Too many bundles

Cave Story seen by @naramura. Shared by @Nicalis.

Today, 14 Dec. 2011, a new Humble Indie Bundle has begun, barely a week after the previous Humble Introversion Bundle concluded. And with it, we've already had 6 bundles from Wolfire in a year: Frozenbyte, Indie 3, Frozen Synapse, Voxatron Debut, Introversion and Indie 4.

Add in Desura's Indie Royale bundles, with its 3 weeks cycle, UK's The Little Big Bunch, supposed to start today, and the fact that indie developers were already quite fond of selling their games in packs, and you have way too many offers like this in a considerably small territory.

Although I like the idea of selling games this way, which clearly works and benefits every participant, I'd like it to stop for a moment and take a breath. Think of the consequences this madness is bringing.
Right now, we live in an ecosystem in which players start wondering whether buying an indie game at release makes sense. If it is any good, chances are it will be sold with some other games at very low prices, even as low as 0.01€, in less than a year. Early buyers are heavily punished.
The standard price for games is also being established at a dangerously low margin of "as little as you want", potentially harming developers who prefer to set their one prices and use sales or gifts to attract new buyers as time goes by.

If anyone involved in this madness reads this, I urge you to reconsider. Keep the good work, release and promote bundles, but slow down. Don't burn the formula or your clients' pockets too fast, or the market will be saturated and possibly damaged. Now that the indie scene is starting to flourish, we must take special care that it grows strong and at a good pace. By watering it to much we risk rotting its branches and roots.

Disclaimer: I'll still acquire HIB 4, of course. It's the best bundle I've seen since Introversion's Anthology! And I love playing from Linux.

Roguelike Line of Sight by Eric Lippert

Isn't it wonderful when two passions get intertwined in ways you never expected? The passions in question are Roguelikes and the C# programming language, joined in the person of Eric Lippert.

In this week's post Eric has tackled the problem of developing a line of sight algorithm for roguelike games, which he'll apparently follow with an implementation. An interesting read for programmers and players alike, which saved me the time required to read through the forums myself =) And don't worry, the technical details are not enough to blow anyone's brains*.

For those not in the know, Roguelikes are top-down view computer role games of unusual graphical simplicity (environments, objects and characters are usually depicted using ASCII symbols) and extremely complex worlds. The genre's identifying marks are random generated dungeons, permanent character deaths (the save file is deleted if the character dies) and cumbersome controls. You should check ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Magic) or NetHack, if you haven't already.

And Eric Lippert is a respected member of the .NET community, having worked on the compilers of Visual Basic and C#, and lately leading the development of Roslyn, an on the fly VB.NET and C# compiler and analyzer.

* Disclaimer: No guarantees regarding the rest of the blog. Tread with caution.