The Humble Indie Bundle No. 3 - Pay What You Want for Seven Cross-platform games

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, Aug 07, 2011, Shlomi Fish wrote about "The Humble Indie Bundle No. 3 - Pay What  You Want for Seven Cross-platform games":
> there are two days left to buy the Humble Indie Bundle No. 3:
> http://www.humblebundle.com/

Interesting. Never heard of these games, so I can't comment on the product
itself, but it's definitely an interesting business model.

The page tries to tell you that this package is normally sold for $50
(a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchor_price) but lets people choose the
price. Do you think people chose something around $50? Not really ;-)
According to them, the average price people chose to pay was around $5 ;-)
And interestingly, Linux users were the most generous ($12) and Windows
users were cheapest ($4.7) - probably the opposite of the normal expectation.

Of course, these averages may be misleading, as their "top contributors"
list show that some billionaire's kid ( :-)) paid $4000 , and probably
many others also paid hundreds of dollars.

In any case these guys made almost $2 million from over 300,000 customers.
Assuming (I *don't* know if that is a safe assumption) that the vast majority
of these customers would never buy these games for their normal prices,
it's not bad.

That being said, something smells a bit fishy. These companies normally
demand $10-$20 for *each* of these bundled games, and now they settle for
less than $5 for seven of them? If they thought this was enough (like
iPhone game developers have come to think), why isn't this the normal price?
Where's the catch?

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |           Sunday, Aug  7 2011, 7 Av 5771
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Early bird gets the worm, but the second
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |mouse gets the cheese.