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Humble Bundle is a digital storefront for video games, which grew out of its original offering of Humble Bundles (previously known as Humble Indie Bundles), collections of games sold at a price determined by the purchaser and with a portion of the price going towards charity and the rest split between the game developers. Humble Bundle continues to offer these limited-time bundles, but have expanded to include a persistent storefront. The Humble Bundle concept was initially run by Wolfire Games in 2010, but by its second bundle, the Humble Bundle company was spun out to manage the promotion, payments, and distribution of the bundles. Initial bundles were typically collections of independently developed games featuring multi-platform support (including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms) provided without digital rights management (DRM). Occurring every few months, the two-week Humble Bundles drew media attention, with several bundles surpassing $1 million in sales. Subsequently, the bundles became more frequent and expanded to include games from established developers, AAA publishers, games for Android-based devices, bundles promoting game jams, and bundles featuring digital copies of music, books and comic books. Bundles are presently offered on a more regular basis, with a persistent storefront for individual game sales. The Humble Bundle offerings support a number of charities, including Child's Play, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, charity: water, and the American Red Cross. By October 2015, the total charitable amount raised by the Bundles exceeded $65 million across 50 different charities. By the end of October 2014,participating developers have grossed more than $100 million.〔(Humble Bundle raises $50m for charity, developers gross $100m ). Retrieved 17 December 2014.〕 The success of the Humble Bundle approach has inspired a number of similar efforts to offer "pay what you want" bundles for smaller titles, including Indie Gala and Indie Royale. As a corporation, Humble Bundle is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with about 50 employees.〔 ==Concept== The idea for the Bundle was from Jeff Rosen of Wolfire Games. Rosen describes the inspiration coming to him through similar sales of bundle packages on the Steam platform.〔 Rosen had noted that such sales would have viral word-of-mouth spread across the Internet. Influence also came from a previous "pay-what-you-want" sale for ''World of Goo'' upon the title's first anniversary;〔 over 57,000 copies of the game were purchased during this sale, generating over US$117,000 after considering PayPal handling fees. Rosen by this point was well connected with other independent developers, for example his brother David is listed as being a game tester for the ''Penumbra'' series, and ''Penumbra'' composer Mikko Tarmia is now contributing to Wolfire Games' upcoming game project ''Overgrowth''. Wolfire had also recently teamed with Unknown Worlds Entertainment to offer a bundle based on their ''Natural Selection 2'' game.〔 The porter of ''Lugaru'' to Linux was Ryan C. Gordon, who was also responsible for porting ''Aquaria'' to Linux. With his close ties to these independent developers, as well as Ron Carmel of 2D Boy, Rosen was able to assemble the package, taking advantage of merchant sales systems offered by PayPal, Amazon Payments, and Google Checkout to minimize the cost of transactions and distribution.〔 The site later added the option to pay via Bitcoin only through Coinbase. Though achieving word of mouth was a key element of the potential success of the bundle, Rosen also recognized that the process to purchase the Bundles had to be simple; including elements like user account registration or the use of a secondary download client would have potentially driven away sales.〔 Rosen also sought to include charities in the bundle, allowing the purchaser to choose how to distribute the funds between the developers and charities. Rosen believed Child's Play was a worthwhile cause that brought video games to hospitalized children and helped to fight the stigma of video games, while he selected the Electronic Frontier Foundation to support their anti-DRM stance.〔 The means of "pay-what-you-want" would allow purchasers to simply give the money to the charities, but Rosen felt this was not an issue and would "consider that a success" of the sale.〔 Rosen and Wolfire employee John Graham provided technical support during the sales, handling thousands of requests through a few all-night email and chat sessions.〔 In April 2011, it was announced that Sequoia Capital had invested $4.7 million of venture capital into Humble Bundle. A dedicated team of about ten employees created by this fund oversee the Humble Bundle; they work with developers to determine scheduling and availability of games, and make decisions about which games to include within the bundles, asking themselves "will this be exciting for gamers", according to Richard Esguerra, one of the current employees. The full arrangements with developers to create the bundle typically conclude a month before the bundle goes live. The Humble Bundle group earns about 15% of the total funds raised, which goes back towards paying for bandwidth costs and to develop new features for the site.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Humble Bundle」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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