Humble Bundle is the most common example, but they're helping charity, and working to deliver low priced games in mass amounts. They have a good reason with good intentions. What about others?
What do they gain from doing this? There is a lot of work in creating a site, making videos, discussing with developers, running the whole thing. With prices being so minor, where do these people earn there profits?

10 years ago*

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Judging by the number of bundle stores that have popped up, business is at least lucrative enough to keep them afloat. Not to mention they've all added stores selling single games on the side, so I guess they won't be going out of business any time soon.

Since you mentioned humble, HB11 has already made 800k since yesterday. If everyone kept the default split, awarding 15% to Humble, they've made 120k in less than 24 hours, which should be enough to pay for expenses and turn a profit in the long run.

10 years ago
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What I see from most posts about how people split their money when buying bundles is they tend to give most of it to the bundle site so I wouldn't be surprised if humble bundle made easy over 300k in the first 24 hours.

10 years ago
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many of my gaming friends give the majority of it to charity and the devs so i guess it's pretty mixed

10 years ago
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Yeah the 20 people you know and 50 people you've read on the internet that either do 100% dev or 100% charity are surely gonna make the difference. Realistically >80% of the buyers will not touch the sliders and just keep it at default.

10 years ago
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no I used statistics from the recent post about it how people split & out of about 150 people only 6 used the default so you basically plucked your >80% out of thin air

10 years ago
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what portion of the general humble bundle population do you think come to answer "what split do you do on humblebundle" on this forum? its a flawed datapool that almost certainly skewed your results. theres obviously a huge amount of shifting in there, so neither one of your statistics mean much of anything(but given the sedentary nature of people who mostly won't give a shit its probably closer to his asspull than your "data")

10 years ago
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How do you know buyers won't touch the sliders and just keep it at default then? It's unrealistic to consider something as true without seeing statistics from the site itself. In general, many people would change the slides and many would not do so, since this is the average result of a logical thought, but still.. No one can predict anything.

10 years ago
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Donating all to charity just means Humble Bundle gets a bigger charity write-off at the end of the year. In the end it's still helping Humble Bundle, but nowhere near as much as if you hand them the money directly.

10 years ago
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I usually give all of it to charity, especially if Child's Play is one of the charities available.

10 years ago
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"keep them afloat"

not just that actually, more like "paying for their yatchs"

10 years ago
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which float, (so while standing on it the yacht is keeping them floating too

10 years ago
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They all pretty much donate a portion of earnings to charity & they usually rely on sheer numbers of bundles sold to make money.

10 years ago
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the creator of humble bundle has already made millions of dollars since they started. sooo obviously they gain more then anyone really

10 years ago
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"what do they gain"

uhhhh are you serious the creator of humble bundle has become a millionaire , and other people would like to also become millionaires so they do what he does.

and the work is easy

10 years ago
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If it's so easy, where's your bundle site?

10 years ago
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Money.

10 years ago
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They get millions of dollars. No one can do this out of the goodness of their heart for so long without any financial gain or support. Humble bundle included. It's a new type of business.

10 years ago
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Bundle creators gain "millions of dollars"?

Hardly.

10 years ago
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Humble does

10 years ago
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look at the total sold number and pricing sometime, take by 15% of that (less cost of servers and making the contract but the tax credit for charity is probably in humble's name so that balances)

10 years ago
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its a volume thing.
(besides bundles seem like a good moneylaundering thing so if its a canadian based bundle site its probably got something to do with meth :)

10 years ago
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They get money. This is a business, not a charity. I always give 80-100% to charity and what is left to developers and sometimes 5% to HB lol Too bad i can't do this with other bundles.

10 years ago
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So how do they get so many games at such a cheap price in the first place?

How can it be profitable giving e.g. 7 games away for a few or even a single dollar? How do developers agree to that? Why do developers agree with it? Where is the profit for them except for gaining recognition?

10 years ago
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They get agreements from the devs to put their games in bundles. Using Humble as an example, you can see how the money is split among the devs, charity, and Humble. Profit comes from the sheer volume of sales. The games that go into bundles are usually (not always) ones that have already hit 75% off in sales a few times anyways.

10 years ago
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So a dev basically give keys for free to e.g. Humble Bundle, and then collect the money regarding to how many products were sold?

10 years ago
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yep

10 years ago
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for indies: company gives games that would probably have never sold in these amounts reaching far wider audiences who have now heard of them, and an infusion of quick cash that lets them get to work on the next project
for big companies: probably a tax writeoff for donating their product to be sold for charity, and a chance to bring some of their old nolonger big selling ips back to the spotlight(either like thq to help sell them off or like ea advertising for sequels (and attempt at good publicity foiled by underestimating steam fanboys and dedicated haters))

10 years ago
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Very common is giving away an older game, to advertise the company's newest game, either in a series or from the same gaming company. Or giving away Early Access games to both increase visibility and word of mouth and to add some amount of (not insignificant) revenue to help finish production. Another thing, the more you see and hear of a game, the more likely you are to buy it if you missed the bundle but it's on sale at some point. So games that have pretty much exhausted their tail after a few years might get a breath of fresh air. But sometimes it's like every one says: for a game that got bad reviews or generally didn't do well, any money is good money. Hacker Evolution being a prime example - and one the devs exploited to the max. Who's to blame them really?

Still sometimes the devs shoot themselves in the leg with bundles. It's happened. The ones who ALWAYS profit are the bundle creating companies, provided they're well known enough.

10 years ago
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Another point is add ons. Sometimes devs are more than happy to let a base game be available for free or cheap if it has a bunch of DLC available for all the new owners to buy.

And then there are multi player games. One or two people in a group of friends get a multi player game in a bundle and then a few more friends want it to play with them and they may not wait for it to show up in another bundle or on sale.

10 years ago
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tons of cash and a platform to advertise their store

10 years ago
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Bundles are profitable(perhaps highly so). If they weren't, they wouldn't exist, plain and simple. So to answer your question of what do they get out of it....MONEY, and lots of it. Helping charity is not completely selfless in this case(not at all, in fact). Still admirable, though.

10 years ago
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Closed 10 years ago by buhcore.