Game developer Jonathan Blow is a busy man. So we found ourselves scrambling about in a panic when we were given the chance to get an update on what’s going on these days with his hotly anticipated adventure title The Witness, and the team behind it, straight from the horse’s mouth. Weeks were spent attempting to scratch out a few decent questions regarding his upcoming game, development style, and some habitual leisure activities (weeks may have also been spent on holiday break as well), and now you can find those inquiries below, along (happily) with his responses.

So here’s some interesting, non-bundle related news for you. Over on the official Playstation blog Sony has released the top 10 best selling PSN indie games for the entire year and, well, I wouldn’t call it too surprising although the way they have it broken down can be a bit confusing.

Big news coming from the filmmaking fellows of Indie Game: The Movie, as they announce their unique documentary will be on display (and competition) at Sundance next month. The film has earned a selection in the World Documentary Competition portion of the festival and will make its world premiere there in January.

Braid is still considered by many to be one of the best XBLA games to ever get released. It’s combination of challenging time puzzles mixed with an intriguing plat structure and wonderful art easily made it an instant classic. Causality Flux is similar to Braid with regards to the time puzzles.

Causality Flux is a time puzzle platformer. What I mean by that is, essentially, the game is similar to Braid. You control a character who has to solve various time-related puzzles to reach complete. The semantics are different, however, in Causality Flux it doesn’t really appear that you’re simply trying to get to the other level, rather you’re trying to complete a task. One of the examples in the trailer is retrieving a girls kitten from the other side of a spike pit.

James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot of BlinkWorks Media in Winnipeg, MB, Canada began advertising their project called Indie Game: The Movie last year. The film crew earned $8,000.00 over its Kickstarter target of $15,000.00 in just 48 hours. Needless to say, the indie community and beyond wanted this documentary to happen. The film is not only about indie games themselves, but also the developers and their craft. The team has chosen a select few indies to follow thoroughly their journeys and present them to the rest of the world.

The team is currently asking fans where screenings should be held. They have posted a specific screening blog post for interested persons to fill out. They seem to also encourage people who know anyone that can host such a venue or those persons in charge of such venues to leave contact information to make this screening dream a reality. They would like to have post-screening Q&A sessions, with hopefully a few developers from the movie tagging along.

The timing for all this indie stardom seems perfect. Big wigs IGN/Gamespy have taken some indies under their wings with Indie Open House. The current generation of consoles have paved the way for indies into millions of consumers’ homes thanks to WiiWare, XBLA/XBLIG, and PSN. Digital download services like Steam and Desura support indies even more today, as well.

But before all of this excitement and industry attention, there were indies making games for the love of games. The documentary crew picked up on this devotion. The film has been a critical success already in award shows. It won $5,000, taking home Pitchfest‘s Best Pitcher Award at the Westdoc Conference in Santa Monica, CA last year. There are several high profile indies featured in the film, as listed in Indie Superstar’s follow-up, including Adam Saltsman (Canabalt) and Jon Blow (Braid).

Do you want to see these guys on the big screen in your home town? Fill out screening blog post.

Source: Indie Game: The Movie

UPDATE: Unknown to me at the time of this writing, it appears that the Humble Indie Bundle guys merely set to requirement to activate the first bundle to whatever the overall average is. As of now it costs $7.43, but expect that to rise incrementally over the remainder of the bundle’s life.

Well this is certainly and interesting turn. In an attempt to get their average price per bundle up the Humble Indie Bundle guys are now offering the first Bundle for free to anybody who pays more than $7.37 (the current average) for the second Humble Indie Bundle. Basically, this ups your haul from 5 games to 11 (World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, Penumbra Overture, Samorost 2).

I gotta say, I’m impressed with the way these guys handle this bundle. I mean, above and beyond a normal level of “impressed.” They move fast and they’re constantly thinking about their next move to increase awareness of the bundle.

Anyway, so there you have it, pay more than  $7.37 and get 11 games instead of 5. That’s a great deal.

[Humble Indie Bundle]

Still haven’t gotten around to grabbing the delicious Humble Indie Bundle just yet? Well, good news then, you’ve got a few more days to mull over the possibility of paying whatever you want for five amazing indie games. The Humble Indie Bundle is now available until Christmas afternoon.

o date the bundle has sold 162,724 bundles and has earned a total amount of 1,202,793.69. Not too shabby. We could be looking at $2 million by the time this thing is over.

