Gamers Are Awesome, Gamers Are Assholes: Observations From The Humble Bundle

We already rapped about the Humble Indie Bundle, but there’s less than a day left on the deal, and it’s definitely worth reminding you about.

The concept is simple, six rad indie games for whatever price you’re willing to pay, with some percentage of the proceeds going to charities like Child’s Play. Oh, and the games work on the PC, Mac, and Linux. Still not sold? Each and every one of the titles comes DRM-free, without even a serial-number check.

Anyways, my job isn’t to sell you on the deal, Jody’s post already did a good enough job of that. As the sale comes to an end, all sorts of interesting data has begun to emerge – effectively exposing the habits and trends across platforms.

It is important to start off by congratulating all of the parties involved. Letting customers pay any amount can be surprisingly profitable. Despite a slow start, the sale has generated about $823,200 from a total of 93,689 contributors. Sure, it’s not the billion-dollar figure that the latest Modern Warfare made, but that is damn impressive for a collection of indie games.

Interested in the per-user breakdown? Those ninety-three thousand customers paid an average of $8.79 each. Now, Wolfire is using the mean, so that figure is slightly skewed by outliers. Oh, and there are some major outliers (which is a good thing, considering the charitable bent of this sale), with the top ten donors paying anything from $230 to a cool grand for the bundle. Now, those especially-charitable souls are offset by those who only dumped a penny for the games, but the statistician in me really wants a look at the median figures.

You Linux users should feel proud of yourselves – these users paid almost twice as much as Windows users, $14.13 to $7.65 (again, this is the mean). Mac users fall in the middle, donating an average of $10. I’m not overwhelming surprised by that discrepancy – with games so rare on Linux, the users of the operating system tend to respond overwhelmingly well to developers that give them the least bit of attention.

No, what does surprise me is the platform breakdown. The “official” numbers that usually emerge is that Windows holds 93% of the world PC marketshare, with Mac taking 6% and the scraps going to everybody else. This is pretty indisputable, but the numbers from this indie bundle begin to suggest that such a percentage split does not so easily apply to the gaming market. Only 52.6% of the sales have gone to Windows users, with an almost identical split of the rest going to Mac and Linux (23.9 and 23.4%, respectively). Now, the completely unscientific conclusion that we can draw from this is that a larger percentage of the overall Mac and Linux user-bases are gamers than the overall Linux base. This is probably true, but this data specifically come from people buying an indie game bundle, and it would be easy to speculate that the users predisposed to using an alternative operating system are also predisposed to purchasing indie games (I know that I fit this pattern).

These overall trends are backed up by previous results from 2d Boy’s birthday sale, where they offered a similar “pay what you want” deal on World of Goo. Linux users were more generous, offering $3.50 on average to the Windows users’ $1.90 (Mac users fell a hair over $2.50). The operating system breakdown was pretty similar, too. Windows users accounted for 65% of sales, while Mac and Linux split the remainder in half (18 and 17%). The results from that sale also showed that donation amounts rose towards the end of the sale, from about $1.60 on the first day to $3.25 on the last. Such data isn’t available yet for the Humble Indie Bundle, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a similar effect.

Wolfire Games’ blog has a fascinating discussion on the operating system breakdown. I highly recommend taking a look at it.

Of course, not everything is peaches and flowers. The demon-child-in-the-corner-that-nobody-like-to-talk-about, software piracy, is still present. You would think that piracy would be low on a bundle that can effectively be gotten for free (ok, you have to pay a penny, but come on) and is DRM-free. I mean, pirates have claimed over and over that they only download games because of the punishing DRM! There should be very few pirates, right?

Well, over the past few days, Wolfire has seen 49.3 TB of raw downloads. The average user has downloaded about 490 MB of data (again, this is skewed by outliers – one user downloaded 10.3 GB). If you do some simple math, you find that there have been 105,497 downloaders. At the time that these numbers were released, there has been 79,000 paying customers. So, how about that? At least 25% of downloads of the Humble Indie Bundle have been by pirates (this doesn’t even include those that copied all of the games and mirrored them off-site).

The lesson there? Some people will always be assholes. No matter how easy a developer makes the process for the end-user, someone will pirate the game. The noble fight against DRM? Bull. Piracy will always exist, regardless of DRM. Sadly, publishers will probably never pick up on this lesson, and will keep inventing more and more punishing measures that will only effect the legitimate customers.

Overall, however, the Humble Indie Bundle offers a positive message. When asked to name any price, when asked to help charity, gamers will respond generously. Eight bucks may not seem like much, but that eight bucks adds up quickly. Indie developers raising almost a million dollars in a matter of days is unheard of. While we don’t know the breakdown between the developers and charity (each donator can specify their own split), I imagine that the proceeds will give a tiny bit of joy to a bunch of sick children (and the starving indie devs).

Oh, and it seems that I hit that average right on – I put in $10 for the bundle (and counted as a Mac user).

Humble Indie Bundle
An analysis of Humble Bundle piracy