The Humble Bundles have been an amazing deal for gamers. Today, the company behind the bundles announced that they would introduce a new weekly sale, in addition to the usual bundles that happen every month or so. Everything else remains the same — pay what you want to get DRM-free downloads of indie games that work on Windows, Mac and Linux. A small customizable part of every sale goes to two charities as well.

The first weekly sale is Bastion, a game that was part of a previous bundle. But for the weekly deals, Humble Bundle introduced a new tier system that is very reminiscent of how Kickstarter works — the more you pay, the more you get.

For example, you can choose to only pay $0.01 to get Bastion. But if you pay $1 or more, you’ll get a Steam key. If you beat the average (currently $2.63), you’ll get the soundtrack, artworks, ringtones and sheet music. Finally, if you pay more than $25, the company will deliver merchandise to your home, such as a soundtrack CD and postcards.

The two charities that will receive part of the sales are long-time partners Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child’s Play Charity. New deals will appear every tuesday on the site. It remains to be seen whether weekly deals will only consist of games that were previously available in bundles.

By default, Humble Bundle takes a 15 percent cut. While this portion is customizable, many customers tend to buy with the default settings. The San Francisco-based company just finished another bundle, the Humble Bundle with Android 5. It sold more than 210,000 bundles, representing more than $1.46 million in sales. Even though customers can pay what they want, it represents quite a lot of money for indie game developers, charities and Humble Bundle.

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StoryBundle is just one of a few new “pay-what-you-want” book deals blossoming from the ashes of traditional publishing like ferns after a forest fire. This service, run by former Gizmodo pop star Jason Chen, is one of the cooler offerings out there right now and they started out with the Big Bang package featuring up to seven sci-fi books for your perusal and purchase.

You can donate as much (or as little) as you want and a portion of your cash can go to a charity. You can also stiff StoryBundle itself, giving all the cash to the author. Your choice.

“My dream is two-fold,” wrote Chen in a blog post. “As an avid reader, I wanted to make a place where independent authors can get exposure and readers can get quality ebooks without having to sift through list after list of titles. With StoryBundle, voracious readers will always have great reads easily within their reach.”

Services like this closely mirror similar services in the gaming and media space including the Humble Bundle aimed at raising awareness of indie games and music. The Humble Gaming Bundle, for example, regularly hits over $5 million in sales. Arguably, books require “imagination” and “literacy” and are therefore lesser cultural artifacts than games, but good on Chen for trying.

We covered competitor Snug Nugget last week but I think StoryBundle is definitely a bit prettier on the surface and the book offerings seem a bit more polished. As a fan of books, however, I’d recommend checking out both over the next few bundle iterations because it’s of paramount importance to support these nascent services.

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Redux has been through a couple of iterations over the years: Originally launched as a platform for social discovery of video, the startup bet big on building an app for Google TV to create a “lean back” experience for navigating channels of online video. Now it’s adding a distribution platform for independent content creators to the mix called Redux for Artists.

When Humble Bundle released its first movie, Kooky, it was Redux that powered distribution for the film. The next project to leverage Redux for Artists will be Smiley, a feature-length film that was a collaboration of YouTube stars like Shane Dawson and Michael Gallagher. Those folks will be distributing the film directly to fans online, selling it for $8 and making it available as a stream or download.

Viewers will be able to watch the film online or on a number of different connected platforms. That includes mobile phones, tablets, and even connected TVs. For that last part, Redux will be leveraging work it did with CE manufacturers to make its video app available on their devices. Redux CEO David McIntosh says that will be available through 40 million connected TV devices in total.

Of course, Redux isn’t the only player to enter this space recently. A few weeks ago, I wrote about VHX, which also launched a distribution platform that is being pitched for creators to release their own videos and sell them directly to fans. VHX was chosen for distribution of Aziz Ansari’s comedy special and the online release of Indie Game: The Movie.

And frankly, there have been a number of platforms over the years that have enabled creators to directly sell their videos to the public, and they’ve all kind of failed. So what is it about the current environment that makes self-distribution an actual viable business right now? If you ask McIntosh, there are a number of factors at play.

