Introducing the Humble Deteriorating Bundle!

RSS Feed - Comments↴ Author: Jacob Barkdull on Friday, December 16 2011

I can proudly say I purchased the first Humble Bundle (the "Humble Indie Bundle"), and I can say I'm glad to have not purchased the last seven. Why? I know what you're thinking, "It's a good deal, and it's monetary motivation for developers to port their games to Linux, and remove any pre-existing DRM." Yeah, yeah, but that's nothing compared to the first Humble Bundle.

Humble Bundle 4
That pixelated four kinda sums up what I'm saying.

The first Humble Bundle included games like World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru, Samorost 2 (as a bonus game) and the full 3-D first-person shooter "Penumbra: Overture". And once one million dollars was raised the source code for the game engines for Gish, Penumbra, Lugaru, and Aquaria, was released as Free and Open Source software under the GNU General Public License, however, the art, music, and other creative assets for these games were not included.

World of Goo, Gish, and Penumbra are all very successful indie game titles, however, success isn't the most important thing for these bundles (hence the name "Humble Indie Bundle"), but more often than not quality games become successful games. When Samorost 2 was added to the first Humble Bundle, I remember thinking "World of Goo, Aquaria, and Gish all already look like Adobe Flash games, so I'm not surprised they'd add an actual Adobe Flash game to the bundle. If not for Penumbra I wouldn't even bother buying this Humble Indie Bundle thing." And that's how the last 7 Humble Bundles (which have all been released this year alone, by the way) fail in comparison to the first.

I think you get where I'm going with this. The quality of the Humble Bundles has been decreasing, there are too many simple 2-D Flash-like games, they're releasing them too often, and they're throwing in the games from their previous bundles just to try and entice people to buy. I think they're more focused on making money rather than putting together a decent bundle now.

What's stopping them from getting "Penumbra: Black Plague" included? Now that Frictional Games has released "Amnesia: The Dark Descent" they're probably willing to participate in the bundle again. And perhaps Prey? It's cross-platform, probably DRM-free or could be made so, and with Human Head Studios' upcoming release of Prey 2, they're probably willing to participate in the bundle, too.

And why not make the liberation of the games a requirement? Why not have a goal of say, one or two million dollars, that if reached the games -- even if just the engines -- would be released as Free and Open Source software? Even a goal of three million wouldn't be hard to reach, this current bundle has already made $1,371,001 and there's still eleven days left. I am just disappointed with the direction the Humble Bundle is taking, it had so much potential to be something great, something more than just a good deal.

If you really want it: Get your bundle here
What Is This Place?
TildeHash is a website for Tech articles revolving around Free Software and Unix/Unix-like operating systems, written by Jacob Barkdull and various contributors, respectively. Meaning, Free Software (or Open Source); and GNU/Linux (or simply Linux), BSD, OpenSolaris, or Haiku; respectively. The main goal of TildeHash is to be different -- the name alone is a little different (explanation here) -- but to do it in a useful way.

TildeHash is about discussing Free Software topics that are beneficial to our community, topics that are largely not discussed nor shown. "Free Software" is also often called "Open Source Software". In practice the requirements are identical, although because the term "open" doesn't call to mind freedom, it misses the point.

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