Humble Bundle launched last year, introducing a cool charity fundraising initiative targeted at the gaming world. Basically, a collection of indie PC games was organized into a bundle and sold at a pay-what-you-like price, with consumers able to specify how much money being spent would be allocated to charitable organizations Child’s Play and Electronic Frontier Foundation. Anyone has the option of spending as little as one penny on the limited time offering, but last year’s two bundles proved to be a success, each earning more than $1 million in donations.
The latest Humble Bundle package showcases the work of developer Frozenbyte, offering full PC/Mac/Linux releases of Shadowgrounds, Shadowgrounds: Survivor and Trine along with a pre-order for the upcoming game Splot and a PC-only prototype of an unfinished game called Jack Claw. It launched last week, and Gameindustry.biz reports that 100,000 copies were sold in the first 48 hours, raising a total of $500,000.
That pace has slowed down quite a bit since then, though the package is certainly still selling. An updating infograph on the Humble Bundle website reveals that roughly $660,000 has been spent so far, for a total of (again, roughly) 129,000 purchases. The average purchase price is $5.09. Breaking it down by platform, Linux users are the biggest spenders, with an average price of $11.71. Mac users come next, at $6.29, and Windows-folk bring up the rear with an average price of $4.09. The largest contributions top out at around $2,000.
The next step for Humble Bundle should be setting up a similar deal for console gamers, perhaps mobile gamers as well. That’s where the largest portion of gaming money is being spent these days. Engineering the logistics might be a challenge, since each platform has its own methods of delivering for-sale content. That said, what’s to stop Microsoft, for example, from building a bundle that people can buy download codes for online from Humble Bundle’s website?
