their last effort to get money out of the releases, to get people that haven't bought them at normal price to buy them now. Titles don't sell almost at all after humble bundle releases. Some devs have even outright said that it's their last ditch effort to make a game profitable.

When someone gives out free samples at the supermarket, is it amoral to accept, because it's costing stop & shop (or whatever) money to give you the container and to pay the worker to stand there giving people stuff? No.

This is a bad example because 'free samples' at supermarkets and stuff are just that: free. They're not 'pay what you want'-you have no choice in the matter unless you try to tip the person. Speaking of which, that's a better example. The humble bundle is more like tipping.

If you give someone a tip of 1 cent, it's an insult. Paying 1 cent for a humble bundle is worse than that because you're actually bringing detriment to the people doing it. It's like saying "Thanks for the food and great service, enjoy the pile of feces I left on your table".

You're absolute scum if you do that. No amount of trying to rationalize it makes it okay.

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http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/2664/7b7aaa038007832d461b28c.jpg

These average donations get higher every time.

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Ace Detective in Sir Chris' Police
http://i55.tinypic.com/16ljqbl.png

because the quality of games gets higher every time (though I would probably rank Humble Bundle 4 a little bit above this one)

This is an incredible bundle, definitely their best one since 1 and 2, though I didn't know Psychonauts was an indie game >__>

Anyways, I have almost all of these games, but I am definitely gonna buy this for the soundtracks.

Also, regarding the conversation about paying 1 cent, bananor is absolutely correct, and people like tcaz are stuck in an outdated mindset of "items on a shelf" that does not apply to digitally distributed games. It's not a wrong mindset, it's just not as good as the F2P/pay-what-you-want system.

Digitally distributed games are not "items on a shelf". Besides the bandwidth required to download the game, there is no expendable resource required to delivering the product to your customer. It's not like tipping a waiter, because a waiter must expend time and effort to deliver his product. If you want to argue that 10GB of bandwidth is equivalent to a waiter's service, that's a different and more ridiculous though.

Think of it this way - is it better for 1 million people to buy a game, or 1 million people to buy a game and 10 million more to pirate it? You would say the first option, obviously, but due to the success of F2P MMOs and experiments such at these bundles, and TF2's F2P transition, most people in the games industry realize that the second option is far superior.

You can also get into it on a deeper social level. Let's say that you pay $60 for a game, and then tell all your friends that it sucks and never to buy it. Then let's say I pirate a game, and tell all my friends that it is amazing and they should get it. And then maybe my friends will tell their friends. Which one of us is a more desirable customer?

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foolmo
at work

Double Fine bought back Psychonauts from the original publisher so I guess it's technically indie since it's 100% owned by an independent developer

While Subdeity & bananor would perhaps have a point if this was a regular sale, i.e. a steam sale, their argument falls short on addressing the fact that they're costing a charity money.

And Foolmo, I get what you are trying to say and there's a point in that but I don't get what you're trying to say here:
Think of it this way - is it better for 1 million people to buy a game, or 1 million people to buy a game and 10 million more to pirate it? You would say the first option, obviously, but due to the success of F2P MMOs and experiments such at these bundles, and TF2's F2P transition, most people in the games industry realize that the second option is far superior.

Why is the second option superior? F2Players aren't pirates; the first ones will perhaps pay money for extra content as they don't have access to the entire game, even those who would have otherwise pirated it and get sucked in to it, something which pirates won't do since they do have the full thing. Or were you trying to say that a F2P model is a good way of rendering piracy useless? Honest question, I don't get your point here and I'm curious about it.

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I'm but a simple companion in the pack of gurus whereof SuperNiceDog is the pack leader!

From: Bospsychopaat | #067

Why is the second option superior?

Well it all comes back to this:

their argument falls short on addressing the fact that they're costing a charity money.

Like I said before, there is no notion of "cost" in this system. All that there is is customers, and potential customers.

Pirates are just potential customers. They can go back and buy the game for real, or add more to their bundle donation, or buy DLC/in-game stuff, or do nothing at all and just be content with their free game. In all of these cases, the WORST outcome is that you don't make any money.

If there is any non-zero chance that a pirate/1center will eventually give you money, then pirates are a net benefit to you. And then if you include the marketing/social promotion aspect of piracy that I explained in the last paragraph of my post, then pirates becomes even more valuable.

The trick with pay-what-you-want systems is that it nullifies pirates by making them regular customers. It doesn't change anything else, really. An F2Per/1center is entirely equivalent to a traditional pirate, and they serve the same purpose. It's just that giving the option to morally obtain a game for free attracts a HUGE number of people that would previously never have bought nor pirated the game, so the game spreads even faster.

People like Valve and the Humble Bundle and mobile game devs have realized that the key to modern video game marketing is exposure. A typical game will sell 1 million if it's lucky. There's 350 million people in the US, and billions all over the world.
Why would you spend so much effort trying to sell a $60 to 1 or even 10 million people when you could sell a $1 game to 100 million people? That's how angry birds works.
Or maybe get 100 million people playing your F2P game, 90% of which pay $0, 9% pay $5, and 1% pays $100 and 0.01% pays $1000 or more? That's how TF2 and the Humble Bundle work (probably not that many $0s but you get the point).

I could go on for at least 2-3 more paragraphs, since there are so many different elements to think about in these systems, but yeah.

From: WazzupGenius00 | #066

Double Fine bought back Psychonauts from the original publisher so I guess it's technically indie since it's 100% owned by an independent developer

Makes sense

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foolmo
at work

foolm0ron posted...

In all of these cases, the WORST outcome is that you don't make any money.

The worst case is it costs them money, due to transaction fees. The argument isn't against piracy. It's actually preferable to them if you pirate rather than pay one cent, which is what tcaz was saying.

Although, since you did bring it up, I've never been particularly sold on the argument that people who pirate often bring in more customers by telling people how awesome it is. In my experience it's usually a lot more like

Person A: Yeah, this game is pretty awesome
Person B: Oh really? Sounds interesting
Person A: Yeah, I can give you the .iso if you want

It has pretty much an equal chance of bringing in new customers as it does dissuading someone from buying just because their friend can easily give them the game.

What has the biggest impact is convenience and extra features, really. Just as it's easy and convenient for me to grab an .iso and a crack from someone's external drive or dropbox, it's easy for me to just buy a game from Steam, which has numerous benefits if I do (being able to download it anywhere, the whole Steam community thing, etc.). And sales obviously make it much easier to impulse-buy

Basically I feel that pirates bringing in additional consumers is not generally something that happens to any noticeable degree. I'm sure there are stories, but I think it's pretty rare that pirates are actually beneficial. They're mostly just neutral.

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Ginhyun
http://i.imgur.com/15vH5.gif