Just one day into its third offer, Humble Bundle has sold about 117K game bundles using its name-your-price model, bringing in more than $558K (at press time) and putting it on track to out-sell bundles 1 and 2.

Each Humble Indie Bundle contains five games that work on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. None of the games has rights-management restrictions so customers use install them as often and wherever they like. Customers can divide the money between charity, game developers and the company itself. Bundles are only available for two weeks.

While Humble Bundle notes that buying the games separately would cost $50, the average spend is $4.78. Linux users are paying about $11 for the third bundle while Mac users average about $6.36 and Windows users $3.85. Currently, the majority of sales are on the Windows platform.

Games in the third bundle include Crayon Physics Deluxe, Cogs, Hammerfight, VVVVVV and And Yet It Moves.

Humble Bundle released its first bundle in May 2010, bringing in roughly $1.2M with 130K downloads. In December 2010, the company's second bundle had 77% more downloads (230K) and brought in more than $1.8M. In 2010, $1M of Humble Bundle’s revenue went to the charities Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Jeffrey Rosen and John Graham, co-founders of Humble Bundle, are among the founders of indie game developer Wolfire. They spun off Humble Bundle from Wolfire so that charities and individual developers could raise money with it, according to this February 2011 interview.

John declined LAUNCH's request to be interviewed about the latest Humble Indie Bundle and the company's plans.

Sequoia Capital invested $4.5M in April 2011, and Sequoia's Alfred Lin (former COO of Zappos) joined its board.

As Alfred told LAUNCH, “Humble Bundle has come up with a very unique business model that is a huge win-win-win for consumers, developers and charity."

Since all Humble Bundle games are open source, some developers have used the same code to sell the games at a cheaper price in Apple’s App Store. To combat piracy, Humble Bundle integrated BitTorrent functionality into the download page and even bought bundles for people who couldn't use the payment processors or could not afford the bundle.

FURTHER READING

1. "Wolfire’s John Graham on The Humble Indie Bundle" (4PlayerPodcast, May 5, 2010)

2. "The Humble Indie Bundle" (Game Developers Conference, June 16, 2011)

3. "Counterfeit Lugaru on Apple’s App Store" (Wolfire Blog, Feb. 3, 2011)

CONTACTS

John Graham
Email: john at humblebundle dot com
Twitter: @wolfirejohn
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/wolfire

Jeffrey Rosen
Email: jeff at humblebundle dot com
Twitter: @humble
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreyr