I see there is a considerable amount of users starting to feel concerned about what seems to be a decline in quality (and sometimes maybe quantity or frequency too) in most bundle sites.
You can see this every Tuesday in the Humble thread. With every Groupees that's not a BeMine and only contains random shovelware (and you pre-ordered). With every IndieGala Demotivational Monday. With every... well, I guess GoGoBundle doesn't even count.
Of course, there's been exceptions with all of them. And of course, what makes a game good or bad, or interesting for you and boring for me, can be very subjective.
But I think we can all agree there are certain indicators that can help discern if what you're seeing is a bundle filled with... cr.p, or if it could be considered a reasonably good bundle, even if you personally don't like those games. And maybe we haven't seen that many cases of the later in the past few... months?
So, how difficult and costly could it be for these sites to curate a good bundle?
Not every dev wants to sell his game for a few pennies. There might be a growing reluctance to do this, and also to do heavy discounts.
Still, there's quite a few indie games, small games, that doesn't seem to be getting a lot of traction in Steam, but have some redeeming qualities (catchy art style, interesting gameplay, low price, trading cards, achievements...) and together in a bundle could probably make a very interesting one.
Maybe niche, surely would never aim to compete with Humble, but...

  1. The poll is actually not about Do you agree Y/N... But please, do share your opinion!
  2. I've selected a few games that I think could fit in a bundle like this, and I wanted to ask you to vote for your favourite one.
  3. Would you buy a DRM-Free ONLY Bundle? No Steam, No GoG. Direct download or torrent only. Would you require any specific conditions to buy it?
  4. What about an itch.io Exclusives Bundle? Examples:
  5. What other games would you like to see in a bundle like this (Reasonable titles)?
  6. How would you name this bundle? :P
6 years ago

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Choose your favourite game

View Results
Angles
Beetle Uprising
Castle Agony
Danger Close!
Horns of Fear
Last Salvo
Midnight Quest
The Nose
Towards The Pantheon
Where They Cremate The Roadkill

Most are looking down on itch.io (and desura) but there are plenty of underrated and overlooked games on there that are just as nice.
Groupees sometimes have bundles with them.

Stil hoping Humble Bundle will get their act together again though, and we still can have nice steam bundles.

Thanks for mentioning Castle Agony, wishlisted it.

6 years ago*
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Glad you found Castle Agony interesting! :)
I think we can still trust that Monthlies are going to be good, but I probably lost my faith in the Weeklies.
They tweeted this a few days ago. Could it mean something?

6 years ago
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Isn't GOG DRM-free?

6 years ago
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yes.

6 years ago
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Yes. But a GoG bundle would require you to have a GoG account and to redeem a key in order to download the installers. Also, GoG doesn't seem to be interested at all in these kind of bundles.

6 years ago
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GOG wont touch bundles. The few gog keys that have been in bundles have been as a result of the publishers inclination to do so, and (far as I remember) mostly included promo codes (which eventually expire).
of course, you would think some devs / pubs might be more inclined to provide gog promo codes in bundles due to the expiration, but the focus is always on steam.

6 years ago
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Please no more bundle websites. Indie devs need to find new ways to promote good games, maybe organize in some way, but bundles are killing indie market in more than one way.

6 years ago
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wanted to write exact the same... i know a indie dev avoiding bundles on all costs... he made 2nd game now both in very good quality and the 3rd is in the beginning phase... awesome games, but no good sale numbers... :(

Shrouded in Sanity / Usurper / Into the Fray

all games share same universe and #2 is sequel of #1, cant tell about #3, but seems to became a Trilogy...

Free version of #1: https://store.steampowered.com/app/820400/Shrouded_in_Sanity_Freebirth/
-#1: https://store.steampowered.com/app/444590/Shrouded_in_Sanity/
-#2: https://store.steampowered.com/app/603020/Usurper/

6 years ago
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+1.
If they would severely limit the number of copies sold and/or monitor keys and resellers (so like bundle runs for 2 weeks, activate game in 2 weeks, then all unused gets voided) it kills sales for months, or a year to come. I love cheap games, but I think I can pay 3-4€ for each good game instead of 1-2€ for all three, if that helps the devs to survive and make more.