[Humble Indie Bundle]

Sometime between last night and this morning, the guys running the Humble Indie Bundle 2 striked an agreement with both Steam and the newly released Desura to allow for bundle buyers to activate their games via either, or both of the two services.

Why would you want to? Well, for starters, it simply makes it easier on everybody. Steam and Desura get more traffic to their communities (which they love), you don’t have to save any emails in case you should want to download them again 6 months later, and the Humble Bundle guys don’t have to worry about supporting downloads for the foreseeable future. Everybody wins!

Now, there is a slight catch here. Neither Cortex Command, nor Revenge of the Titans is available on Steam yet, so should you decide to activate your games there you won’t be able to download either… yet. Both games are planned to be released onto Steam, at which point it should automatically activate for your account to.

[Humble Bundle]

This just occurred about an hour ago, but the Humble Indie Bundle has reached a major landmark tonight in that it has now amassed over $1,000,000 in sales since launching about five days ago. Very impressive, to say the least.

Of course, I predicted as such the other day when I noticed the bundle was selling like hotcakes only a day into the event.

Anyway, there’s no word yet, but if the previous bundle is at all to be believed, we can probably expect some special goodie to hit the bundle tomorrow or Monday in celebration of hitting this magic number.

Some other choice stats as of now:

• Total revenue: $1,006,243.39
• Total purchases: 131,785
• Average amount: $7.64
• Average Windows: $6.42
• Average Mac: $8.57
• Average Linux: $13.75

Can we possibly reach the $2,000,000 mark? Probably not without an extension, which isn’t entirely beyond the realm of possibility.

[Humble Indie Bundle]

As most of us well know by this point the Humble Indie Bundle 2 kicked off yesterday featuring a number of great indie games both new and old. Seriously, these bundles are great as they offer a wide range of video games to meet anybody’s budget. But that’s not what this post is about, you can read all about the Humble Indie Bundle 2 HERE.

This article is about analyzing the success of the bundle just a single day into the event. As it seems the organizers of the event (Wolfire Games) love to share their stats, we’ve been given a fair amount of information to work with already. Here’s where we are at as of this moment (9:10am PST):

Whew. Big numbers for being a single day in. As I analyze this data I’ll be breaking it down into sections to make it a bit easier to digest. So, let’s get started:

Total Revenue and Bundles Purchased

The second Humble Indie Bundle got off to a great start yesterday. Only a few hours into the bundle’s launch the team had already amassed over $100,000. Now, as you can plainly see, after a single day the bundle has racked up over $500,000. This is almost entirely unheard of for indie games, bundle or not.

But let’s take a moment to revisit stats from the first Humble Indie Bundle. When all was said and done for the first Humble Indie Bundle, the grand total brought in was $1,273,588. Impressive, to say the least given that this was a huge experiment that could have ended up as a complete disaster. This amount was gathered over a week-long period from May 5th to May 12th.

Fast forward to the second iteration of the bundle and let’s see the same stats. While I don’t have the current knowledge to analyze first day sales of the original bundle, I can tell you that it was nowhere near as high as the Humble Indie Bundle 2′s first day earnings, which were almost half of what was earned in total the first time around. At this rate I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the Humble Indie Bundle 2 hit the $3,000,000 mark or higher.

That said, however, it’s worth noting that despite earning more in an earlier time frame, the original indie bundle actually averaged more per bundle than the second one is today. We’re only a day in so that could change, but it’s still interesting to see a trend showing up. If I had to wager a guess, I’d say it’s due to more casual gamers buying the bundle for a lower amount than gamers who love to support the medium. Not that that’s a bad thing, selling 100,000 things for $3 beats selling 10,000 things for $10, after all.

Battle of the Operating Systems

Once again, as expected, the Windows users are bringing up the rear of the average contributions with the Linux users being far ahead of the other two platforms. In case you don’t want to scroll up here are the averages as of the time of this writing:

• Windows – $5.96
• Mac – $8.11
• Linux – $13.57

Looking at this I can come up with logical reasons for why the Windows average is so low and the Linux is so high. I believe that Windows users (I am one, by the way) are generally more ignorant about the indie game development scene and are therefor less willing to give more for what they might perceive as inferior games to the Call of Duty’s of the world. PC gamers can be a bit jaded by all the games they have to offer, after all. Note: if you are a PC gamer, please don’t take this as me saying you are like this. This is generalizing based on my own perceptions of which I am definitely a part of. This is my own rationale, nothing more.

