It's Not All Roses For The Latest Humble Bundle

Last week marked the start of a new Humble Indie Bundle, but there isn't as much interest among gamers this time around.

This newest bundle, The Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle, is similar to previous HIBs: you pay what you want, the games are cross-platform, and there is no DRM (Digital Rights Management) restricting the user. But this newest bundle isn't nearly as popular as some of the past bundles, most of which have generated more than one million dollars (USD) in less than two weeks and even two million dollars.

One week into this Frozen Synapse Bundle, there's $832k as of this morning from 175k sales. The average contribution price is just $4.75 USD. This is still a very modest amount and it should cross one million dollars as there is still six days left to the sale period, but the pace of sales isn't as fast as some of the other bundles.

More noticeably, this bundle has actually resulted in some complaints among gamers. Most of the complaints seem to boil down to just one game being officially part of this bundle: Frozen Synapse. Frozen Synapse is a "simultaneous turn-based strategy game / turn-based tactical game", but it's not exactly the most popular indie game or wooing large numbers of gamers. Past bundles have incorporated multiple games from the start.

With the Frozen Synapse Bundle, the Frozenbyte Bundle is also included, but only if you contribute more than the floating average price. The Frozenbyte games (Trine, Shadowgrounds, Shadowgrounds: Survivor, Splot, and Jack Claw) are of little use though if you participated in that bundle from April.

Trying to boost the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle, added now to the bundle is SpaceChem and Trauma. SpaceChem is self-described as "an obscenely addictive, design-based puzzle game about building machines and fighting monsters in the name of science."

Trauma is described as a "unique photographic experience." Here's the trailer for Trauma.

Adding more value to the bundle may generate some additional sales, but here's some of the comments so far from the Phoronix Forums.

cl333r: "IMHO they should only release when they have serious stuff. Releasing a single game looks like an excuse to try to collect another 2 million. Don't get me wrong, I want them to succeed, but it looks like the lust for money is pushing them to act like this."

lexa2: "...if you offer a bundle - it should be a bundle and it shouldn't be significantly worse than previous offers of the same kind." and "Huh, that's the usual thing. Pizza, beer, snacks, e.t.c. For example average cost per 0.5L (~1 pint) of "drink-able" beer (like Krusovice Cerne) here in Moscow is about $8. Needless to say that one would consume much more that one pint during standard friday pub visit. Indie games cost significantly less and still average Moscow citizen isn't ready to pay for them the same amount of money he or she would pay for beer/pizza/e.t.c."

stqn: "Only one game, with no Linux demo, no 64 bit build... I tried the win32 demo under wine (runs perfectly) and I'm glad I disliked it! I would have been seriously disapointed not being able to run the game. I don't know why they rush bundles out like that, with no linux demos or unfinished games or only one game now (!)..."

Etc... If you wish to participate in the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle, visit HumbleBundle.com.