The Humble Bundle Botanicula Debut

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Humble Bundle Botanicula Debut

It's time for another Humble Indie Bundle... This time it's called The Humble Botanicula Debut and features three games plus bonuses...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA4OTU

[allquixotic]

COME ON, Linux! Let's GO!

Right now the pie chart looks like pacman, with the red Windows eating up Mac and Linux, and even Mac is about three times wider than the Linux slice! Unacceptable!

Support Humble Bundle and let them know that Linux is a real gaming platform!

Meanwhile, I'll be playing Botanicula. I was ENTHRALLED by the story of Machinarium and I can't wait to see what they've come up with.

Amanita Design is easily one of my favorite game publishers for that genre of relaxing, thought-provoking and truly artistic games -- their games are more of a piece of art than they are an arena for gameplay. And that is just fine by me. Don't get me wrong, I still love competitive games like Savage 2 and Nuclear Dawn and FPSes and strategy games, but I also love to relax and think once in a while.

See you guys in a few days... I'll be enjoying this one for a while. On Fedora 16.

[[Knuckles]]

Sorry but this one really really sucks.
Only 4 games: 2 repeats, and you only get the other non-repeat with $8.66 mininum. Also $5 minumum for steam.

I really want to support, but this is a humble disappointment bundle.

[grantek]

The annoying thing is Amanita partnered up with gog.com (who do excellent things for PC gaming in general, even if it's windows-only), hyping up a pre-order sale with them, then on the day of release offer a pay-what-you-want sale via humblebundle

I still bought it through HB because they offer something vaguely linux related (it runs on Adobe Air though), but it gave me great pleasure to move the payment slider for Amanita down to zero and donate most of my payment to their charity

[AnonymousCoward]

Seems they changed their model from pay-what-you-want-for-everything to pay-above-average-to-get-everything...

[allquixotic]

Seems they changed their model from pay-what-you-want-for-everything to pay-above-average-to-get-everything...

As long as they don't implement minimum payments, why is this bad? You're getting a brand new game that retails for at least $10, plus two other games that you may or may not have, and you can put in as little as a penny and get all three. What kind of self-entitled prick would complain that they just paid a penny for 3 things but would have to pay at least $8 or so to get 5 things? Especially when the retail price of all the things combined is probably about $35....

Seriously, put it in perspective. HIB is in no way greedy or evil. Their business model is unique. You can still get a LOT of games for a penny.

In fact, the people who donate a penny and download the games from HIB are actually costing them more money than they would cost them if they just pirated the games and downloaded them from a torrent. But because HIB trusts that people will pay a reasonable amount (which IMHO is at LEAST $5 per bundle) they accept those penny purchases.

They're offering a huge value. Many of the companies that throw their games on HIB are open source friendly, and all of them are Linux friendly. And they're basically kissing any meaningful future retail sales on those products bye-bye, so whatever they make on the HIB is all they're getting for their effort, period. And many of the games are quite creative and intriguing.

I really see no reason to complain, unless you live in a village in Africa and use an XO laptop and a 56k-equivalent mesh network for internet access, and a US dollar is a week of work to you. But then, those people typically would never purchase a game sold through any other means than HIB, so even they would probably splurge for a penny and get three games for practically nothing.

[Mystro256]

COME ON, Linux! Let's GO!

Right now the pie chart looks like pacman, with the red Windows eating up Mac and Linux, and even Mac is about three times wider than the Linux slice! Unacceptable!

Support Humble Bundle and let them know that Linux is a real gaming platform!

Meanwhile, I'll be playing Botanicula. I was ENTHRALLED by the story of Machinarium and I can't wait to see what they've come up with.

Amanita Design is easily one of my favorite game publishers for that genre of relaxing, thought-provoking and truly artistic games -- their games are more of a piece of art than they are an arena for gameplay. And that is just fine by me. Don't get me wrong, I still love competitive games like Savage 2 and Nuclear Dawn and FPSes and strategy games, but I also love to relax and think once in a while.

See you guys in a few days... I'll be enjoying this one for a while. On Fedora 16.

Good to see that some enjoy it, but I personally find this to be quite.... meh.
I bought Bundle 2,3 and the first Android one, but the rest haven't really even made me feel like I want to throw something small at them.

I'm waiting to see Wasteland 2, and whatever value has in mind.

Oh and Props to Fedora 16

[AnonymousCoward]

What kind of self-entitled prick would complain that they just paid a penny for 3 things but would have to pay at least $8 or so to get 5 things?

Those spoiled by the earlier bundles I've paid at least a dollar even for those where no games looked immediately appealing, since one might turn out to be interesting. But the recent bundles don't excite me (partly due to the lack of selection in the base games), so I don't spend any money there. (And it just seems disingenuous to me to call the thing "pay what you want" if it really is "pay what you want except...")

all of them are Linux friendly.

... or at least as Linux friendly as Adobe is. The Wolfire blog has a few comments from people having problems with that...

[benjamin545]

this one looks horrible. its basicaly a flash or air demo. they need to get good 3d opengl games that can really be considered a modern indie game. even some of the 2d games are really impressive and make full use of the 2d api capabilities you would expect a modern game to use. but cmon, flash is dead and chargng money for a flash game should have been dead from the start.

we need another trine quality game. that wil bring faith back into the humble indie bundle( but not like how trine was released, the frozenbyte bundle wasnt nearly as complete as it should and really should have included other companies)

[stevenaaus]

Anyway... Botanicula is amazing. Half way thorugh now i'd guess.
A shame about the Adobe Air hassle, but The Humble Indie Bundle is amazing value.