“Be Mine” Indie Bundle – Indie Bundle #576

First of all, isn't this title picture amazing?! I'm anything other than a MS Paint artist, I must admit, but I was forced to come up with something random for a reason that you'll soon know if you read on. I can tell you're curious why in the world I'd draw something like this in Paint for the article when I could be using something from the website of the item that I'm talking about, aren't you?

Well, read on after the jump to learn more about this newest of the "Pay As You Can" indie bundles!

First of all, I know we've been saturated with indie game bundles lately, what with the Humble Bundles, the Indie Galas, the Indie Royales, etc etc. Normally we don't post about these since there's already so much interest in them already, but this one caught my attention for a specific reason.

For those of you who don't know, this is a bundle that was supposed to be released on Valentine's Day and was supposed to be Valentine's Day themed, apparently. It features games such as Wasteland Angel, Sideway New York, and Beep... so I'm not sure how that's Valentine's Day themed, but so be it. The website for this fantastic bundle (indie games which are high quality but that I haven't seen in any of the other bundles yet) is located here.

You already clicked on it, didn't you? Notice that it takes forever or never loads at all. This is the point of interest for this bundle. When it was first promoted and news was spreading around the internet, I heard many people wondering if it was legitimate or just some sort of scam to take your money. It wasn't one of the big names (though about three years ago, no one had ever heard of any of the big names either) and people were beginning to question whether or not to give their money. But, let's take a look at what happened even with all the skepticism.

The bundle was released (the website opened for transactions) on Valentine's Day at 1PM EST. Within five minutes, the website was entirely down and the servers were overloaded, crashing the entire system. A notice was posted at the website, informing people that there was more interest than anticipated and that the bundle would rerelease the next day at the same time. Alright, it happens... people underestimate interest in things all the time. Several MMOs have even had major launch issues because they got more people than their network was tested for.

So, we wait for the next day for things to get released again. Waiting patiently until the afternoon, we quickly go to the page at 1PM EST to buy our new shiny bundle of games. Within five minutes again, the server was overloaded and crashed resulting in yet another message from the providers that it was going to be 24-48 hours this time before the website was back up and that they appreciated our patience. They underestimated not once, but twice on the same bundle within a day of each other. (The website being down, incidentally, is the reason that I couldn't get a proper graphic for this post.)

Keep in mind that this website was only handling transactions and routing money changes through PayPal (where most of the transactions themselves actually occurred). All of the games were Steam keys that were downloadable through that platform, so the website wasn't even handling download traffic for these games.

There are two points of interest in this:

1) How do you screw up your estimate of interest twice in a 24 hour span and how is this going to affect their sales? Personally, I still want these games... so I'll still be interested in trying to get this bundle, but I have to say that I'm getting a bit frustrated by this. They seem to be trying, which is nice to see, but it isn't translating well into some sort of solid product. Hopefully they'll get it figured out soon! I'd like to know your opinions or what you'd do in this situation as the consumer.

2) Do we need more indie bundles? As a huge indie game fan, I find that the indie scene is where the real ingenuity is taking place right now and it's nice to see that scene put more and more into the spotlight. However, I wonder if it's cheapening the efforts of the indie developers when all these games are offered so cheaply to the public. This bundle in particular you can pay 1$ if you want to, for around 5 games + a soundtrack. Does this cheaper price tag cheapen the value of these games in people's eyes? How does this affect the indie development scene?

Just some thoughts. If you have any further comments on things that I thought of, or if you came up with some questions of your own based on these trends, please leave a comment below!