For one thing, people aren’t just watching these digital movies on their computers anymore. We’ve reached a critical mass of connected TVs and other devices that allow for streaming to the biggest screen in the house. There’s also a number of portable viewing devices — like smartphones and tablets — that people watch videos on as well. In a lot of ways, Netflix has helped lead the charge with its connected device strategy.

With all those pieces in place, independent content creators no longer need to go through a movie studio or TV network to amass a large audience of viewers. Instead, they can sell directly to fans instead. That’s good news for creators and good news for fans, as they generally get more freedom and flexibility to consume content.

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If you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of years, you might be excused for not knowing about this Humble Bundle thing. As a long-time Linux user, the Humble Bundles have always been of interest to me, and I’ve always tried to support them financially. It’s also always been interesting to me that Linux users typically pay more for the Bundles than their Windows or Mac counterparts. Clearly there’s a profitable market for Linux games.

Canonical has jumped on the Humble Bundle bandwagon this time around, and are making it easy for Ubuntu users to install the games they’ve purchased. Each of the Humble Bundle games is available individually for direct purchase through the Ubuntu Software Center at full retail price; but if you buy the current Humble Bundle you can quickly and easily install them through the Software Center, rather than download them and manually install them.

When you purchase the Humble Bundle, you’ll get an authorization link that tells the Ubuntu Software Center that you now own those games. You then fire up the Software Center and install the games. Think Steam, but without having to manually key in an authorization code.

Canonical is also donating money to each charity for each of the Humble Bundle games. Their mechanism for this is a little weird, at first glance, but makes sense within the context of the Bundle. Canonical will donate $100 for each game for every 5,000 Facebook “Likes” that game gets in the Software Center, up to a maximum of $500. This allows the charities to get additional money without overly skewing the average price of the Humble Bundle.

I asked David Pitkin, Canonical’s Director of Consumer Applications, about this, specifically wondering why Canonical didn’t just make a flat donation to each charity? Pitkin acknowledged that this was an experiment to track each game’s relative popularity in a public way. While Canonical tracks download numbers for Software Center applications, that information isn’t very visible to end users, and of little interest to non-Linux users.

When people pay more than the current average Humble Bundle price, they get a bonus game. As more and more people pay to unlock that bonus game, the average price goes up and up. This means people late to the Humble Bundle party will have to pay a bit more than the early adopters. Canonical’s donation strategy will also gently increase the average price over time.

Canonical has done a lot of work to ensure that each game is a first-class citizen within the Ubuntu ecosystem. This means building and testing .deb packages for them, ensuring that updates can be pushed out automatically through Ubuntu’s normal software update mechanism, and performing quality assurance testing on the whole thing.

I asked Pitkin for a rough estimate on how many Ubuntu users have purchased the Bundle thus far. His immediate response was “thousands and thousands!”. A followup with Pitkin revealed that Canonical saw ten thousand downloads in the first 72 hours of the current Humble Bundle.

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I may not mention it often, but I’m kind of obsessed with 2D twitch platformer Super Meat Boy. I’ve burned barrels of midnight oil battling my way through its nigh-impossible later levels, played until my hands cramped more times than I can count, and its namesake character is the only thing besides the TechCrunch logo (and the silly AOL inventory sticker) that graces the lid of my laptop.

So when Super Meat Boy shows up in a Humble Indie Bundle with a bunch of other ridiculously good games collectively selling for less than the cost of a footlong sandwich, you just know I’ve gotta write it up. Meet Humble Indie Bundle 4, which is quite possibly the best bundle yet.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, the Humble Indie Bundle is a charity flash sale of a bundle of indie games. You pay what you want (as low as a penny, if you’re super broke or a total jerk), get a bunch of great games, and then get to choose how the money gets divvied up between the game developers, the charities (Red Cross and Child’s Play), and the Humble Bundle guys. As a bonus, the games are all DRM-free and cross-platform across Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The games included this time around:

• Super Meat Boy
• Bit.Trip Runner
• Shank
• NightSky HD
• Jamestown

And if you’re kind enough to pay more than the running average (currently $4.58), they’ll throw in Gratuitous Space Battles and the stupidly pretty remake of Pixel’s Cave Story, Cave Story+.

