Taking advantage of the zero-marginal-cost nature of electronic media distribution, a group of independent computer game developers has teamed up to offer the “Humble Indie Bundle”, a bundle of five games (including the award-winning World of Goo) for Windows, Macintosh, or Linux as a set-your-own-price download.
Purchasers can choose how much of their purchase contribution they want to go to the games’ developers and how much to go to the non-profits Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The default is to split it fifty-fifty, but if purchasers want it all to go to the developers, or all to go to one or both charities, that is their choice. If they want to pay a penny, ten dollars, or a hundred dollars, that is also their choice.
The games are then theirs to download as often as they want, for whichever platform they like. They have no serial numbers or other DRM; once downloaded there are no restrictions on running them.
According to an info box on the site, at the time of this writing the bundle has raised $852,948 from 96,585 individual contributors. The average donation is $8.83, with Windows users donating $7.70, Mac users donating $10.03, and Linux users donating $14.21 each on average.
But the interesting thing is, even though users can pay as little as a penny to get all the games, one of the developers still estimates that as many as 25% of the games downloaded from their site are downloaded without any payment at all (via download links reposted to various forums)—and that’s not counting possible BitTorrent, RapidShare, or other peer-to-peer transmission. Possible reasons include laziness, inability to pay, or just wanting to “stick it to the man”.
Another developer, David Rosen, has written an essay on Kotaku talking about the perception of video game piracy, game publishers’ claimed losses, and their likely actual losses. He does some math to show that it is entirely possible that a “90% piracy rate” could be accounted for by only 20% of gamers—the Pareto Principle in action.
Rosen suggests that the actual reason games are pirated is not simply that gamers do not want to pay for them:
However, it’s easier for these developers to point their fingers at pirates than to face the real problem: that their games are not fun on PC. The games in question are usually designed for consoles, with the desktop port as an afterthought. This means they are not fun to play with a mouse and keyboard, and don’t work well on PC hardware. Their field of view is designed to be viewed from a distant couch instead of a nearby monitor, and their gameplay is simplified to compensate for this tunnel vision.
I wonder if something similar could be said of pirated e-books—they’re pirated not because people do not want to pay for them, but (at least in part) because of a perception that they are not as good in e-book form as in print form yet?
Rosen points out that despite the rampant piracy, within the first two days of the Humble Indie Bundle’s sale “we have over 40,000 contributions with an average of $8 each!” Perhaps the industry should concentrate not on how many sales they “lost”, but how many they won.
