For many of our e-mail is crammed full of of ads for bundles. However just recently some of us have noticed that many of them are claiming they have groups of them worth over $100. There are many reasons for this that you might find interesting if you follow the indie gaming scene.
Bundles Along with Supply and Demand
The first reason for this is that a healthy indie industry has led to a massive supply of games. These are good, bad and everything in between. Take a look at the current Bundle Stars group for evidence. Day One is bad. Stealth Bastard, pardon out language, is good. Several of the games are in-between. You would never see something like this just a few years back.
We are not saying this is good or bad, it just is. In our opinion it is better to have 100 bad indie games than a stagnant, non-competitive market.
Bundles Get your Foot in the Door
There are many indie developers who got in this way. Even if your game is bad and not fun at all you can do so. You can even start your own large company off of it. As a result people of all varieties are rushing to get in. This is the downside to the trend.
Bundles Increase Supply
Back to the law of supply and demand the bundles also increase the number of gift copies floating around, codes and much more. This ends up diluting the market and causing the games to cost even less. This is probably why games such as Planetary Annihilation do not go into bundles much (they had a short stint in the Humble Store at a significant price, along with a few other promotions). The current Humble Indie Bundle has some excellent games that we will see the price drop on indefinitely.
Devaluation May Not Matter
In the end bundles build up a fan base for many games. They are perhaps the best way to do it for the indie crowd. Both good and bad developers have made a living off of doing this. We do have to ask though, is there a bottom to this trend? Will some games end up in the collections of so many people they lose all value? That remains to be seen.
