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Latest Humble Bundle brings Fez and Mark of the Ninja to Mac and Linux
We've seen the Humble Bundle be used to introduce some big games to new platforms in the past, and the latest offering is no exception. The 9th edition of the Indie Bundle sees both indie game favorite Fez and Mark of the Ninja making their debut on Mac and Linux. Along with those, you'll get FTL: Faster Than Light, Trine 2 and Brutal Legend, plus the beta version of Eets Munchies, which is making its debut on all three platforms. As usual, you can pay whatever you like for the bundle and choose how much goes to the developers and charities (EFF, Child's Play and Watsi), but you'll have to pay more than the average to get Fez and FTL. Those not up on their indie gaming can get a taste of what's in store in the video after the break -- just don't get your hopes up for a Fez sequel if you like what you find.
Humble Indie Bundle 8 offers 7 indie Mac games for a great price
The Humble Indie Bundle is one of the higher-quality game bundles around (there are quite a few of them these days), and the eighth iteration, just announced this week, is one of the best deals we've seen in a while. The bundle features seven different games (all available on the Mac, along with Windows and Linux versions if you happen to OS that way) for a name-your-own price. You'll get Little Inferno (which began on iOS, but later arrived on PC), the excellent indie MOBA Awesomenauts, Capsized, heart-tugger Thomas Was Alone and the very atmospheric Dear Esther, along with two other titles if you pay higher than the average (currently about $5), the beautiful Proteus and the violent but very well-designed Hotline Miami. All of those games are excellent, and the fact that you can pay your own price (which you can then divvy up as you like to charity, the Humble Bundle folks or the developers) is just icing on the already sweet cake. And there's more, too: You get soundtracks for all of the games, not to mention that all of these titles are cross-platform and DRM free, so you can play them anywhere you want, too. This bundle will be available for a while, but it's definitely a great deal. If you need a few more games to play on your Mac, pick this one up for sure.
Humble Bundle goes indie once more in seventh iteration, includes Indie Game: The Movie
In recent months, the notorious Humble Bundle has gone from indie, to literary, to mainstream, and back again, with today's announcement of the newest Indie bundle and its smattering of games. If the six indie titles included aren't adding enough indie cred, the bundle also includes a digital copy of Indie Game: The Movie -- surely you remember the documentary from its appearance on The Engadget Show, no? As per usual, two of the bundle's games are tied to a pay tier (currently just under $6), and all titles are PC / OS X compatible -- you'll even snag soundtracks for everything, DRM-free. And should you pony up over $1, the games all transfer to Steam. To be clear, you should be paying more than $1 for all this stuff anyway.
Humble Bundle goes literary, offers octuplet of books at a humble price
The Humble Bundle tends to be associated with not just low prices, but also indie video games (and occasionally music). Today's bundle, however, centers on the literary-minded among us, offering a set of eight e-Books for just under $10. Of course, a main staple of the bundle is its pay what you want price model, which applies here as well -- should you only want six of the books, you can pay any price (one penny for six books! hot dog!). If you want access to John Scalzi's Old Man's War and Signal to Noise by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, you've gotta shell out over the average payment price (currently sitting at $9.84). If you want that sub-$10 price, we'd suggest heading over sooner than later. Another good reason? You've only got two weeks before this humble e-Book bundle disappears forever.
