Tag Archives: humble-indie-bundle

Second Humble Indie Bundle + Braid Linux release!

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Hi all,

After the huge success of the Humble Indie Bundle from last May, which I absolutely loved, the group of Indie developers decided to release a second Humble Indie Bundle with five other games, one of which is Braid, my favorite Independent game.

I suggest everyone goes over to http://humblebundle.com and buys those games, you name your price and you get five great games with no DRM and with Linux, Mac and Windows binaries available for you to install on any and all of your PCs. you can also decide how to share that money you just spent, how much you want to send to the developers, or to the EFF or Child’s Play charities. Don’t waste any time and go show your appreciation of good games and your support to the open spirit of writing multiplatofrm, non-DRM games. Maybe this time again, like in the first bundle, the developers will decide to release their games to an open source license (I wish:)).

In the last bundle, I was a bit sad that Braid wasn’t included, but it was because it wasn’t available for Linux yet. I had previously discussed with Jonathan Blow (the author of Braid) about Linux support and he said that it would eventually be available, and he indeed delivered! Although there has been no news about this and no release of Braid for Linux so far, the Humble Indie Bundle also marks the release of the Linux version of Braid. Get the bundle and you will be able to download a native version of Braid for Linux (although it’s been reported that the Windows version worked under Wine).

I’ve tried running Braid on my  Linux system and had the horrible issue of the ‘missing GL extension’ that so many people are having. I checked the game’s bugzilla on icculus and found the related bug report in which Scott Mansell found the solution : The missing extension is “GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc” which is disabled on the open source drivers because it is covered by a patent and requires a licence.
If you live in a country where the patent doesn’t apply, you can enable it using driconf. Simply install it (“sudo apt-get install driconf” or “sudo yum install driconf”) then run ‘driconf’ and enable the S3TC extension in the “Image quality” tab of driconf.

Thank you Scott Mansell! 🙂

I hope this helps a few of you, enjoy!

KaKaRoTo

Humble Source

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Hi,

As some of you might have seen already, there’s this great great initiative called the Humble Indie Bundle. It’s basically a group of five independent developers who decided to make a ‘pay-what-you-want’ promotion for a bundle of five games, and the money can be distributed however you want between the developers and two charities (Child’s play and Electronic Frontier Foundation).

This whole idea is really awesome! The minimum donation requested is 0.01$ so for just one cent, you could be getting 6 very awesome games (World of Goo, Gish, Penumbra, Lugaru HD,  Aquaria and as a bonus Samorost 2) although I hope you will be more generous than that!

I think that the initiative is indeed humble, and by giving the power back to the consumer, you let him decide on the price and ask him for his generosity, you can get some really good results.  And the proof is here.. After only 10 days, they have raised over one million dollars! 30% of that went to charity and the rest went directly to the developers! What does this mean? It means that people thought that the developers deserved the money because of this brilliant idea. This also gives us some pretty awesome statistics.

As of the moment of writing this, the average donation was 9.05$ and The distribution is  : an average of $7.95 for Windows users, $10.18 for Mac users and $14.55 for Linux users! It looks like Linux users are more generous than Mac users who are more generous than Windows users! The developer seems to have noticed this and talks about it in his blog.

You can also see the distribution of the downloads, it looks like the Linux and Mac gamers are also a big part of the gaming market. As explained in the developper’s blog :

Our most recent promotion, the Humble Indie Bundle, shows even more dramatic statistics for Linux: 52% Windows, 24% Mac, and 24% Linux.

Finally, the most interesting thing for which I want to salute those developers is that, considering the success of the Humble Indie Bundle, they decided to open source 4 of the games from the bundle! This is great news for the open source community and for the gaming community as well.

The bundle has been extended for 3 more days, so I encourage everyone to go buy these games and help the developpers who had this brilliant idea!

KaKaRoTo