Humble Not Bundle

When I wrote about the most recent Humble Bundle sale two weeks ago, I made a rather pessimistic prediction about future bundles and the amount of content that would be available for below-the-average contributors. While I wasn't being completely serious, I was waiting patiently to see whether the next bundle would return to the old standard of just a single locked beat-the-average game, or whether it would remain at two, or even increase to three. Of course, I was expecting the next Humble Bundle sale to be an actual bundle.

Suddenly, as of yesterday, Humble Bundle is doing a weekly thing, and this week's iteration includes only a single game. I very much doubt this is the end of the bundles we all know and love, unless they're planning on changing their name and web address, so try not to panic. Just think of it this way: Those awkward pauses in between bundles — during which the Humble Bundle site became a little more than a shrine to a sale no longer being offered — are no more. They're claiming a different game will be offered every week, starting now with Bastion, so as long as they can keep finding new games without resorting to repeats too often, the fun will never end.

Honestly, though, skepticism is in my nature and I'm not sure what I think of this. It's a neat idea, and I've already made it known that I regretted missing Bastion in Humble Indie Bundle V, but I'm not exactly pooping my pants with excitement over the whole concept. If I give in to temptation and buy Bastion tomorrow, it doesn't mean I'll be picking up indie games from Humble Bundle on a weekly basis (and with a full time job, I doubt I can even play through them at such a pace.)

As always, you can still name your own price. A penny gets you the game, a dollar gets you a Steam copy, and paying above the average gets you the soundtrack, as well as some other goodies we haven't seen before: some art, some sheet music, and some ringtones. And here's where things get interesting: A purchase of $25 or more gets you some actual (physical) merchandise: a bandana, the soundtrack on a CD, and a couple of postcards.

The highest-tier purchase, obviously, is for those who truly want to support the developers, so the monetary value of that merchandise is pretty much irrelevant. Customers who aim to buy goods, not to donate money, will at best exceed the average contribution by one cent in order to get the soundtrack and the artwork. People who just want the game are unlikely to pay more than the bare minimum unless their guilty consciences push them to open their wallets a little wider. In the best case scenario, these frugal contributors value Steam keys enough that their definition of "bare minimum" is raised from one cent to one dollar.

That is, by the way, a big improvement. And while I don't advocate paying the absolute bare minimum of a penny, I do think that paying a dollar is fine. The people running the Humble Bundle seem to think so too, since they've decided to dangle that first carrot — those Steam keys and (in some cases) soundtracks — at the one-dollar mark.

For these one-dollar contributors, the new weekly sales have no added perks, and are likely to seem underwhelming in comparison to the less frequent, full-fledged Humble Bundle events. A video game for a dollar is a great deal, but it's considerably less than what people were getting for a dollar two weeks ago. In the good old bundles like the one that ended earlier this month, a dollar can get you several games, plus their soundtracks, plus Steam keys, plus any extra games added to the bundle after your purchase. (All you miss by paying below the average, in a typical bundle, is an additional game or two, as well as any late additions if you're a slowpoke who didn't pay early enough to get them automatically.)

On the other hand, I could be completely wrong about all of this, and these weekly sales could end up being even more successful than the bundles because there's always something on sale. Some might even prefer buying their games one-at-a-time instead of grabbing entire bundles of games and only playing one of them. It's really too early to say how this will turn out in the long run, but I'll be keeping an eye on it.

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Update (April 16, 2013):

Humble Bundle is already taking a break from its weekly sales, so I guess it was an incorrect to say that those awkward pauses in between events are no more. Still, I trust the weekly sales will come more often than the full-sized bundles. (Otherwise, what's the point?)

Humble Bundle's Problematic Pricing

Another Humble Bundle has arrived. More specifically, it's the fifth Android bundle, which means all of the games will work on a variety little "devices" that should never be used for "gaming" as well as the usual PC operating systems (Windows, Mac, and Linux).

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.

The Death of Used Games (Or Not)

I've long speculated that digital rights management doesn't really exist for the sake of stopping software piracy, but rather to stop people from buying used games. After all, DRM almost always fails to stop piracy (especially of single player games), while the potential second-hand market of any game is completely destroyed as soon as any form of DRM is implemented.

