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Humble Bundle Insta-Post-Mortem

Monaco just finished up its two week run in Humble Indie Bundle 11. Here's a quick dump of the stats, the revenue, and theories as to improving future performance.

Andy Schatz, Blogger

March 4, 2014

3 Min Read
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Crossposted from the Pocketwatch blog 

Monaco just finished up its two week run in Humble Indie Bundle 11.  So, how’d we do?

Total payments: $2,323,681

  • Ranked 6th among 11 Humble Indie Bundles

  • Highest Gross: HIB 5 ($5.10+ M)

Number of purchases: 493,816

  • Ranked 3rd among 11 Humble Indie Bundles

  • Most units sold: HIB 9 (715,012 units)

We sold a ton of units, but with a fairly low average price ($4.71). One can probably assign partial blame to the Beat the Average games, Monaco and Antichamber.  The bundle may have ended up with a higher average price (and thus a much higher gross) had Monaco been swapped with Guacamelee or Dust: An Elysian Tale.  Even so, we performed quite well, and a lot of people are playing our games now!

How much did Monaco make?

Monaco was a Beat the Average game, which means that not all HIB bundle sales resulted in a Monaco sale.  Of the 493,000 bundles sold, 370,034 of them included Monaco.  Of those, 270,677 have activated their Steam keys.  Interestingly, this means three quarters of the Humble customers beat the average.  (Remember that the average starts low and climbs as people beat the average)

This means that Monaco has now sold over 750,000 copies!

Distribution of revenue typically ends up being the default distribution of 65% developers, 20% charity, 15% humble tip.

With 6 developers, plus the mid-week additions of Fez, Starseed Pilgrim, and BeatBuddy, that’s around 8% per developer.

Monaco grossed approximately $215,000 over the course of the Humble Bundle.  Of course we’ll know more when we get the actual sales report.  In any case, that’s a nice hefty sum!

Steam Sales and Cannibalization

This chart shows gross revenue of sale on Steam (not Humble Bundle) over the last 31 days.  The Humble Bundle started on the 18th.  Despite the huge number of units that we sold in the Humble Bundle, it doesn’t appear that our presence in the HIB affected our day-to-day Steam revenue.

Why is this?  My guess is that customers tend to be loyal to sales channels.  Customers that buy from Humble Bundle tend to only buy indie games from there, and customers that buy full priced games on Steam probably don’t know about — or don’t care about — Humble Bundle.

What do you think?  Any theories as to why Steam sales don’t appear to be affected by an active Pay What You Want bundle?

-Andy Schatz  @andyschatz

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Andy Schatz

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Andy was the sole programmer, designer, and producer on the company’s first two titles, Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa and Venture Arctic. Venture Africa was built in 10 months on a budget of $8,000 and has sold over 90,000 copies worldwide, while Venture Arctic is receiving tremendous critical acclaim and continues to sell in stores across the United States. Andy also served as the Executive Producer of the kid’s eco-themed website, Green.com. As a leader in the world of “indie games”, Andy hosted the 2007 and 2008 Independent Games Festival awards ceremonies, which were attended by thousands and broadcast to 21 million viewers on the internet. Andy has been published in Game Developer Magazine and Gamasutra.com. His design and development skills have been specifically praised in Game Developer Magazine post-mortems, Gamasutra’s Media Consumption column, BusinessWeek Online, and more. He was a keynote speaker for the Game Career Seminar at E-for-All in 2008 and at the Austin Game Developers Conference in 2007. Prior to Pocketwatch Games, Andy worked as a Designer, an Artificial Intelligence Engineer, a Lead Programmer, and a Development Director. Among other things, he wrote the first Xbox Live code to ship to the public (Whacked!) and the first implementation of EA’s multiplatform internet layer (Goldeneye: Rogue Agent). He graduated from Amherst College with a degree in Computer Science and Fine Arts.

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