Success The first promotion was considered to be very successful. Rosen noted that they saw the million-dollar goal as a best-case scenario, but once the sale actually started, "it was immediately clear that we were on to something". Rosen would later attribute part of the success to
Ars Technica writer Mike Thompson, stating that he "immediately saw the potential" of the Bundle in an article written for the website just prior to the Bundle's sale period. Brandon Boyer of
Boing Boing believed that it provided a model that "seems it could and should be repeated". The move to offer games in a price and manner that consumers were willing to buy was contrasted to larger software publishers that place artificial limitations on their content; Mike Masnick of
Techdirt believed the Humble Bundle promotion worked as it "focus[ed] on giving people real reasons to buy, rather than just feeling entitled to define the terms under which they buy and looking for ways to limit those who want to interact with you in a different manner". The source for the promotion's website has been requested of Wolfire by several other groups, according to Rosen; Rosen continues to believe that many similar charitable sales can be seen in the future from the Humble Bundle's success.
PC Gamer named the Wolfire team as founders of the Humble Indie Bundle as their 2011 community heroes for their support of the indie game development market.
Forbes listed John Graham in its 2013 "30 Under 30" leaders in the field of games for the success of Humble Bundle, while Rosen was recognized for the same in 2015. After the end of the Humble eBook Bundle,
John Scalzi noted that various factors, such as brand name recognition, a lack of DRM, a focus on charity, the uniqueness of the bundle and its format, and the variety of included authors, all made the Humble eBook Bundle a success. Scalzi notes that while people who participate in Humble Bundles will get less in net profit than they would have without the bundle (due to the variable percentages patrons can donate and publishers taking their cut of proceeds), but in return receive greater volume (the Humble Bundle sold 42,000 copies of eBooks in two weeks, almost as much as the average monthly bestseller). In conclusion, Scalzi lauds the idea of the Humble Bundle, and notes to future contributors that while the bundle is low-margin, it's also low-risk. Novelist
Cory Doctorow, who organized both eBook bundles, noted that while no publisher aside from
Tor Books would participate in the bundle because of no-DRM stipulations, they still raised around $2 million for books whose circulations were earning their authors little to no money. Terence Lee of Hitbox Team also mentions that the Humble Bundle was a success for their game
Dustforce, even after the bundle ended. When Humble Bundle first called the team and asked if they could port the game to Linux and bundle it, the game sold about ten copies on Steam daily. The day the Humble Indie Bundle 6 came out with
Dustforce in it, sales through the Humble Bundle skyrocketed to over 50,000 copies per day. While Hitbox Team only received $178,000 out of the $2 million Humble Bundle made, the increased number of players caused daily sales of the game to jump from less than a dozen to around 50–60 copies per day. On the other hand,
Binding of Isaac and
Super Meat Boy developer Edmund McMillen noted in a Tumblr post that the bundles are "not as successful as many would think." While the Humble Bundles are an excellent way for popular games to get a final boost in sales as well as to help lesser-known games get more attention, statistics have shown that sales dipped more in the years when
Binding of Isaac and
Super Meat Boy were in bundles than they were in following years. Ultimately, according to McMillen, Humble Bundles neither hurt nor help in the long run and now seem more of a tradition than anything else.
Piracy Despite the ability to get the games at nearly zero cost, Wolfire Games estimate that 25% of the traceable downloads for the first Bundle have come from
software piracy by links provided in some forums that bypass the payment screen to access the games; Wolfire further surmises additional piracy occurred through
BitTorrent-type peer-to-peer sharing services. Rosen noted they purposely removed much of the DRM associated with games to appeal to those who would otherwise engage in software piracy, through both having the games ship without DRM and by having only limited copy protection on their website. While aware of the presumed software piracy, Rosen says that Wolfire will take no steps to limit it, believing that "making the download experience worse for generous contributors in the name of punishing pirates doesn't really fit with the spirit of the bundle". Rosen noted that by offering the source code of the games as an incentive, they would hope that "the community will help build them up with the same vigor that crackers tear DRM down". An anonymous survey conducted by Wolfire for those who felt it necessary to acquire the second Bundle from other illegitimate sources showed that some preferred the option of using peer-to-peer sharing services like BitTorrent to improve the speed and reliability of the download; as a result, Wolfire added the option to download the games through BitTorrent, hoping to entice more people to acquire the game legitimately.
Software "counterfeits" Several games in the Humble Indie Bundles have been released as
open-source software as a result of the Bundles reaching certain sales levels. One such game was Wolfire's own
Lugaru HD, where they released the engine under the GNU General Public License, and also included the various art assets, level designs, and other creative elements under a freely redistributable license for personal use. Their intent was to allow programmers to experiment and improve the game's engine using the associated assets. Wolfire later began selling the title
Lugaru HD on the Mac App Store for $9.99. A company called iCoder used the open-source resources to recreate the same game for the App Store, charging only $0.99 for their version of
Lugaru. iCoder claims they have the right to recreate and charge for the game under the GNU license, but Jeffery Rosen notes that this did not apply to the art assets. Also, Apple's AppStore terms are not compatible with the GPL license. The iCoder version was taken down from the App Store after about a week since Wolfire notified Apple of the issue, though so far no explanation has been given by Apple. As the iCoder version of the application was popular, being the 60th most downloaded game application prior to its removal, Wolfire offered those who purchased the iCoder version a free copy of their version and codes to unlock the game from within Steam. Rosen notes that the incident may discourage developers from releasing their source in the future. In November 2013, Humble Bundle, Inc. implemented a system on redemption of bundles that, for Steam games, would not give the user the alphanumeric key but instead automatically redeemed the key within Steam through Steam account linking as a means to avoid abuse of the key system. 7 Entertainment has responded to these issues by changing its own terms of service to the marketplaces that use it to prevent and deal with these key sales.
Criticism Developer compensation Alexander Zubov of
Kot-in-Action Creative Artel who developed the
Steel Storm games complained in an interview about the trouble he had getting his games accepted into the Bundles, originally trying to push their game's first episode as a free bonus for the second Bundle, and then trying to get their full game into the third. Zubov recalls that he had heard "nothing back" until they made a "last minute decision" to include
Steel Storm: Burning Retribution in the Humble Indie Bundle 3. Even then, Zubov further described his dissatisfaction with how payment was handled, saying that they were "offered a tiny-tiny fraction of what HIB3 made, a very small (compared to the profits of HIB3) fixed amount of money" even though, according to Zubov, "when Steel Storm was released as a bonus, their sales jumped up significantly." He also mentioned that despite claims by the organizers that their sales would "sky rocket just because [they] were in the HIB3", their actual amount of sales remained relatively constant. Zubov noted that their inclusion in the third bundle "did get a lot of users who redeemed their copy of
Steel Storm on
Steam and Desura" and that they hoped this would help keep their "current user base, which we gained with HIB3, interested in our upcoming games". He concluded his comments about his experiences by saying that "only time will tell if HIB3 was [an] awesome deal or not. Maybe, maybe not. If it works out as a long-term investment, it will be awesome indeed. If not, I will never ever participate in such capacity (as a bonus item for a small fixed payout) in the future HIB bundles. We all do have bills to pay and families to feed, don't we?" Prior to the sale, THQ had issued public statements of internal financial difficulties; Ben Kuchera of
Penny Arcade Reports noted that several of the games' developers at THQ have since been let go and would not see any money from the Humble Bundle sale. Following the bundle, THQ's stock price increased by 30%.
Sale timing Prior to the Humble Botanicula Debut,
Botanicula was offered for pre-order through other websites but at full price, leading designers Amanita Design to apologize for the pricing disparity, offering those who pre-ordered a soundtrack, art book, and a copy of
Machinarium. Linux port In the Humble Indie Bundle V, the game
LIMBO was provided for Linux as a
CrossOver build. At the time, this was the first game in any Bundle to have a
Wine based Linux version. As the quality and the nativeness of such Linux ports is debated, the inclusion was criticized by some members of the Linux community. Also a petition was started to protest the inclusion of such as "non-native" described games in the Bundles. A native version of LIMBO was finally released in 2014 and was made available to Humble Indie Bundle 5 purchasers.
Games with DRM Although Humble Bundle makes a point of offering games without DRM, the game
Uplink in Humble Bundle for Android 3 was delivered with DRM copy-protection measures, both in the Android and the PC versions. A representative for Introversion stated on the forums that it was due to some leftover DRM code on the Android version. Kyle Orland of Ars Technica and Ben Kuchera were critical of the THQ Bundle's inclusion of games limited to Windows and containing DRM. Humble Bundle co-founder John Graham replied to these complaints, stating that the THQ bundle is one of several other experiments for the Humble Bundle project in 2012, and that they are still committed to future bundles featuring smaller and indie games that run on multiple platforms without DRM. ==References==