Humble Indie Bundle Finally Sells Out
 

It has finally happened. The latest Humble Indie Bundle is not indie, it is not cross-platform, it is not DRM free, and it is certainly not humble.

http://blog.humblebundle.com/post/36...le-has-arrived

Was the millions of dollars that they had generated by sticking to their ideals just not good enough for them? Was all of the passionate support they received so meaningless to them that they felt they could just cast it aside like this? I am not even really angry yet, just completely numb...

A good article from ars technica on the subject:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/1...ds-reputation/

I agree with the arstechnica comments that said they should have simply not called this a Humble Bundle.

I missed this post, yes, I completely agree it is not Humble. It really wasn't humble in the past either. They often did not give enough info about the games on purpose. Some were flash games, some ran through wine, some were 32-bit only, but none of this info was readily available.

It certainly had been becoming a lot less Humble over time (no more source code releases, for instance) but they did always stay true to their founding values. There were some technical hiccups, but those were acceptable problems, and you could always vouch for their good intentions. Not anymore. Now they are just another publisher, just another game bundle.

I guess the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Hopefully they'll take the massive amount of money that this is clearly intended to bring in, and use it to redeem themselves soon.

I wouldn't hold your breath :/

What's their business-model? They sell their product for ... what ... "one dollar?" Given that I can't buy a roll of paper towels for one dollar anymore, any so-called "business" model that has such an absurdly low price, especially for a bundle of things that (one must hope ...) still have copyrights and therefore still have owners who expect royalties, cannot survive long.

Customer expectations are a delicate thing. If you start out by selling things at a loss, hoping to somehow "build up a mass of loyal fans," a year goes by and your hopes come true and you are now ... selling gobs of virtual boxes to a mass of loyal fans, but still at a loss. You change your policy in hope of making some, y'know, profit, and suddenly those "loyal" fans are panties-up about it all. You would have been far better off to build a sustainable business model, then leave the thing in the ground long enough to sprout leaves, then nurture it into a sustainable crop. Takes a few years, maybe, but it works.

No, it's not a good business model, and the way they act doesn't help it any.

I'm not sure most of the outrage is so much about them working on making a profit, but the sudden swing to non-crossplatform, DRMed software. It isn't really about money (as some people contributed significantly considering they didn't have to pay more than they wanted to) but as a perceived change in "ideology" that people were supporting and now feel betrayed.

Whether they can come back from that, only time will tell.

This has repercussions beyond Humble too as the EFF were supporters/beneficiaries of some of those bundle promotions too.

I just think that the light just blinked-on somewhere that ... "hey, we're not making money here!" :banghead: And someone else finally realized that they never, ever could. So, they apparently picked one platform and tried to sell stuff that's locked-in to that, and the popular results of that were entirely predictable.

But-t-t-t-t.... they weren't making dollars anyway. Personally, I would have shuttered the old company and opened up a "brand new" one to avoid polluting the new brand-name with the loser past. Sure, they would have had to attract new customers, but they didn't have customers anyhow. (No money = not a customer.) As it is, the new enterprise "inherited" a bunch of old names-on-a-list and, it would seem, pissed-off every one of them at once. Predictably so. Better to have a list of no-one than to have a list of thousands of jilted freeloaders. Every eventually successful company starts out with a list of no-one, and so to some degree is able to control what happens next while starting with that precious blank slate.