Gamers voluntarily donate 1.1 million for games

The small independent game developers of Wolfire Games have found an innovative and sympathetic way to make money on their new games. Since a few days, Wolfire offers a completely DRM-free bundle of five games on their website. What’s so special about it, is that people who want to download the Humble Indie Bundle can decide for themselves how much money they want to donate for downloading the game package. Even donations of 1 dollarcent are possible. Meanwhile the (fantastic!) game Samorost 2 is also added to the bundle.

What is also special about the way the bundle Wolfire Games offers is that not all the revenue is necessarily going to Wolfire itself. Donors can decide how they distribute their donation between Wolfire, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child's Play Charity. 

With this type of game promotion Wolfire hopes to gain the sympathy of the user, hoping that it will lead to them not downloading the game anywhere else for free, but instead voluntarily donating a reasonable amount for the game to Wolfire and its creators. 

Within 24 hours, the Humble Bundle raised quarter of a million dollars. After seven days the counter was already at 1.1 million and 120,399 supporters. Of the total donations 339,778 were assigned to the charities (EFF and CPC). This means that a small $ 700,000 was voluntarily donated to Wolfire for the release of the five/six games, which leads to an average donation of $ 5.79. A larger and probably faster revenue than if the games were to be released to the market in the usual way, when the game cracked and are widely available for free download would be via other channels. 

Although all six games can be legally downloaded from the site of Wolfire for 1 cent still that 25% of the game pack is spread through forums and BitTorrent platforms. Wolfire can think of a number of reasons why people still choose to download pirated versions of the game pack: 

- “Some might want to donate, but it seems a whole lot easier to just click on a hyperlink than it is to enter a credit card number. Sure, it only takes a couple seconds, but for many, this is a few seconds too long. The most successful online stores all allow one-click buying, including Amazon, Steam and iTunes. In the words of one gamer, Steam showed him that he "wasn't cheap, just lazy," and I'm sure he's not alone in that realization.

- Some users may want to share the bundle with their friends, and decide that it's easier to just make one donation for a larger amount than it is to make separate gift donations.

- Some users may live in countries where none of our three processors (PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon) are accepted. These users might pay if they could, but they feel that they have no choice but to search for shared copies.

- Some users just want to "stick it to the man", and be edgy and rebellious. It doesn't matter if they're sticking it to indie developers, sick children, and online civil liberties... they're sticking it to someone, so they feel cool.”

Wolfire already indicates that it won’t do anything about these reasons. Instead of investing money in the technical protection of their games or hiring a lawyer, they’d rather focus on making cool games ... which makes them even more sympathetic.

Wolfire has an innovative business model based on both the sympathy and guilt feelings of the games player. You can however imagine that this business model will work only as long as it remains a niche phenomenon. It is also questionable if it will work to less sympathetic games and software developers.

13 May 2010