The PC gaming community has largely gotten over this, because we've had to deal with it for so many years. Many of us have even embraced digital distributors like Steam (and, to a lesser extent, Origin), whose downloadable games, forever tied to online accounts, cannot be resold or even returned. Surely we're all aware that this isn't the natural state of things — that when we pay for something, we should own it — but we're quickly moving toward an all-digital era in which the things we buy aren't really "things" at all. Perhaps video games are actually behind the times, in that regard. You can't resell the songs you buy on iTunes, and people stopped complaining about that a long time ago.

However, while people who buy PC games have had plenty of time to digest the prospect of a non-existent used game market and sales that feel more like indefinite rentals (which might need to be "returned" if the company running the authentication server goes bankrupt), console owners have not. They're ignorant of much of this, and what I've heard is that they're about to get a rude awakening.

It's not a new rumor, but it's been started up anew thanks to fresh quotes from Eidos co-founder Ian Livingston, who says (according to Destructoid):

With the next Xbox, you supposedly have to have an internet connection, and the discs are watermarked, whereby once played on one console it won’t play on another. So I think the generation after that will be digital-only

Whether the games for the next Xbox will each be married to an Xbox Live account, or to the physical hardware inside of an Xbox, I'm not really sure. Either way, this is bad news for GameStop, GameFly, and anyone else who wants to make money by selling or renting out used games. If DRM has been the industry's attempt to destroy the used game market, this will be the final nail in the coffin. Certainly, we'll still be able to privately resell some of our non-Xbox games — DRM-free PC games, for example — but with an entire next-generation console taken out of the equation, there won't be enough business to justify having a shelf for pre-owned games at any game store.

I suppose I should point out that I don't really care if GameStop goes out of business or resorts to selling new merchandise exclusively — their prices for used games are awful anyway — but the whole idea of eliminating used games on an entire platform is bad for players as well. Sure, those of us playing PC games have gotten used to this, and we've learned to compromise with the current state of things, but nobody wants another step in the wrong direction.

Nobody except greedy developers and delusional fanboys, I mean.

There are those who will claim that used games are actually bad for the game industry, despite the fact that no other industry needs to have its workers complain about the used sale of its products. (When was the last time someone told you that buying used furniture is bad for the furniture industry?) They'll even say that buying a used game is just as bad as piracy, because it puts no money in the hands of developers, despite the fact that it does put money back in the hands of people who buy new games... and despite the fact that, while piracy is morally questionable, buying a thing from a person who owns that thing is not. (When was the last time someone told you that buying used furniture is equivalent to robbing a furniture store?)

But I guess we all know which way the industry is going despite what people think. Or... maybe not. Only a few days ago, Eurogamer reported that Sony has taken a stance opposite that of Microsoft, and that the next PlayStation console will not be blocking used games. I can only wonder if this means the PlayStation 4 will sell better than Microsoft's next console. If consumers want to make a statement with their purchases, it likely will. On the other hand, consumers are pretty dumb.

So Now Demos Are Bad for the Industry

It looks like Jesse Schell's keynote speech at the D.I.C.E. Summit is causing some minor controversy.

You can watch the whole thing (which runs just over 22 minutes) right here, and I recommend doing so, since the speech is pretty entertaining and informative overall. Schell makes some jokes, discusses the psychology of getting customers to spend money, talks about why Facebook games and microtransactions are terrible, and makes some less-than-optimistic predictions about the future of 3D games and augmented reality.

But most of that is being ignored because of something that occurred about half-way through the speech. In the context of discussing how "plans" affect consumer behavior, Schell presented a graph with data from EEDAR showing that games with a demo (and no trailer) sell better in the first six months than games with neither a demo nor a trailer... and that games with both a demo and a trailer sell even better... and that games with a trailer and no demo sell even better. In fact, among games with a trailer, those without a demo appear to be selling twice as well. Schell comments:

"Wait, you mean we spent all this money making a demo, and getting it out there, and it cut our sales in half?" Yes, that's exactly what happened to you. Because when you put the demo out — people had seen the trailer and they're like, "that's cool," and they made a plan: "I gotta try that game!" And then when they played the demo: "all right, I've tried that game. That was okay. All right, I'm done." But the things with no demo — you've got to buy it if you want to try it.

This all starts at about 10:24 in the video below.

This minute-long part of the speech, far more than any other, is being picked out for commentary by video game news sites (see articles here and here and here and here and here). While it's regrettable that most of the speech is being overlooked, it should be no surprise that this particular section is a point of controversy. Schell is basically implying that sales can be increased by not releasing a demo, since a player might not want to buy the game anymore after he or she tries it.

