Humble Indie Bundle 3: A review

It was jolly good ride for the Humble Bundle 3, and it was far better and more exciting in the second half than the first one:

15 days of Hunble India Bundle 3

The main events which transpired here were the following:

1. A problem in processing Paypal transactions, which let to a premature lull and then an unexpected spike
2. 2 weeks of free Minecraft for the buyers
3. Addition of Steel Storm to the bundle (also announced by e-mail)
4. Reaching $1 million
5. Inclusion of HIB 2 into HIB 3 for all the previous buyers and for those future buyers who paid more than the average amount at the time of purchase. More on the effect of this later.
6. A Reddit IamA with the developers
7. Addition of Atom Zombie smasher to the bundle.
8. News of HEG's port to Linux/Mac
9. News of the bundle exceeding the previous maximum of $1.8 and becoming the greatest bundle to date.
10. Closing off of the bundle. Curiously, despite all guns blazing, this bundle was not extended beyond the 15 day period.

Something Interesting

A curious play that Jeffry did for this bundle's pay-what-you-want model was setting the current average as a threshold for more goodies bang in the middle of the sales period. This is not without precedent, though. The HIB 1 was included in the second bundle too at mid point and, hence, was somewhat expected.

People could still purchase just the 5 + 2 games for whatever they wanted to pay for it, or they could pay more than the average purchase amount at the point in time when they make the purchase to get 5 more games into their bundle. This, as one might guess, had a wonderful effect on the average purchase price:

The average purchase price for the Humble Indie Bundle 3.
See graph above for the legend of the events.

The orange line marks the announcement of the inclusion of the second bundle. 

Just look at the averages go!

After the announcement, Linux's average rose about 3% (they are incredibly high to begin with), Mac's average rose by 16% and Windows' average rose by a ginormous 28%! The absolute increases in the averages were $0.37 for Linux, and $ 1.07 for both Mac and Windows.

However, no epic battle for the Leaderboard happened, with the leader changing only 5 times.

I have the raw data of the evolution with me with a five minute resolution. If someone wants it for a deeper look, post a comment. :)

Also, I think I missed something big which happened around Aug 09 (an un-annotated surge in that region in the graphs). If you know what triggered that surge, I would be happy to include it in the data-set.

~

musically_ut