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Wolfire founder explains Humble Indie Bundle's success

Wolfire Games founder Jeffrey Rosen has said the keys to the Humble Indie Bundle's success are visibility, simplicity, and good customer service

"We were pretty adamant that instead of having to download a client or anything, you would click the buy button, get an e-mail, and download your games,” Rosen said at a presentation at GDC yesterday, as reported by Gamasutra.

"Which seems kind of silly, but it really worked."

Rosen commented that the bells and whistles of shopping sites like clients, registration, and shopping carts just make it harder for customers to reach you.

He also highlighted the importance of good customer support.

"“It's really surprising how a lot of companies don't have a good customer support team, but we managed to do it across hundreds of thousands of customers while also developing the site,” Rosen said.

“It's not really that hard, you just have to sit down and answer e-mails.”

Rosen said the Humble Indie Bundle was inspired by the popularity of major sales on digital distribution services.

"One thing that we instantly noticed is that anytime Steam would take a bunch of games and put them together and discount the price, it would become the number one story on Reddit,” he said.

“I felt like I could do that, [that's] not too hard.”

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Brenna Hillier avatar

Brenna Hillier

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Based in Australia and having come from a lengthy career in the Aussie games media, Brenna worked as VG247's remote Deputy Editor for several years, covering news and events from the other side of the planet to the rest of the team. After leaving VG247, Brenna retired from games media and crossed over to development, working as a writer on several video games.

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