So, a week ago there was an special offer at
Humble Bundle (
What is Humble Bundle?) that included 8 EA games:
- Mass Effect
- Mass Effect 3
- Burnout Paradise
- Mirror's Edge
- Crysis 2
- Medal of Honor
- Battlefield 3
- Sims 3
So you pay 1$ and you get 6 awesome games, but if you pay more than average (around 5$) you also got BF3 and Sims 3. Very nice, isn't it?
You could decide how much you want to pay and then split that money into different cuts for different organizations. But there wasn't an option to actually give that money to developers of the games.
Since all the money went into charity or as a tip to Humble Bundle, EA didn't get a single dollar from that offer. My question is: How did EA profit from that bundle?
EA won an
worst American company award (or something like that, I am not entirely sure) and it's reputation among gamers isn't the best. I think we all know that they are known as a "greedy" company - which has been shown by various offers from their side (getting game for cheap or regular price, but not with all the features - they can only be bought for more money. That pisses a lot of people).
So, with this Bundle they regained some of their reputation.
Games on the list were not the "hottest" titles, which means that they "life span" was approaching the end, which means that number of people that were buying that games were very small or decreasing drastically (Medal of Honor was made in 2010, Battlefield in 2011, Crysis 2 in 2009 and so on ...).
What I am trying to say is that "nobody" was actually buying these games and they didn't have any loss of giving it out for free (Don't forget that if you bought the games on Humble Bundle you got serial key, with which you could download the game - no physical CDs, manuals, boxes (which cost). All they had to pay for was electricity for servers from which you downloaded the games).
Last but not least, with that they've expanded Origin user base (Steam is far more popular than Origin, so they tried to do something here too). And more people you have in your user base, more people you can advertise too.
Also, if you never played Crysis and then within Humble Origin Bundle, you tried it and liked it - it's more likely that you will buy Crysis 3 too.
So, as you can see there are lots of thing that EA gained from this bundle. What can I say? Great job EA, keep it up and I hope we will see more offers like this in future.