None of this has anything to do with the "leading ladies" theme of the included games, by the way. I have nothing against female characters or female protagonists in video games. Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, after all, was a brilliant game; Super Metroid was a brilliant game; Perfect Dark was a brilliant game. Sunset, however, was not a brilliant game. More importantly, the game's development studio (Tale of Tales) deserves no one's money.
The other games in the recently-ended weekly bundle, as far as I know, are wonderful; I know from first-hand experience that Trine 2 is a perfectly fine game. I also know that anyone who buys a pack of games from Humble Bundle can specify where every cent of his or her money goes: to Humble Bundle itself, to a charity (in this case the Girls Make Games scholarship fund via the Tides Foundation), to any of the developers of the games being offered, or to any combination thereof.
Unfortunately, I can only assume that the vast majority of customers do not bother with these options, and just use the default split (65% equally divided amongst developers, 20% to charity, and a 15% "tip" for Humble). Most customers probably just don't care, and what makes this especially bad is that the default settings will send money to the developers of all the games being offered, regardless of what a customer pays.
Typically, in any Humble Bundle, only a few games (in this case Trine 2: Complete Story, Lumino City, and Hack 'n' Slash) are available for any price (or a minimum of $1 for Steam-only games), while some more games (in this case A City Sleeps and The Marvellous Miss Take) are available to customers paying more than the average amount paid so far, and then some more games (in this case Gravity Ghost and Sunset) are available for a typically higher fixed price (in this case $12). As of the end of this weekly sale, the average amount paid was only $4.23; this means that the vast majority of customers didn't pay enough to get Sunset. However, the developers of Sunset still got money from every customer who didn't explicitly choose to put Sunset's share to zero in the options during payment.
More than 52,600 of these bundles were sold this week, the average paid was $4.23, and (as we can see in the image above) each developer gets approximately 9.3% of the revenue by default. If just about everyone used the default settings during payment (and "everyone" is probably a reasonably close estimate), the developers of Sunset raked in more than $20,600.00 during this sale. And this all happened after the previously abysmal sales of Sunset caused them to have a minor meltdown on social media in which they forsook commercial game development, whined about consumers and capitalism, and acted pretty childish in general.
Their oft-cited insults against "gamers" (shown below) are a joke, but still tasteless; moreover, they're the kind of joke that betrays the true feelings of the joker.
@jeroendstout Perfect. Goodbye, gamers! May you die in the same agony that you caused to thousands of defenceless virtual creatures.
— Tale of Tales (@taleoftales) June 22, 2015
@jeroendstout Hahaha. I'm so free. Look at me. I can say FUCK GAMES! FUCK GAMERS! FUCK THE GAME INDUSTRY! DIE! DIE!DIE! And rot in hell! 😝
— Tale of Tales (@taleoftales) June 22, 2015
To paraphrase: "Ha ha, look how not mad we are; we're so chill that we're pretending to be mad as a joke! But really, we're incredibly mad."And then there's this more serious quip:
@vladwes We're not coming back until the game industry gets rid of the vermin that it enables and encourages.
— Tale of Tales (@taleoftales) June 22, 2015
And here's the best part of all:
We don't need commercial failure to know capitalism is evil, right? Because it is: evil. And if you think that's cool then you are evil too.
— Tale of Tales (@taleoftales) June 22, 2015
In what universe could good video games (or a career in them) be possible without capitalism? But of course they hate the free market when they're the ones who put out the product which no one wanted.I guess the point of this post is to remind people to be aware of where their money goes in the future. If you're paying less than $12 for a pack of games, there's no reason for any of your money to go to the developers of a game which is only unlocked for $12 or more, especially if those developers are talentless hacks known for being crybabies on Twitter.
