Humble Indie Bundle 2 Embraces BitTorrent

Offering $85 worth of games for a price set by the buyer, Wolfire's Humble Indie Bundle 2 pack has brought in more than $1.6 million since its launch. Inevitably, some people are using unofficial channels to acquire it and of course, BitTorrent is high on the list. After reaching out to pirates for information, Wolfire co-founder Jeffrey Rosen says the problem is real easy to fix. BitTorrent, here we come.Just in time for the Christmas holidays, the guys who brought us the Humble Indie Bundle have done it again. With their latest game pack, called simply Humble Indie Bundle 2, Wolfire Games are capturing imaginations.

Their pay-what-you-want model is proving very popular with customers, especially when the funds go not only to indie developers but the EFF and the Child’s Play charity.

At the time of writing the pack has received 211,641 orders which have generated more than $1.6m, an average price of $7.68. Currently, anyone paying over this average amount will also get a free gift – Humble Indie Bundle 1.

http://torrentfreak.com/images/hib2.jpg

But inevitably, HIB2 has ended up becoming available through unofficial channels and naturally those include BitTorrent. Just last week a reader wrote to us explaining that users of Demonoid were getting rather upset that the pack was available there, even though its possible to get it for virtually nothing through the official sources.

The fact that BitTorrent was being used to distribute HIB2 didn’t go unnoticed by Wolfire Games either, and on Dec 19th co-founder Jeffrey Rosen tweeted: “If you pirated the Humble Indie Bundle, please tell me why in this anonymous survey.”

Even the tone of the survey shows why people have become so protective over HIB and HIB2. “This is an anonymous survey to try to understand why you pirated the Humble Indie Bundle and what we could have done better,” it says, humbly. No angry finger pointing here, just a willingness to listen. Just how business should be done.

Jeff told TorrentFreak this morning that he had several hundred responses back.

“One of the response types was ‘I just like BitTorrent’. For instance, they have a poor internet connection and can’t sustain a direct download, or more simply, they just hate downloading things in their browser and then having to md5sum it, etc,” he explained.

Indeed, the most common search autocomplete for the Humble Indie Bundle on Google is “Humble Indie Bundle torrent”, not surprising really since for those already familiar with the protocol, BitTorrent is an extremely convenient way to transfer files.

Would you prefer to get HIB2 using BitTorrent? You got it.

“I just added a BitTorrent download option in addition to our direct CDN downloads,” Jeff told us. “The BitTorrent files include the new web-seed feature pointing to our CDN, so even if there are no seeders, people still get fast download speeds.”

Jeff says customers have really taken to the new distribution method.

“I added this about 20 minutes ago, and so far the response has been phenomenal. Everyone is happy about it and we’ve already gotten hundreds of people donating their bandwidth to help seed it.”

Of course, the benefits of using BitTorrent don’t stop with the customer, Wolfire Games are saving money too.

“We are going to reduce our bandwidth costs dramatically because of this while providing better service and faster speeds,” Jeffrey concludes

Wolfire Games really have got it absolutely right with both their attitude and their HIB2 offering. We wish them every success and ask our readers who are interested in the game pack to donate a few dollars and get it here.

Article from: TorrentFreak.