Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Do you have between one and infinity dollars? Are you waiting for Alan Wake to be ‘bundled’ up with the expansion and extra materials, where the costs are distributed between the developers and charity? Those are some very specific conditions you have there. Gaming welcomes you, but if that’s your criteria for every game then you might want to relax it a bit. Just buy games in sales and give money to charity, okay? This week’s Humble Bundle sale presents Alan Wake, Remedy’s love letter to Stephen King novels and lovely naps. But it’s more of a nap that a baby has, where it wakes up screaming and smelling of poo, because the bundle also marks the end of Remedy’s work on an Alan Wake sequel.
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“Double Fine?” someone somewhere has probably said at some point maybe. “Who do they think they are, claiming to be twice as fine as the rest of us? I’m no fool. I don’t believe it for a second.” But, Mr Somewhere, what if you’re wrong? Then you’ll just look silly, your only solace coming in the fact that going off the grid in shame would be simple, given that you have the least Google-able name of all time. Clearly, the only solution to your conundrum is a test. You need to play most of Double Fine’s back catalog, but your gleaming shield of skepticism must be kept aloft. Buying these games full price would only create suspicion that you might harbor legitimate interest. We can’t have that. The solution? A new Humble Double Fine Bundle. It’s offering all of the laugh factory’s PC games except Iron Brigade on a pay-what-you-want basis, and a pre-purchase of Broken Age if you’re willing to part with $35. Exceedingly strange, vaguely arousing video after the break.

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Here’s a clever idea: instead of paying £30 for a game, or getting it for free then buying lots of little extra bits, or helping to fund it pre-release, what about paying what you want for it? For instance, as part of a bundle of other games? Next big thing, you mark my words.

Team Humble’s just gone live with its first ever experiment using this payment model. For some reason they’ve put a ’5′ in the title, but I’m pretty sure that refers to how many cups of tea they drank while putting it together. They’ve also put ‘Android’ in the title, even though the games are all available on PC too. Silly-billies! Read on to find out the contents of this bundle – oddly, the most famous name in there is one of the optional bonuses rather than at its core.
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As we all know, the free-to-play Facebook game Minecraft 2: Steve’s Magic Garden launches its Kickstarter on Christmas Day this year, published by Activision, funded by the Bulgarian mafia and available exclusively on Origin. But given that’s just a reskinned FarmVille clone that they’ll knock out in five minutes, what are Minecraft-makers Mojang spending their time doing in the meantime?

One of those things is their second Mojam, wherein the Scandi-devs splinter into small groups, rope in famous friends such as Vlambeer, Wolfire and Grapefrukt, and frantically try to make new, teeny games within a strict time limit. Humble Bundle are once again in on the act, with a pay-what-you-want deal for the resultant games, all proceeds going to good causes. By which I don’t mean another platinum hat and diamond-tipped beard-trimmer for Notch.
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The holidays are a time of indecision. Who should you visit? What ugly, uncomfortable seasonal sweater should you wear? Which deity(s) should you dedicate your hedonistic blood celebrations to (aside from Horace, of courace)? And, most importantly, what will you buy before/after your relatives shower you with socks or rocks or whatever it is that passes for a universal gift these days? But it doesn’t end there. Oh no. There are, after all, 927.45 trillion videogames to choose between, so you may as well just start sobbing and curl up in a fetal futility ball right now. Unless… no, no. That’s crazy. But maybe… no. It’ll never work. Ah, what the hell: bundles! Both Indie Royale and Humble Bundle have new offerings up, and they’re quite tempting, if I do say so myself.

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This is admittedly a bit of an “ooh a thing may be happening sort of at an unknown point in the possible future”, but I’m frankly quite fascinated by the moves THQ are making as they battle to fend off moneypocalypse. The Humble THQ Bundle was divisive, what with it not involving the DRM-free indie games that Humble has become synonymous with, but one thing it seems to be is a sign of THQ striving to court a PC audience after long years of being very much console-focused. The PC-only Company of Heroes 2 appears to be a very big deal for them (and Metro: Last Light too, a preview of which I’ll bring you later this week), but now they might maybe perhaps possibly be going one further – they’re talking about Linux support for their games. This is not the usual MO of a large publisher.
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As opposed to not-indie games. Apparently there’s controversy when bundles aren’t indie, though I’d appreciate the ill sentiment more if Indie Royale did it, what with the whole indie in the title thing.

Anyway: the line-up for the Indie Royale Winter package is Greed Corp, Hamlet, BIT.TRIP Runner (isn’t that in everything now?), Conquest of Elysium 3, Leave Home and They Breathe. Seeing as I ruined basically hit-attraction techniques by putting all those names above the cut, I’m going to stuff some videos of each of those games below instead. Then I will be high on hits, beyond my wildest possible hit-based dreams. (I don’t have any hit-based dreams, I’m not Rupert Murdoch even if I am almost as crabby).
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The internet had itself a good old shouting match about the concept of a pay-what-you-want bundle for mainstream, traditionally-published games rather than indie games, but whatever the ethics of that particular drinking receptacle-based meteorological event, it appears the effects have been highly significant. Beleaguered publisher THQ has seen a 40% jump in its stock price in the wake of its Humble Bundle, having so far brought in $3.25 million – and with nine days left to go, too.
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Update: I got in touch with the Humble Bundle folks to find out more about how this out-of-nowhere partnership came about. See what they had to say after the break.

Original: I was incredibly tempted to begin this post with a joke about how the charity slider on this Humble Bundle is redundant, because THQ is already basically a charity. That would be mean, though, so I opted to– oops, I already did it. Hm. Shame backspace was never invented. Anyway, the latest bundle of densely packaged humility puts the spotlight on a decidedly non-indie THQ, but oh well. Indie’s a pretty terrible word when it’s used to write off great games because they weren’t coded by a half-person team in a garage-bedroom constantly beset by subarctic winds and ravenous wolverines. So, right then, let’s take a look inside.

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Double Fine’s crowd-funding / PWYW bundle / rapid prototyping / community voting idea-cocktail Amnesia Fornight has just proceeded to its next stage – choosing, via public vote, the four concepts that will be turned into working, playable games. I want to play all of them so I’m happy, but see if they’re Your Sort Of Thing below.
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