But seriously: it’s worth it just for Super Meat Boy. Find the bundle here.

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The game industry is in the middle of an interesting shift right now. We’re at a point analogous to where the music industry was in the early 2000s: the product is only just becoming convenient enough for the mainstream to purchase and download online. Sure, people have done it for years, but the sales of online services, and the services themselves, are multiplying. As the pricing model for music changed with mp3s and iTunes, so the pricing model for games is in flux now.

We’ve seen how Minecraft and the Humble Bundle have seized the opportunity presented by this unstable situation, and now we can add another potentially disruptive model to the list. Polish developer NEG is offering its upcoming sci-fi/horror game Afterfall: InSanity for only one dollar — but only if it gets ten million pre-orders. If they fall short of that goal, they’re donating all the money to charity.

Even if they hit their goal, ten percent is still going to charity. But there’s no way to get that dollar back once you pledge it. Here’s a video explaining the whole thing, with that flopping text effect I can’t stand:

It’s an interesting model, though certainly one with a little room for refinement. Ten million, for instance, is a pretty large figure to aim for right out the door. Even indie phenomenon Minecraft is only at around a third of that number, though admittedly the price is higher. A million pre-orders at a dollar each is still a lot of money for an indie developer.

The game looks creepy and interesting, a Dead Space style 3rd-person survival horror thing with mutants and failing batteries and a fear system, all that stuff. Sure, it’s not going to dethrone the majors or cause as much of a splash as the incomparable Amnesia, but I think sight unseen I can tell you it’s worth a dollar.

Either way, I think it’s a good thing. If these guys hit their goal, it’s a proof of concept. If not, the game still gets made, and maybe they try again once they’ve shown they’ve got the game-dev chops to back up their pricing gumption.

You can pre-order the game here. I’m going to. It’ll be available until November 25th, so if you aren’t sure about whether you have a dollar to spare, you’ve got some time to think about it.

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If you’ve watched the gaming world at all over the last year or so, you’re probably aware of the Humble Bundle, a charity-orientated promotion where you pay what you want for a few standout indie titles. The few so far have had a great reception, raising millions for charity (EFF and Child’s Play). A new one has just launched with acclaimed strategy shooter Frozen Synapse as the main draw, but there’s a new wrinkle in the pricing scheme.

Instead of just having the whole bundle available for any price you want to pay, you receive either just Frozen Synapse or the whole previous bundle depending on how much you give. Give under the average and get the game, give over the average and get the bundle. It’s a little bit brilliant.

Paying over the average (around $4.40 as I write this) will almost certainly be the more popular choice, as it gets you quite a bit of extra content (the excellent Shadowgrounds and its sequel). And what happens when you pay over the average? You raise the average. It’s a nice, soft way of setting a price floor without preventing cash-strapped (or just cheap) people from paying a buck for a good game. The average price has gone up a couple pennies just as I’ve written this paragraph, and when you’re looking at sales in the hundreds of thousands, those pennies start to add up.

So far they’ve sold over 30,000 bundles and have raised above $130,000. The sale’s just beginning (it goes for two weeks), so those numbers should rise quite a bit. Head on over to the Humble Bundle site to buy or just check things out. And here’s a video of the games involved:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You may remember the Humble Indie Bundle from May, which was a sort of experiment in payment, trends, and distribution. It was extremely successful, raising quite a lot of money for the EFF, Child’s Play, and of course the developers themselves. Now, just in time for the holidays, a new bundle is being offered with similar terms, and it’s just as tempting.

One new wrinkle is that the sale is now being run by Humble Bundle, Inc., a Y Combinator startup. With downloadable games becoming an almost disturbingly large business, the company could have carved itself out quite a comfortable little niche. The independent games and apps scene is quite active and prolific, and projects like this one are an excellent way to reward developers who often create these things in their spare time.

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