

Wolfire open sourcing Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra Overture - mcantelon
http://www.wolfire.com/humble?a=1

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samd
The title is misleading, Wolfire made Lugaru, not the other games. Those other
developers have independently chosen to open source their games.

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NathanKP
Wow, this is incredible. I can't wait to see the source for Aquaria.

I guess that the humble indie bundle is over now that the projects are open
sourced. Or maybe people will continue contributing just to be nice.

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bmunro
Only the code is being open sourced. I presume this means that the graphics,
sounds and other resources will stay closed. Thus, if you want the games, you
will need to buy them.

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mambodog
Well... for a penny, yes.

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wgren
You are allowed pay just a penny, no one is stopping you, but don't you think
it is a bit... not-nice? The payment services will take that penny in charges
(maybe even more? Don't know who gets stuck with negative, but you are
possibly causing indie devs and charities to LOSE money.), plus you are going
to cost Wolfire some bandwidth on top of that.

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ramidarigaz
I'm really, really glad that all of the games were available for Linux, and
I'm glad the numbers show that Linux could be a viable gaming platform.

Massive kudos to all the developers!

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BoppreH
I don't think the numbers mean much. After all, this stunt was based mainly on
advertisement for the bundle page, and such advertisement seemed to be focused
on techie websites (hacker news, slashdot, reddit). There is also the
"finally, games for linux!" novelty that may or may not wear out quickly.

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nitrogen
$250000+ just from Linux users is hardly meaningless. And even if it is just a
matter of novelty, the results of this experiment could still influence other
developers to start porting their games, and break the chicken-and-egg problem
that prevents Linux from being a good and popular gaming platform.

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r0s
This whole phenomenon makes me happy. I already had 3 of the games, so the
user set price hits my sweetspot.

The idea of open-sourcing the games after a set goal is achieved is
interesting. Could there be some future business model there?

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sgift
That was the "business model" used for Blender: The company developing it was
bankrupt but the creditors allowed open-sourcing the software for a one-time
fee of 100k.

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ThePinion
Over a million dollars, wow, pretty amazing! According to the JSON file, each
of the developers will be getting $130,000+, right? I'm sure they will be
eating a nice success steak tonight... or a fatty veggie burrito for the
vegetarians, heh.

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mkramlich
And I'm sure a lot of entrepreneurial minded folks here on HN are taking note
of this as well. A million dollars gross in 7 days for a bundle of indie
games. Who knew? Let the gold rush begin, eh?

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Dove
I was thinking about that.

On the one hand, it's not an easy stunt to reproduce. These are great games at
a massive discount in a well-publicized event. Not surprising you can make
money at that.

On the other hand, none of these games are very new. Games are usually like
movies: a lot of sales in the opening weeks followed by a quick convergence to
zero as they fall off the radar. A million dollars is not a _lot_ of money
split seven ways and then split again among developers. But I'm sure it's
great for games headed for the bargain bin.

Certainly there are a lot of games out there great enough in their day to be
worth playing even now that technology has moved on. HOTU is evidence enough
of that. A service that sold _only_ hand-picked classics, polished for modern
platforms, at cheap prices? Yeah. I'd buy that.

~~~
ptomato
"A service that sold only hand-picked classics, polished for modern platforms,
at cheap prices? Yeah. I'd buy that."

<http://www.gog.com/>

~~~
Dove
Cool! Thanks!

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justindz
This is a really interesting approach. I've been reading <http://jeff-
vogel.blogspot.com/> for a while now and the whole DRM argument there has been
that there's realistically a threshold on how much you make on a game before
it pretty much becomes readily available to pirates and/or the initial sales
interest is just gone anyway and the rest is not a reliable source of income.
Something like that. So an approach which provides an incentive to maximize
early sales during a brief period with a statistical understanding of what the
target sales are and a reward to the public for getting there is really cool.
It sort of embraces the piracy constraint and optimizes for being profitable
in light of that.

Imagine if the maker of some new, high-budget PC game called "DRM GoreShooter"
decides that they will be in good shape if they make $5 million in the first
three weeks of sales and past that point they won't really be profitable
anyway (DRM or not). They want a profit better strategy than trying to use DRM
to extend the window of pre-piracy sales out to week four or five, which might
or might not work anyway. So they sell the game with something physically in
the package that's really cool and you can only get in the first few weeks and
they let you report in your product code, one time, for credit on Facebook or
wherever for you having sponsored the development of the next game and been a
generally cool person paying for quality entertainment. Would that be a better
approach? It might ultimately result in the same money, but could be done as a
way to cost less or at least provide a great marketing push and build good
will in the fan-base.

My argument would work better if I had any idea how much it costs to develop,
maintain and manage a per-title DRM strategy, I suppose.

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malkia
I bought the pack for $50, from them $25 for donations. I'm happy to see it
open sourced. Great job! And great service to the community!

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mambodog
I can see the Penumbra engine being used to build some 90's style point-and-
click adventure games in first person 3d, if someone was so inclined. Maybe
even something along the lines of Myst. However those genres are probably dead
for a reason.

