'Humble Indie Bundle' Lets Buyers Name Own Price For Charity

The "pay what you want" business model is always an interesting experiment in finding out just how much monetary value a consumer places on a product. But the "Humble Indie Bundle" goes beyond mere business experiment, allowing consumers to pay what they want for a five-game indie bundle, with the option of giving all proceeds to charity. The Humble Indie Bundle includes Independent Games Festival 2007 Seumas McNally Grand Prize winner Aquaria from Bit Blot, Cryptic Sea's 2005 IGF grand prize winner Gish, Wolfire Games' Lugaru HD, Frictional Games' Penumbra: Overture and 2D Boy's multiple IGF category award winner World of Goo. At the Humble Indie Bundle's website, buyers can choose any amount of money to pay for the pack. They can then choose to donate to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity toy drive, the non-profit digital rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation or the game developers. Buyers can also decide how they want to split their contributions between the recipients. All of the games work on PC, Mac and Linux, and are DRM free. Combined, the games are valued at around $80 if purchased separately. As of Tuesday afternoon, the total amount raised was over $40,000 across 5,300 contributions, with an average contribution of $7.59. Last year, 2D Boy had a separate limited-time pay-what-you-want model for World of Goo. 2D Boy's Ron Carmel called the experiment "a huge success."