The Humble Indie Bundle folks have just launched Humble Indie Bundle 3 (confusingly, this is the fourth Humble Indie Bundle, but the third was called Humble Frozenbyte, leaving the 3 designator free). For those of you who’ve missed the previous installments, the HIB packages a collection of five great DRM-free indie games and invites you to name your price for them, and to divert some of the money to one of a list of charities. I recently hung out with the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (one of the HIB charities — the other is Child’s Play) and she was ecstatic about the enormous contribution HIB players had made to EFF. Without naming any figures, I can at least say that last year’s HIB was enough to have funded my whole salary at EFF, over all the years I was there, twice over. In addition previous HIBs have raised enough for the game creators involved that they released their games as free/open source software by way of thanks.
I love the way HIB does its thing, especially the metrics they provide on how different operating system users give (all HIB games run on Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux) and the running totals. This really seems to capture the giving and competitive spirits of gamers to amazing effect (I’m thinking hard about how to apply this to ebooks!).
This round’s games are Crayon Physics Deluxe, Cogs, VVVVVV, Hammerfight and And Yet It Moves. I’ve just bought in (can’t wait to play Crayon Physics with the kid!). Look for my donation buoying up GNU/Linux side of the financials.
(via /.)