‘Pay What You Want’ Indie Game Sale Breaks Million Dollar Barrier

Last week, we reported on a so-called crazy idea of a sale where customers set the price of a pack of video games. This crazy idea has now earned over 1 million dollars.

In the first 24 hours of the Humble Indie Bundle got over a quarter of a million. Today was suppose to be the last day of the sale, and we caught up with how the sale is doing today. The sale is, as of this writing, a hair shy of $1.1 million. The sale has since been extended by three days.

A fair bit has changed about the sale between then and now. Since the sale began, the Electronic Frontier Foundation sweetened the deal by offering special memberships and swag for those who donate $100 or more for the bundle (in whatever style donator’s choose).

Another thing that has changed since the launch of the sale was the addition of a fifth game, Samorost 2. To say developers are happy would be an understatement.

Wolfire said, “The Humble Indie Bundle experiment has been a massive success beyond our craziest expectations.”

“So far,” Wolfire added, “in just over 7 days, 120,399 generous contributors have put down an incredible $1,097,310. Of this, contributors chose to allocate 30.96% to charity: $339,778 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child’s Play Charity.”

There was some criticism along the way from there to here as well.

“Unpacking the actual numbers behind piracy is often difficult,” Ben Kuchera of Arstechnica wrote, “but Wolfire has been incredibly transparent about its numbers. The result is strong evidence that no matter what steps developers take, piracy will still be an issue.”

Wolfire did offer some statistics on people pirating the game anyway, but it’s worth pointing out that big companies constantly argue that they are losing big revenue due to piracy. At this point, this no longer obscure game developer is, as seen by other comments from Wolfire, thrilled by the success of the sale. It renders the argument that the Indie Bundle is being pirated pretty much a moot point. Even if piracy had an impact on the sale, it’s to increase the exposure of the developer in the first place. Hundreds of thousands of people know about Wolfire now – it’s the kind of publicity that costs other companies millions in marketing and these guys pretty much did it for free. That also means an increase in loyal future customers that Wolfire didn’t have before the sale. An invaluable thing particularly for a smaller independent gaming company. It’s next to impossible to find anything negative about this sale and it’s next to impossible not to find anything positive about the sale.

The sale allowed anyone to set the price for the game package. People could also choose where the money went – be it all going to the developers, all going to the different charities involved or divided up however the user wants.

It will be interesting to see how much more of a success this sale will be by the time the sale does come to a close.

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