Usually, I have nothing but nice things to say about the Humble Bundle. It's hard not to like a site that lets you buy packs of indie games for as little as $0.01, even if those games are mediocre in comparison to their $60 big-budget counterparts. (If a penny is too much to spend, you could even commit a heinous act of copyright infringement with relative ease, because the games are DRM-free and everyone who buys the bundle gets the same links to the same torrents. Those torrents, if shared, work just as well for people who never made a purchase at all.)
There is, however, something I don't understand. Maybe I'm just nitpicking, but this doesn't make a lot of sense:
Super Hexagon and Dungeon Defenders are only included if your payment is higher than the average, but the "default split" (which gives 65% to developers, 20% to charity, and 15% to Humble Bundle, Inc.) doesn't take this into account. The developers' share of the contribution is, by default, split evenly among all the developers regardless of how many games are included in your purchase.
It's fair to evenly split the money among all six developers if all six games are being purchased, but why should these two developers be getting money from people who aren't being given access to their games? There's less money to go around, for each below-the-average purchase, so it should be divided among the developers who actually contributed something to that below-the-average bundle.
Sure, you can adjust those sliders to divide your money however you like, but I think most people don't even do this. In fact, I'd be surprised if most people even noticed that you can expand the "developers" section, which appears like this by default:
Or maybe I don't have enough faith in the average indie-game-buying internet surfer. Either way, I don't know why Humble Bundle would presume that I want a developer to receive roughly 11% of my contribution even if Humble Bundle has decided that I haven't contributed enough to receive that developer's game. And yet I can only assume that it was deliberately set up this way.
You could argue that it doesn't matter because these aren't typical purchases — they're essentially donations, and maybe the idea is that a portion of each donation should be split equally among all of the developers who made this Humble Bundle possible, and that the particular incentive for making a donation is irrelevant. But then I have to wonder about the developers whose games are added mid-way through the sale as an added bonus. Those games are added automatically to the beat-the-average list, but they're also given at no extra charge to anyone who had already purchased the bundle beforehand. So if I buy the bundle now, and more games are added next week, those developers get none of my money.
I suppose I could just make another donation if I had a serious problem with that.
In other news, I'm slightly disappointed that Dungeon Defenders has appeared as a beat-the-average game on two Humble Bundle sales in the past three months, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I'd even wager that fewer repeat customers might be willing to pay above the average, if the reward is a game they already have, but I guess they've covered their bases by starting with two beat-the-average rewards instead of one. This seems to be the new norm, in fact, and it probably won't be long before all but one or two games per bundle is accompanied by that little padlock symbol.
