Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 14, 2010 21:11 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica) by ewan
Parent article: Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

That's simple economics. Games are scarcer on Linux, thus their value is higher.

(Sure, maybe it's a sign of innately higher moral standing on our part as well -- or perhaps it's just that the money is going to a worthy charity, to the EFF, and to a bunch of indie developers... and a lot of us are developers ourselves. People are always happy to pay other people like themselves.)

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 14, 2010 21:47 UTC (Tue) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link] (5 responses)

The next step is where vendors realize there's an untapped market and supply increases. Maybe someday.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 15:42 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (4 responses)

Hmm, Grand Theft Auto IV was developed for ~100 million USD - the one million USD is not really a market for this type of software...

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 19:37 UTC (Wed) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

Keep in mind the amount paid is decided by the purchaser, this significantly skews the numbers. Also the games being sold, indie games, typically have much smaller budgets and development costs. The statements at the time of the original offer were that a couple of the developers made more on the original humble bundle offer than they did selling the game through the normal channels. One million might not be significant for a major console game but for some of these indie games it's like the developer winning the lottery.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 15, 2010 19:49 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

how much of that money was spent on the artwork and gameplay design and tuning that would be re-used on a linux port vs the amount spent on windows specific code that would have to be replaced?

and of that amount spent on the windows specific code, how much savings would there be by planning for cross-platform portability to begin with vs going in after the fact and re-coding things?

Small correction...

Posted Dec 17, 2010 9:14 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

and of that amount spent on the windows specific code, how much savings would there be by planning for cross-platform portability to begin with vs going in after the fact and re-coding things?

90% of contemporary games are planned for "cross-platform portability". Including GTA4, of course. You should thank surprising non-ally of FOSS: SONY. It's "battered and miserable #3" in current generation of consoles, yet it still sold 41.6 million of PlayStation3 (vs "successful #2 XBox360" with 44.6 million) so game developers can not ignore it.

Yet another case where Microsoft was unable to successfully exercise it's Windows monopoly to gain monopoly in adjacent market. The initial plan was to make sure games are easily portable between XBox and Windows, but not portable to other platforms... but runways success of PlayStation2 made this plan impossibility and neck-to-neck competition between PlayStation3 and XBox360 created window-of-opportunity for cross-platfrom games... too bad Linux was unable to seize said opportunity.

Humble Bundle 2 is live: 5 great games, no DRM, pay what you want (ars technica)

Posted Dec 16, 2010 18:23 UTC (Thu) by Lovechild (guest, #3592) [Link]

GTA IV is the most expensive game developed to date. It is hardly a fair standard by which to judge the model in question.