Humble Music Bundle shows charity disparity among Mac, Linux and Windows users
I bet that behavioral economists get rather excited when they see pay-what-you-want offers going viral. Assuming the seller is collecting some basic demographic detail, the resulting statistics might deliver some interesting insights into the relative altruism (or discretionary cash reserves) of different sorts of folks. The Humble Bundle team (responsible for the Humble Indie gaming bundles that we've covered before) is running a Humble Music bundle, accessible to all sorts of music fans. Featured artists include Jonathan Coulton, They Might Be Giants and MC Frontalot; a flexible portion of the purchase price goes toward not-for-profit cause groups like Child's Play Charity and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The bundle price is entirely up to the buyer, although suggested pricing goes from $100 down to $15. If you pay more than the rolling average price (currently around $8.28) you get a bonus album of remixes from viral-video darlings OK Go. You can also define the split between the artists and the charities, and contribute a "Humble Tip" for the bundle organizers. Given that buyers can pay what they want, what sort of variance do the Humble Bundlers see among their contributors/customers? It's not scientific, and there could be a whole horde of confounding factors, but take a look at the stats in the image above. Mac users (representing about 1/5 of the 45K total customer count) are paying an average of $9.84 for the bundle, more than $1.50 above the average price and $2.40 above the average Windows user. That might be skewed by a few "whales" who are contributing $100 or more from the Mac side, but even so the population is large enough that the differences would seem to be significant. Before you start forwarding this post to your penny-pinching Windows-using wealthy relatives, note that the Mac users aren't the most likely to empty their wallets for tunes. Linux users, with a slightly smaller share of the overall purchases, are coughing up a stunning $11.94 per transaction -- more than $3.50 higher than the average cost. This might be an artifact of the Humble Bundle's past service to Linux gamers, who may be feeling especially supportive of HB's efforts here, or maybe Linux users feel more strongly about the charities/artists involved. Or they just really are more generous by nature. With the recently finished Humble Indie Bundle 5, Linux users donated an average of $12.51 per transaction. It would be really interesting to do a deeper dive into the HB sales data, especially from the perspective of Dan Ariely or the Freakonomics guys. Most sellers aren't this transparent about their customers, and what they do with the behavioral data they collect -- and there's good PR reasons why they don't share more. In June, travel site Orbitz caught some flak for acknowledging that it showed different search results to Mac users (skewed towards the higher-end properties that they apparently prefer to book) than to PC users. While both sets of searchers would pay the same price for the same room, Mac users responded better to upscale hotels and slightly more expensive stays. The Humble Music Bundle is available until Thursday, August 9.
Canonical tag teams with Humble, wraps up Indie Bundle installation with bow (video)
Love your Linux games, but hate painful installs? Ubuntu maker Canonical understands, and has kicked the usual, less snappy, procedure to the curb creating a new approach for the Humble Indie Bundle. The company already expanded Linux gaming, recently adding EA titles to its Ubuntu Software Center, and now you can download the Humble quintet from there as a single file, and install it in one go. In true open source style, you can pick the price you'd like to pay at Humble's site and even juggle how that sum is distributed to the games' developers and charities. So with the install obstacle gone, trundle on past the break and see if the promo video seals the deal.
Humble Indie Bundle team offers a Frozen Synapse Bundle
The Humble Indie Bundle guys are back with another pay-what-you-want bundle of games. Proceeds from your purchase may be directed to the developers or to charity, in any combination you like. This time around, they're focusing on the turn-based strategy game Frozen Synapse, offering it up to anyone who wants to pay in at any price. There is a reason to pay a little higher this time. If the price you choose is higher than the average (currently around US$4.50) will also get you the Frozenbyte bundle, featuring the great Trine, the Shadowgrounds games, a game prototype called Jack Claw, and the upcoming release Splot. That lot for less than five bucks is a great deal, even if the Humble Indie Bundle folks aren't actually providing a bundle to everyone this time around. And as you'll probably remember from the past few offerings, these guys have a habit of adding even more extras into their deals, so odds are good that those six games aren't all you'll get if you buy in now. As usual, all of the games are available through Steam and are compatible with Mac, Linux and Windows. If you need something to play this coming weekend, you won't find a better deal around.