A lot of us, understandably, are upset about the idea of game developers forgoing the playable demo for the express purpose of keeping customers uninformed. Such business practices are generally regarded as evil (and I've said as much before when discussing pre-order bonuses and other incentives to invest in games without even knowing how good they are). The reasoning is that players should be allowed to know what they're paying for, and this often means a bit of hands-on experience with the game, especially when a teaser trailer is insufficient. Trailers work for the film industry, but the most important aspect of a typical video game is — not surprisingly — the gameplay, and a trailer tells you little or nothing of that.

We care about how the game is played, how well the difficulty is balanced, and how the controls feel; unfortunately, you can't sample any of those things by watching a pre-rendered plot-focused movie-style preview. (This argument for the necessity of the playable demo isn't quite as strong in the case of a sequel, for which the continuation of a storyline is the major selling point, and in which gameplay might be expected to remain largely the same as in the previous release. However, even die-hard fans of a series will want to verify that the gameplay in the upcoming installment is up to par with that of its predecessors. And if it's not, this happens.) By failing to release a demo, a developer denies its customers the chance to gauge accurately the quality of the product first-hand, leaving them to rely on the opinions of professional reviewers and "gaming journalists" whose integrity is questionable to say the least.

If a developer refuses to release a demo, shouldn't that lack of transparency be troubling? Furthermore, if a developer actually fears that releasing a demo will result in a significant loss of sales, what does that say about their confidence in their own product? Finally, if the release of a demo does in fact lead to fewer sales, doesn't that mean the game wasn't very good? Maybe, just maybe, the release of a demo hurts sales on average because the average game just isn't very good. I'd like to think a fantastic game would only benefit from the release of a demo because people would see how great it is.

Schell, however, thinks it's less about the quality of the game, and more about the player's curiosity being satisfied — that once the player tries the game, even in the form of a demo, he or she will no longer need to buy it. To me, this is pretty unbelievable. When I download a demo, it's because I need to see the gameplay in order to decide whether to buy the game. The demo will make or break that purchase based on the apparent quality of the game alone. If I decide against the purchase, there's no "lost sale" as a result of the demo because, in the absence of a demo, I would never have bought the game at full price just to "try" it. But maybe most consumers just aren't as cautious as I am, and maybe Schell is right that a huge portion of sales are due to nothing but blind impulse.

The numbers, after all, seem to suggest as much. Still, it is exceedingly important, as always, to note that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. Moreover, with nothing to analyze but the data itself, we can't really say which way any existing causation goes. Maybe some developers didn't bother to release demos because they knew their games — perhaps sequels riding on reputation alone — were going to sell regardless. Maybe some other developers released demos to generate interest because they knew their games weren't going to sell as well as those blockbuster sequels. Or maybe that's a stretch.

In any case, while I think it's plainly obvious that Schell is at least partially right, he's being rather dramatic ignoring a lot of possible contributing factors. To say that the release of a demo is solely responsible for a 50% reduction in sales is clearly an exaggeration. Furthermore, if Schell's statement is to be taken as advice for game developers, it's pretty horrid advice. If a developer does manage to increase the sales of a certain game by failing to release an hour-long playable demo, the only sales gained will be from players who get tired of playing the game after an hour. An increase in sales will mean an equal increase in disappointed customers. But the developer doesn't care, right? Hey, kid, no refunds.

So what should we take from all this? Dubious advice and questionable arguments aside, one fact still remains: If a developer releases a trailer and no demo, their game can still sell. We know this not because of the statistics Schell cited, but because we see it happening every day. Regardless of whether the release of a demo can hurt a game's sales, we're certainly not teaching the industry that the release of a demo is a prerequisite for record-breaking pre-orders. Too many of us are buying games without knowing what they're like, and eating up whatever the industry throws at us, probably because some of us don't know any better.

Worse yet, if Schell is right about how much the release of a demo can negatively affect sales — or, more accurately, how the absence of a demo can positively affect sales — it would mean that even "smart" consumers can be pretty dumb. It would mean that even those of us who like to make informed decisions, and try games before we buy them, will buy on impulse when such informed decisions are not possible. I don't doubt that some consumers do this on occasion, but could it really be happening to such an extent that the overall affect of not releasing a demo — of keeping us ignorant — is more profit for the publishers?

I'd like to think not, but if it's true, we only have ourselves to blame.