’s a possibility with any product. You can always choose to not buy something. Alternatively, perhaps he’s mentally conflating paying ‘almost nothing’ with the technical definition of ‘nothing’. The trouble with this is that it implies a shared standard of what is a ‘nothing’ amount of money, which may or may not be the case.
One of the first ‘pay what you want’ sales by an indie game developer was 2D-Boy’s experiment at selling their game World of Goo at a ‘pay what you want’ price point. Incidentally, 2D Boy also made paying ‘nothing’ off limits, and placed a similar restriction of a minimum price of 1c (which I didn’t realise at the time). Regardless, once you set your price that low you might as well be giving it away for free as I’m certain it begins to costs the seller more in bandwidth than is recouped off a 1c sale. The seller is obviously aware of this potentiality and is counting on consumer’s own goodwill and sense of fairness in pricing. In the long run it seems to works out at a net benefit, as the numbers clearly show.
But according to the stats in the above-linked RPS piece, over 16,000 consumers paid 1c for World of Goo. If they all downloaded the game, with the World of Goo client even a paltry 67mb, multiply that by 16,000 and you get over one terabyte of bandwidth that 2DBoy now have to pay for with 16,000 cents. With this in mind, I think 2DBoy are less disadvantaged by P2P torrenters since they don’t incur a bandwidth cost.
The Humble Indie Bundle adds another layer on top of the World of Goo sale approach, however, in that it has also opted to split your choice of the amount with a pair of charities. Since both amount and split ratio is now left to the purchaser to determine (with a suggested split of 50/50) it makes the issue of what one should pay for the package an even murkier affair.
Furthermore, I also wonder what effect it has on the overall bundle that it’s a mixed charity and commercial venture. ‘Cause-related marketing’, as its known in marketing circles, is hardly a new tactic and apparently quite an effective one. The stats have indicated that from the money brought in from sale of the bundle about 1/3rd of the money is going to a charity, indicating that not everyone is following the advised 50:50 split. Certainly the end result is much more beneficial for the charities involved than the veritable con-job of “1c from every dollar goes to X charity” often employed by commercial type products, and the organisers of the bundle are to be commended for that.
However even if the motivation behind the use of ‘cause-related marketing’ was a genuinely altruistic desire to benefit charity while running a sale, it does leave open the possibility to read it as though the Humble Indie Bundle is trying to double down on the social guilt and stigma that is being employed in place of a DRM system. In any ‘pay what you want’ situation the seller is deliberately opening themselves to potential abuse and relying on social pressure offset the downside. By adding in an element of donating to charity it adds further compulsion to enforce behaviour through social expectations, and clearly it’s working incredibly well for them.
Viewed like this, the hand-wringing and moral outrage that inspired my initial comments over twitter as well as this subsequent post can be read as complicity in a free and distributed form of social DRM. And I’m not entirely convinced that I want to be a part of that – or at the very least, I don’t want to be an unwitting part of that. According to Travis Megill, torrenting the humble indie bundle makes you an ‘asshole’. PC Gamer in a blog post call downloading the game for free, paying nothing (not even one cent) “a little bit dickish.” Both fine and valid points of view, especially since these people aren’t even donating to charity. But given that most people weren’t donating to charity (or not in amounts to equal the amount directed to the developers) why isn’t there more of a cry going up about those people?
I guess I’m less willing to quickly condemn the ‘pirates’. Is it even really piracy if they’re giving it away for almost free anyway? Are there other benefits the sellers get from that 1c sale? And if the pirates are torrenting, at least they’re not taking up bandwidth. There’s also a big expectation with the internet, and perhaps this is changing in select pockets like amongst indie game supporters/purchasers, that stuff is supposed to be free. It’s extremely unlikely, but some of the piracy could even be a kind of protest against the 1c requirement, since it’s been remarked (I forget where) that the gulf between “free” and “1c” on the internet is a huge span that many people are not willing to cross. Clearly, when it comes to indie games, that’s not quite so simply the case but the idea ought to be kept in mind.
As I think I’ve shown above, the phrase ‘pay what you want’ is hardly clear and unambiguous – even when the actual payment mechanism is less ambiguous, preventing the purchasing of a game for zero dollars and zero cents. The bundle is ultimately a very unique and appropriate product of the internet – exhibiting something some important aspects of its nature: it’s both technical and social; expectation and implementation; and it’s got the inherent push/pull aspect of information wanting to be free and simultaneously expensive. I’m reminded by it of Alex Galloway’s concept of ‘protocol’ as described in his book of the same name. Built to appeal to the techno-utopian ideologue who speaks out about ‘free as in freedom’ but who then furrows his brow at ‘free as in beer’. So where do we position ‘free as in pay what you want’? Capitalism has never been ‘free’ except in the manner of being ‘free to buy or to not buy’. The ‘pay what you want’ movement merely extends the ‘freedom to choose between’ to the amount you pay.
Here’s a torrent for the Humble Indie Bundle if you must pirate the game. I won’t judge you. There may be nothing ultimately wrong with social DRM, but politically speaking I’m much less enamoured with the ‘pay what you want’ approach than I was before I took the time to critically examine it, finding it now much less revolutionary than I first thought.

If my blog ever had, or needed to have a boxquote, this would be what I put on it. He’s totally right, by the way. I’m a poor, poor editor of my own work but until someone volunteers to do it for free, it’s all you’re getting – straight from my brain to the page to your screen. There’s just something about reading back over your own work that makes the distance necessary for good copy editing nigh on impossible to maintain. All I see when I read over it is what I wanted to say, not what’s actually on the page. Anyway, Mark deserves props for asking some rather good questions, which is always harder than it looks.
One person who always makes it look way too easy, however, is Michael Abbott. While I haven’t actually had the chance to listen to it yet, his latest Brainy Gamer podcast features the dynamic duo of Jamin Brophy-Warren and Chris Dahlen, founders of the excellent Kill Screen magazine. Having had the pleasure of meeting them both, I feel safe in saying they’re both worth listening to. and the clothes I hide inside.
in a way that only I can truly appreciate.
others the twilight.
are the only stars that can ignite me.
now I dress only to please myself.
My skin is the only skin that fits.
A smile is the most beautiful accoutrement.
someone or something to regard.
press against you.
as an untenanted womb.
quite so well as a naked heart.
and I am overcome with choices.
doesn’t seem quite so heavy.
always seems so alive.
to love and create.
when harnessed for good.
Beautiful poetry and about something we all look at every day, our clothes closet. Mine is not so full, and it contains a whole swath of black work clothes and the only accoutrement I can wear with these is my smile. I love very much your words and thank you for posting this today. much love.
My scarves are my true inner landscape — running with color and soft with the finest threads. I love those last 4 lines. Our imperfections are our truth.
Home>The Global FoodBanking Network (GFN) expands food banking around the world.
New food banks launched in Panama City, Panama, and Bangalore, India.
At its most basic level, food banking is a smart yet simple concept: get food from where it is plentiful to where it is needed. Food banks do that by rescuing safe and nutritious surplus food that would otherwise be wasted and distributing it to hungry people.
While simple in theory, opening a food bank is no small undertaking. Food banks have multiple stakeholders, require capital and resources, and demand long-term planning. In addition, the food banking model—originated in the US—must be adapted to work within a country’s cultural, geographical and political structures.
The Global FoodBanking