It’s difficult to argue against at this point as it’s increasingly likely that we’ll find our favorite indie games in a bundle of some sort, but could it be that the future of indie games and whether or not an indie game becomes successful depends on whether or not it is “bundled?”

Over the last couple years the “bundle” idea has grown from that quirky but awesome thing the guys at Wolfire started with the Humble  Indie Bundle into a full on business platform created by the guys at UBM Techweb (owners of Gamasutra, IndieGames.com) and Desura (owners of ModDB, IndieDB and Desura). In between them lie a dozen other “bundles” that we’ve seen come and go either successful or unsuccessful.

So what makes them work? Why bother selling your game for far less than it’s stand alone price? What about the bundle makes it so attractive to gamers worldwide?

Before I continue let it be known that from this point on this article is entirely subjective and is 100% based on my opinions and perspectives. If you agree. Great! If you disagree. Also great! We can discuss it further in the comments.

The Origin Story

The first ever indie bundle that gained any sort of traction was the Humble Indie Bundle which launched in May of 2010. It was a completely fresh idea that had never really been explored before. While Steam has been “bundling” games up for years they always come at a set, albeit discounted, rate. The Humble Indie Bundle packaged five great games for the price of… whatever the hell you wanted!

Since then we saw a series of other bundles:

• The Indie Love Bundle
• The Summer-of-Love Bundle
• The Corona Bundle

And on down the list it goes.

Really though, the only bundle that ever garnered any mass amount of traction was the Humble Indie Bundle until last month when Indie Royale appeared offering a new bundle every fortnight using a very interesting algorithm to set the lowest price.

Interestingly enough, both the Humble Indie Bundle and IndieRoyale use a similar design and stat tracking method that most other bundles I’ve seen have not used. Interesting correlation…

Anyway you’re probably wondering where I’m getting at with this, but I just wanted to give you a brief history lesson on the bundling scene before heading into the next section.

Profit or Loss?

Looking at the two biggest bundles it’s difficult to figure out just how much money each one makes and how much is given to the developers/charities respectively, but we’re gonna give it a go anyways.

We’ll start with Indie Royale…

In my recent interview with Michael Rose of Indie Royale he wasn’t able to give an exact split making it difficult to figure out just how much money was made. Indie Royale also doesn’t share a total amount earned like the Humble Indie Bundle does. All we can see is a total amount of bundles sold.

I’m going to take a stab and say the average is ~$3.50 based on my own tracking over the last few days. So we’ll take that number and multiply it by the amount of bundles sold at this moment (29,095) and we get $101,832.50. Again very rough but it’s something to base this off of.

Now, again, I don’t have any idea of what the split is but, for the purpose of this article we’ll say it’s split evenly between the four developers and Indie Royale. Which means that each dev and the Indie Royale creators get $20,366.50 over the course of the five day period.

Not bad, right? Look at each of those games. No matter how much those games cost ordinarily do you think they would have ever been able to make $20,000 in the span of 5 days? Not likely, especially considering each game has been available for quite a while already. Granted you’re removing a large number of potential customers as well, but we’ll ignore that equation for simplicities sake.

Now let’s turn our attention to the Humble Indie Bundle and, once again for simplicity’s sake, we’ll use the Voxatron bundle since it’s ending today.

The Humble Bundle gives quite a bit more information on actual money earned, but due to their allowing of users to set the distribution of payment it makes it more challenging to figure out just where the money is going. But let’s break it down anyway.

Currently the Humble Voxatron Bundle has accrued $887,483.16. Impressive, right? That amount is divided up to three developers who made Voxatron, The Binding of Isaac, and Blocks That Matter as well as the EFF, Child’s Play, and the Humble Bundle itself. Also worth noting is that Voxatron received a bonus amount due to it being the only game for the first few days.

Dividing up this amount would be disingenuous as I don’t have enough information to really tell who’s getting what. But suffice it to say, we’ll assume that at least Voxatron is getting a hefty sum of money and again it boils down to the profitability of said project.

Sure the Voxatron Alpha currently costs $15 which is a deal more than the average bundle price at $5.24 but would Voxatron have ever made this kind of money had it stuck with its own devices? No. Short of Minecraft, I don’t know a single indie game that could command hundreds of thousands of dollars in a couple weeks time.

So are these bundles profitable? Are they worth a developer’s time? Given the very basic information available to us I’d say yes, undoubtedly. The life of an indie developer isn’t a rich life, believe it or not, and most don’t ever be profitable on their game independently. Both IndieRoyale and the Humble Indie Bundle seem to have broken through the consumer wall to allow for the kind of success that most indie developers would never experience on their own.

Ripple Effect

Finally, this leads me to my final question: does being included in the bundle have a ripple effect for the game’s sale post-bundle? This is difficult to know without actually talking to a developer involved with one of the said bundles, but given the popularity of each I’d be very surprised if it didn’t have at least a small ripple effect.

Let’s take the Humble Indie Bundle as an example. They sold 169,000+ bundles this go around which means 169,000 less customers, technically, but millions more visited the site and didn’t buy it for one reason or another. Factor in all the added press coverage (previews, interviews, reviews, general news) and you’ve created quite the media circus.

Therefor it’s probably safe to assume that each game does receive a certain amount of upward sales post-bundle as the games are very much on the minds of gamers everywhere.

Final Point

So are bundles the future of indie games distribution? In some aspects I’d say yes. Games who are featured in a bundle currently stand to become more successful than those who are not. I also don’t see either bundle going away anytime soon, although I do wonder for how long Indie Royale can keep up the fortnightly bundle going.

The simple fact of the matter is that both bundles have achieved levels of success for themselves and the developers, and consumers love them for it. Each new bundle is like a little success story that each consumer can be a part of.

Looking ahead I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of these bundles cropping up. In fact, I’m surprised some of the bigger names in game distribution, like Direct2Drive and GamersGate, haven’t jumped on the idea yet as it seems perfectly suited to what they want to accomplish.

So chin up! It’s gonna be a “bundley” future.