Wolfire Games offers a unique pricing model on their Humble Indie Bundle of five computer games. Buyers can pay what they want for the games, and they can direct some or all of their payment to charity (or the game developers). Interestingly, people are still pirating the Humble Indie Bundle even though “they could get it just by donating a penny to charity.” (HT: Tyler Reid)[%comments]
Pay-as-You-Wish Gaming
TAGS: pay as you wish
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The piracy tells you that a substantial chunk of gaming (and movie/music) piracy is more about convenience than money. It can often be much easier and (in the case of gaming) more reliable to pirate something than to buy it legitimately.
Interestingly enough, the bundle has also made over a million dollars in sales.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/guides/2010/05/with-1-million-raised-humble-bundle-games-go-open-source.ars
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Jason
Interestingly enough, as a software engineer, I have no problem with people pirating my work. Neither do any of my co-workers and friends (and I’d guess software engineers do more than our share of pirating).
It’s like the Blues, “it’s all about borrowing”, as Johnny “Clyde” Copeland told me between sets outside a club as we shared a joint.
Zeppelin borrowed without giving proper credit before they saw the light or heat.
@Chris
That is only true if you’re already part of that world. I have no idea where to look for pirated games and I have no reason to believe that I can trust any random file I find via Google when searching for a game’s name. On the other hand, it’s quite easy to identify the game maker’s website and place and order.
I’d be more inclined to believe that people pirate this stuff because they think it’s cool to do so rather than because they are so lazy they can’t place a $0.01 order. That’s insanely lazy.
I looked at the games, looked at the budget, and looked at the average purchase price, then spent $21 so that each of the creators and each of the charities would get $3.00.
It’s a pittance, considering I usually spend between $20 and $50 for just ONE game.
YX: But when you pirate a pack of games where your purchase would have been given to charity…. that’s a little different.
Clearly, people aren’t going to feel really bad about pirating this one. If you can get it for practically free, getting it for actual free is not a big step. The marginal cost to the publishers of pirating the bundle is probably about a penny; you’re practically not paying for it, but in a much more convenient way, as everybody’s mentioning.
It’s an interesting counterpoint to mainstream games, since the marginal cost looks different, but probably isn’t.