Humble Bundle Eliminates “The Man,” Generates Over $1M

Any way you slice it, the Humble Indie Bundle being offered by Wolfire Games is a smashing success.

The pay-whatever-you-want bundle includes the indie games World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru and Penumbra Overture. All the titles are DRM-free and will run on Mac, Windows and even Linux. Additionally, a portion of the proceeds goes to the Child’s Play charity and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). By default donations are split evenly amongst the two, but users can even control how much of their purchase price goes to each organization.

Going one step further, Wolfire has released an open-source version of Lugaru, with Aquaria, Gish and Penumbra Overture scheduled to follow suit. Wolfire noted on its blog that, just hours after the release of the source code for Lugaru, the gaming community had already fixed a few smaller problems with the game , which caused Wolfire’s Jeffrey Rosen to write, “When I saw this flurry of positive contributions, it immediately reminded me of its mirror image -- the rush to be the first cracker to crack each new DRM scheme.”

Rosen continued:

It makes me a little sad to see all this effort expended on games with DRM. Could it work the same way in reverse? When Aquaria, Gish, and Penumbra Overture open up, I hope the community will help build them up with the same vigor that crackers tear DRM down.

A lack of any protection on the downloadable files meant that some people were posting links around the Internet that led directly to the files, which Wolfire estimated led to 25% of the downloads being “pirated.”

So, will the developer go after these “pirates?” Wolfire answered, “No -- we will just focus on making cool games, having great customer service, and hope for the best. It sure seems to be working right now!”

The developer did ask that "pirates" use BitTorrent to download the bundle however, instead of sapping Wolfire’s bandwidth.

At the time this was written, 130,930 people had made donations towards the Humble Bundle, generating over $1.20 million. $188,448 was earmarked for Child’s Play, while the EFF’s slice was at $182,921.

The sale ends on Saturday.