I was curious to see today, the number of Humble Monthly subscribers on the Humble Monthly page.
That's 300,000 subs at $11-$12 a month, meaning between $3.3m-3.6m per month. A nice tidy sum. 5% goes to charity - about $180,000.
Then I was curious to see if this actually did anything for the indie titles, because an indie title that has 300,000 owners would be a success.
Note: I only checked February Humble Monthly, but i suspect that the pattern holds true for other months.
I checked Black The Fall first.
Black The Fall was released in July 2017, and had only 5,000 units sold up to Feb 2018. After Feb 9th, about a week after Humble February Monthly unlocked, it grew from 5,000 units to 185,000. Interesting also to note that only about half the people even bothered to activate the game. From there though, it rose to 225,000. Now some of these could be late activations, purchases off key sites or even off forums like Resetera's BST, but I'd expect some of these to also be true purchases off retail websites and steam. In fact there are just 17 offers for Black The Fall on Kinguin, 56 offers on G2A. Quite a small amount vs the 40,000 owners within the last 3 weeks.
I also checked Snake Pass.
Snake Pass was released about a year ago in March 2017 and had 35,000 units sold up to Feb 2018. After Feb 9th, about a week after Humble February Monthly unlocked, it grew from 35,000 units to 200,000. From there it rose to 250,000 units.
For completeness sake, I also checked Owlboy.
Owlboy was released over a year ago in Nov 2016. It's already sold 325,000 units up to Feb 2018. After Feb 9th, it grew from 325,000 to 450,000 owners. It stayed there for the next three weeks.
Conclusion: If your game isn't getting the number of units sold, the Humble Monthly seems like a good way of getting exposure on the game and people to try it out. If it's good, people are going to spread the word of mouth. I suspect Humble may also not even pay for these type of games or perhaps devs may even pay Humble to put their game on the Humble Monthly. Thus Humble may only pay for the AAA games which draw in more subscribers to the service. For games that already have a large number of owners, it may not really help sell the game as well as the word of mouth was already there. However it's still useful to get the game into hands of people who haven't tried the game and in turn make them fans so they buy the following game that comes along.
That's 300,000 subs at $11-$12 a month, meaning between $3.3m-3.6m per month. A nice tidy sum. 5% goes to charity - about $180,000.
Then I was curious to see if this actually did anything for the indie titles, because an indie title that has 300,000 owners would be a success.
Note: I only checked February Humble Monthly, but i suspect that the pattern holds true for other months.
I checked Black The Fall first.
Black The Fall was released in July 2017, and had only 5,000 units sold up to Feb 2018. After Feb 9th, about a week after Humble February Monthly unlocked, it grew from 5,000 units to 185,000. Interesting also to note that only about half the people even bothered to activate the game. From there though, it rose to 225,000. Now some of these could be late activations, purchases off key sites or even off forums like Resetera's BST, but I'd expect some of these to also be true purchases off retail websites and steam. In fact there are just 17 offers for Black The Fall on Kinguin, 56 offers on G2A. Quite a small amount vs the 40,000 owners within the last 3 weeks.
I also checked Snake Pass.
Snake Pass was released about a year ago in March 2017 and had 35,000 units sold up to Feb 2018. After Feb 9th, about a week after Humble February Monthly unlocked, it grew from 35,000 units to 200,000. From there it rose to 250,000 units.
For completeness sake, I also checked Owlboy.
Owlboy was released over a year ago in Nov 2016. It's already sold 325,000 units up to Feb 2018. After Feb 9th, it grew from 325,000 to 450,000 owners. It stayed there for the next three weeks.
Conclusion: If your game isn't getting the number of units sold, the Humble Monthly seems like a good way of getting exposure on the game and people to try it out. If it's good, people are going to spread the word of mouth. I suspect Humble may also not even pay for these type of games or perhaps devs may even pay Humble to put their game on the Humble Monthly. Thus Humble may only pay for the AAA games which draw in more subscribers to the service. For games that already have a large number of owners, it may not really help sell the game as well as the word of mouth was already there. However it's still useful to get the game into hands of people who haven't tried the game and in turn make them fans so they buy the following game that comes along.
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