6 years ago
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most users complain about bundles and keep buying them, sending a clear message to devs and sites "please release more trash so we can +1 our libraries <3".

not that i'm against customers spending all their money in +1s or whatever they want, but if people support this practice they can't complain about $1 bundles filled with 20+ asset flips.
it's their fault there are 5+ bundle sites releasing games every week, multiple times in some cases. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

and you also have the issue with repeated bundles. it's the same with steam sales, 6 years ago it was a novelty and most people didn't own a lot of games. now it's pretty hard to find someone that doesn't own super meat boy or terraria (to name a few famous quality bundled games).

6 years ago
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6 years ago
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I don't own Super Meat Boy and I do own terraria but not a fan of the game.

But I get your point, as long as people keep buying those bad bundles, they keep releasing more of those bad bundles, I always find it sad if I look at a chart of a typical horrible bundle and see people responding with stuff like 'repeats' or 'thanks, didn't own them all yet' or stuff like that as if it's a good thing those bundles exist.
I mean sure everyone their own I guess and if people are happy with a +1 even if it's from a crappy game, be my guest but it also means that they are supporting crap meaning more crap will be released and we will never get rid of it this way.

6 years ago
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Bundles have definitely trained me not to pay much more than about 10% of retail. Even for games I really want.

6 years ago
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6 years ago
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6 years ago
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I don't even know how to respond to this
we don't need another bundle site
we need bundle sites that already exists to actually sell single keys for the bundle, so that people can stop reselling games singularly and killing any interest from the dev side to put their game in a bundle

6 years ago
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The single key idea I think would work if Valve properly supported it. Right now when you add a key containing multiple games all of them will be linked so you can't delete the bad ones from library, nor can you discard the ones you don't want during activation.
The other issue is that afaik there is no way for companies like humble to group keys that way, it must be done by the developer (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).

6 years ago
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the first humble-bundles were actually single keys only, and valve was also fine with that
in the near future we will see humble bundle switch back to single key.
that or they'll keep getting bad feedback from angry people that do not understand that the "bad quality" is caused by key resellers.
Also you can permanently remove any game you want from your steam library, from quite a while now.
here's an interesting read about bundles

6 years ago
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6 years ago
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Oooooh, I see. My bad.
This actually is a bummer but I don't think it's really THAT BIG of a problem. In this case for example you could hide the games instead of removing them.

6 years ago
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The problem with hiding games is that you can't see the groups they're in, it just becomes one big list. If you want to unhide an entire group you have to go through all your hidden games and figure out which are from that group one at a time (or unhide all your hidden games and then re-hide all games that were previously hidden other then those from said group). I really wish Valve would improve it so it was more useful.

6 years ago
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Yep, that's what I meant.

6 years ago
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SG would be an awful lot quieter if this was the case.

6 years ago
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Indie devs that do their research about marketing are far more aware these days that bundles are a double edged sword. Sure they may get a nice lump of cash from them, but afterwards sales will usually plummet.

6 years ago
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I don't want DRM-Free titles outside GOG (and 'cause GOG Connect). Just because I have all my junk library in Steam, if I had started on another platform I would be there, but there aren't many bundles for other sites either.

Anyway, what I do hope is that Tencent will compete well with Valve, although we've been talking about WeGame for one year and nothing yet...

6 years ago
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6 years ago
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I don't really have an opinion on the whole bundle site thing but I thank you for those itch.io games recommendations (although I'll probably never get to play them like the 7 million others I've bookmarked on itch, it's a nice attention).

(If I saw Where we Cremate the Roadkill in a bundle I'd probably hit myself with a couple bricks to check if I wasn't dreaming.)

6 years ago
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If you think "Where they cremate the roadkill" is interesting, you might also want to check out Dujanah.

6 years ago
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Already on my wishlist since I liked Beeswing :)

6 years ago
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Would you buy a DRM-Free ONLY Bundle? No Steam, No GoG. Direct download or torrent only. Would you require any specific conditions to buy it?

For me anything that's not Steam or GOG, be it DRM-laden or DRM-free, means 'not supported'. So basically if a game is at its end of life, getting no updates or DLC (though I care less about DLC), then getting it in an alternate service is okay.

Even then, I'll most likely misplace the games at some point (I'm not very organised when it comes to tracking my games), and when the service dies, which has a decent chance of happening, I will no longer have access to the games. It's what happened to my Indie Gala DRM-free downloads and my Indie Game Stand downloads.

6 years ago
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