Humble Indie Bundle 3 announced, includes Cogs, VVVVVV, And Yet It Moves
The Humble Indie Bundle is back at it again, offering five new indie gaming titles for one low choose-your-own price. This time around, they've got Crayon Physics Deluxe, 3D puzzler Cogs, the excellent retro platformer VVVVVV, Hammerfight, and the award-winning puzzler/platformer And Yet It Moves. They're all solid games designed by talented indie artists, together in this one bundle. As before, the price is pay-what-you-will -- while there's a suggested value of $50, you can donate whatever you like, and you can split your donation any way you want, giving the money direction to the developers, or donating it to either the EFF or Child's Play nonprofits. You even get Steam codes from the purchase, so it'll be as if you picked up the games from Steam, even if you give the money to a charity. You just plain won't find a better gaming deal on the Internet than this one -- the Humble Indie Bundle is always a very generous proposition, and the fact that all the games are Mac (and Windows and Linux) compatible is an added bonus for us Mac users.
New Humble bundle offers Frozenbyte games, pay what you want
The folks behind the extremely popular Humble Indie bundles are at it again -- this time, they've assembled a "Humble Frozenbyte Bundle," featuring a pack of games from Finnish game developer Frozenbyte. The real centerpiece here is Trine, an excellent physics-based puzzler/platformer that's done well both on PC and on the consoles, but the other titles (Shadowgrounds, sequel Shadowgrounds Survivor and a preview of a game called Splot) aren't bad either. There's a game prototype in the mix called Jack Claw -- that's a game that Frozenbyte eventually canceled without release, but buyers of this bundle will get to play it anyway (on Windows, that is). As with the other Humble bundles, all of these games are Mac-compatible and DRM-free, and the price is pay-what-you-will, with money going either to Frozenbyte or to the EFF or Child's Play. The suggested price cost of the games separately is $50 (which would still be a great deal for four games), but you can give whatever you want to whoever you want and still get the bundle for yourself. On a quick platform-specific note, too, Mac users aren't being quite as well represented this time around -- they're paying, on average, way less than Linux users, and taking the smallest piece of the pie out of the three platforms. If you do buy the bundle (and the games, with the exception of Jack Claw, are compatible on any and all platforms anyway), make sure to show a little Mac pride over there, and prove that among the three OSes, Mac users are the most willing to pony up for great software.
Humble Indie Bundle hits $1.2 million, promises Steam integration
The Humble Indie Bundle 2 has reached $1.2 million in revenue, topping the last offering, and there are five days left to go, so the turnout for the pay-what-you-want gaming pack should be pretty spectacular. All of the games were previously announced as released on both Mac and PC, but the group has also hammered out a deal with Steam to optionally give out keys for the games on that service if you so choose. That means that even if you don't have Steam, you can get the games on their own, but if you do, you can pay whatever price you want, and get all five of the games (two of them when they actually debut on the service) through Valve's downloadable game app. That's a pretty spectacular deal -- you can download the games through Steam onto any other computers you happen to have, and as before, you can still give all, some or none of the money you pay to your choice of charities. Mac donations are above the average, but still nowhere near as high as Linux donations. If you do head over there and pick up the bundle, be sure to represent your OS of choice when you do. As I said, there are five days left, but if you're a gamer and want any one of these games, this deal is more than worth getting in on before it ends.
Humble Indie Bundle 2 offers more Mac gaming deals
The Humble Indie Bundle is back for round two, which means that you've got another deal with some terrific indie games to run on your Mac, completely DRM-free. This time, you get Jonathan Blow's excellent time-shifting platformer Braid, quality puzzle game Machinarium, iOS favorite Osmos, and Cortex Command and Revenge of the Titans, two titles still under development. Just like last time, you can pay any price you want. While the games by themselves would cost you $85, people have paid up to $1000 just to promote and support independent game development -- and just like last time, all of the games are playable on Mac, Windows and Linux as you choose. You can also give any or all of the money donated to charity, so really this is about as awesome as a game deal gets. Pay whatever you want to someone worthy of the money, and you get five games to do with as you please. Last time around, the bundle raised upwards of a million dollars, and Linux users, we're told, were twice as generous as Windows users. That seems to be the case this time as well (with Mac users only a little better than Windows), so let's head on over and represent, since it's definitely true that Mac users are willing to pay a quality price for quality software. I can tell you outright that Braid and Osmos are worth a $20 donation on their own, so head on over, give some money, and support some more than generous independent game developers.
