The Not So Humble Bundle of Pirates

The Humble Indie Bundle has been making its way around the net over the last week, allowing people to set their own price for a set of 5 top-rated Indie games with some or all of the proceeds going to charity – the amount of which you can decide. There is no DRM, no middleman, it’s multi-platform (Mac, Linux and PC compatible) and charitable, so why are people still pirating it?

The Bundle consists of 5 games including World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD and Penumbra Overture, with a 6th made available, Samorost 2. Some you may not have heard of, though most would probably have heard of World of Goo. The games have been created by various Indie Developers that decided to collaborate and sell their products in a single bundle for a limited time with the twist that  you set the price.

This model was field-tested a couple years back by Radiohead, releasing their album to the public with a ‘set your own price’ model. The results of their endeavour where never made public, so it’s hard to gauge the success, but even then, many decided to simply not pay for the album at all, while admittedly some paid far more than the recommended retail price.

Jeffery Rosen, co-founder of Wolfire Games, was made aware that download links for the bundle were being posted over the net and decided to do a little math to see what proportion of the download figures were ‘pirates’ – in that they had not paid to download the bundle. With his somewhat modest calculations, he came to a figure of just over 25%, and this didn’t include torrents and other alternative methods of download. These are people that are downloading from Wolfire’s servers without paying anything. One could argue that the download figures are skewed, multiple downloads by the same person, etc, but they must be applauded for making the statistics available.

The most disturbing part is that there is very little reason for people to pirate. The games are near completely DRM free, no serial numbers, no Internet connection required (apart from the download itself), no copy protection, no download limits, they’re multi-platform, and the money contributed (minus transaction fee’s) goes direct to the developers and two charities, or if you prefer, just the developers or just the charities since they offer the flexibility on who you pay.

The normal reasons for pirating simply don’t apply anymore, leaving one to assume excuses such as ‘laziness’, in that there was no one-click buy option. Other speculated reasons are that of sharing the link with friends (by posting the link in a forum for the world to see?), and of course, ‘sticking it to the man’, the man being a handful of Indie developers and charities.

It is a shame to see this level of piracy on an otherwise very humble experience. If you haven’t already, you can order the bundle and set your own price here. Without trying to sound like an advert, there are only a few hours left till the offer expires.

As a side note, this has been posted on the official bundle page just hours ago:

The Humble Indie Bundle experiment has been a massive success beyond our craziest expectations. So far, in just over 3 days, 113,793 generous contributors have put down an incredible $1,030,198. Of this, contributors chose to allocate 31.03% to charity: $319,657 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child’s Play Charity.

$319,657 to charity for a sale that lasted for what, about a week? That’s incredible. As a result of the success, some of the developers have opted to release their respective game’s source code for the world to make use of. If that isn’t cool, then what is? If you’re a budding game developer and want a best-selling indie game to work off of, this is the perfect opportunity.

Making the download experience worse for generous contributors in the name of punishing pirates doesn’t really fit with the spirit of the bundle. When considering any kind of DRM, we have to ask ourselves, “How many legitimate users is it ok to inconvenience in order to reduce piracy?” The answer should be none.