The flip side of this is the Linux user (of which I’m also a part of). Linux users, in my experience, tend to be more knowledgeable about tech minded things like creating games and the amount of work that goes into it. As such it would only make sense that they’d be willing to pay more for hard work. Also, as somebody who loves Linux and wishes more games would come out for the OS, I’m sure there’s a bit of a “grateful” effect going on here whereby the Linux guys are merely grateful for the opportunity to play games natively in their OS of choice. Also, I’m curious if, on some level, the Linux guys are aiming for that coveted $13.37 average. They’re awfully close now.

The Mac group is the only one that I can’t quite decipher. I’m not a Mac user and I probably never will be a Mac user. I can only assume the reason for their middle-of-the-road average is due to their being placed right in the middle of the two other groups, if that makes any sense at all. There’s a large community of them, but certainly not as large as the Windows crowd, hence not getting a huge amount of saturation. They get more games that Linux, but not as many as PC so that could play a part in these numbers. I can’t honestly say. Based on the Mac users I do know I would have guessed they would be the lowest, but I don’t know many Mac users.

Of course, this is all subjective and unofficial. I am, in no way, suggesting this data to be factual, I’m just analyzing it based on my own abilities.

Total Revenue by OS

And finally we come to the numbers that really count. As you can see via the pie chart above, Windows takes a wide lead in total revenue brought in while the Mac and Linux users are almost split right down the middle in terms of their respective revenue intake.

It’s interesting to see that, despite having almost 1/3rd the average profit intake from individual bundle purchases Windows users make up almost 2/3rds of the total revenue slice. Basically this means that the ratio of Windows – Linux users is far heavier on the Windows side, for obvious reasons.

Really though, I’d suppose the biggest surprise is that Linux, on a revenue basis, is able to keep up with the likes of Mac users given that Mac is far more ubiquitous than Linux. I would even go so far as to say that this proves that there is as large a market for games on Linux as there is for Mac. Although it remains to be proven whether there is a market for either, at least for major game companies.

Top Contributors

Finally, we have the top contributors. Nothing to analyze here too much, but it’s interesting to see how people are using the device to get their name onto a page viewed by millions of people. Here are the top 10:

1. @notch – $2,000.00
2. Site5.com Coupon “indie” For 20% Off – $1,000.00
3. irradiatedsoftware.com coupon “indie” for 50% off – $777.77
4. www.PubNub.com – Real-time Internet-Wide Bidirectional Messaging – $700.00
5. paulguy – $666.00
6. Journeyman @ RPS – $650.00
7. @tpjeff – $600.00
8. @fourzerotwo – $500.00
9. @ExpiredPopsicle – $500.00
10. Mr. Phil Games – $337.42

As you can see, the ever venerable creator of Minecraft, Notch, takes the top spot donating a healthy $2,000.00. I say donating because, well, when you give that much you’re not doing it for the games anymore.

The next three “people” also seemingly had other ulterior motives when making their purchases. As you can see they were bought more as an advertising media buy as opposed to an actual donation/purchase of the games. Still, if you pay enough to get in the top spot, I say let em put whatever they want there. Any takers on their coupon offers yet?

Finally, we have some average people rounding out the top ten. Somebody from Rock Paper Shotgun it looks like. @zerofourtwo, Robert Bowling from Infinity Ward. Nothing too interesting here, really. Just some incredibly nice people who were willing to go above and beyond in donating to the cause.

–

Well that’s it for the day one analyzing. As you can see, the overall stats are shaping up similarly to the original bundle, albeit with a higher amount of overall sales. My guess for why is that it’s simply due to people knowing what to expect and the media/press/consumer responding thusly. I’d liken it similarly to how a movie sequel tends to do better when based on a good movie. People saw the first one, told their friends, the media picked up on the excitement and, by the time the second movie came out, more people knew about it and were willing to pay to see it.

Not a perfect comparison, but apt enough I say.

Anyway, if you’ve yet to buy the Humble Indie Bundle 2, I’d suggest checking it out, remember you can pay whatever you want for these games, but in the spirit of the Holidays why not pay just a little bit more to help some great charities and the developers involved? You’ll feel great, I promise.

[Humble Indie Bundle]