About Humble Bundle

The effort originated with Wolfire Games who contacted several indie developers who agreed to provide games and pledged to change the game's licenses to open source if a minimum amount of profit was made. A figure of 1 million dollars was put out as a hopeful maximum estimate but no one really thought it would approach that amount. Customers were able to distribute there payment in any way they liked between charity and developers and the it was decided that the Humble Bundle would be a success if money was donated to charity. In fact about 1/3 of the over 1.4 million in sales was donated. The Humble Bundle revealed some trends that were surprising to publishers. Despite an overwhelming perception of major publishers that Mac and especially Linux having a minuscule market share at not worth their effort, nearly half the profit was from non-Windows purchases. Mac users are willing to pay more than windows users and Linux users are willing to pay a lot more, twice as much as Windows users in fact. The HIB also shattered the perception that gamers, and especially Linux gamers, are a selfish group with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement that will demand and even take for free anything they can get away with. Given the opportunity to buy 5 games for $1, they averaged almost 9 times that amount (over 14 times as much for linux). Also, we live in a world that, on average, will allocate 2% to charity when given the opportunity. This should shame everyone else that gamers chose a whopping 31%.

Some 'piracy' was traced also. But it is noted that most of the 'piracy' was probably people making multiple downloads with one large payment instead of making multiple payments for each download (ie: I want 10 copies to give 9 to my friends at $20 each, here's $200 instead of paying $20 ten times). The instructions were not clear for the first bundle, the 2nd bundle had a gifting/multiple purchase option. There were other reasons legitimate customers may have mistakenly included themselves in the piracy count, including technical difficulties with payment methods that the customers bypassed (illegitimately) in order to acquire their legitimate purchase. But, some actual theft did occur also. For the 2nd HIB, Wolfire games provided their own torrent in case customers chose to acquire their copy this way due to technical difficulties of the legitimate interface (and simply to offload illegitimate bandwidth from their servers for the convenience of legitimate customers). On Wolfire's blog it states, "If you are deadset on pirating the bundle, please consider downloading it from BitTorrent instead of using up our bandwidth!". This 'semi-official' torrent allows further distinction between blatant piracy and 'customer self-support'.

On February 17, 2012 the Humble Bundle Mojam ran for 60 hours with all proceeds going to charity. One of the games from the event, Fists of Resistance from Oxeye Game Studio, was only available on a single platform and not pledged to be ported in the future (as has occurred in past HiBs). This marks the first time the Humble Indie Bundle team decided to exclude the customers that routinely provide them with %25-%50 of their income.

Some packs turn the games open source afterwards. Details are as follows...
Changing licenses to Open Source is highly encouraging but not a strict requirement of HiB. Each developer makes this decision (it is widely presumed that the HiB team favors those that pledge Open Sourcing in the decision of which games to include in each Bundle). The game engines, and not necessarily the content, are released as Open Source. As some developers relied on proprietary code from 3rd party sources, a few were unable to release any useful code (World of Goo, for example.) Some developers set a minimum amount of profit and other requirements for fulfilling their pledge to Open Source. In each case, all pledge requirements have always been met thus far. Some developers have Open Sourced before conclusion of HiB sale or the moment it began (including games that were not available before the sale).

One could consider the Mac/Linux users paying more have a factor in that they have generally less commercial games available, and thus spend less money on games overall, and thus have more to offer when they do buy them. Also, the number is average, which anyone familiar with statistical math knows to be a poor representative of uneven distribution.

Hmmm, Linux users maybe. But Mac users spend all their money on the Apple tax (noting again, Linux users offered more than Mac :)

There's also companies/organizations contributing to the sales, and I have no idea what platform (if any) they choose to pump with their contribution.

Edit: Considering the overall average is near identical with the average Windows payment, it would seem there aren't many Linux/Mac customers for the bundle. And the aforementioned companies/organizations contribute 250$ to 2000$ donations which obviously cause severe skewing of results (unless they're sensible enough they make their contributions count towards all or none, but it defaults to what browser reports I think.) I'm assuming they aren't affecting the stats we see currently, but there's no telling. Single ~200$ donation ups the average for dozens who pay less than the average.
Edit 2: That said, I'd still like to see actual distribution of payments per platform and how large portion of total sales they cover before I'd claim anything in regards of customers for one platform being more generous than others.

Browser reporting is known to be faulty by the people involved according to what they've said. Additionally, with no DRM, one can download on a different system than the intended target. When I still had my foot in both worlds, I'd set my crappy Windows machine to the task of downloading and torrenting Linux files at home while I used my Linux Notebook with wifi to work and play games. What is more reliable is checking which files they actually download. Downloading the Linux files but not the Windows or Mac version is proof positive the person intends to install only the Linux version. But it unfortunately does not work the other way. One can download Mac, Win, and Linux files but then decide to only install on a single platform.

Except the credited platform is automatically set before you download anything, which is why I assumed what the browser reported being used. Though I guess it could've fetched it from my previous purchases, in which case I can't say what it does since I don't remember what it had originally.. maybe the credited platforms defaulted to none at all.

Yesterday I edited the main description a bit along with the tag description, removing the explicit statement that all bundles become open source after the sale which has not happened that I know of that much. Checked few older specifically indie bundles and not all games in them have been open sourced despite a lot of time passing since (actually very few have).

On topic of Humble Bundle games and their open sourceness, here's an old article: blog.wolfire.com/2011/02/Counterfeit-Lugaru-on-Apple-s-App-Store-developing

That article seems a bit strange in its accusations. The game itself is not a pirate since it uses source code they released to the public via GPL license, however it uses art assets (art, story, sounds, etc.) that were not, so it's more like plagiarism than piracy.