kludgekml

Your question rephrased: 1 of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utahraptor versus a herd of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eohippus

The tiny horses are cute, but who doesn't want to see a big duck?

Hypothetically?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tuug8hjdcrz6446/2013-07-12%2020.19.30.jpg

...or The Submission Grinder, (http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/ ), if the $60/yr cost of Duotrope is outside your budget.

My gut feeling is that readers are more generous than gamers.

But obviously these are not two mutually-exclusive populations, so I suspect a slightly different reason. It's reasonably well-established that people are more generous to individuals than they are to groups (a charity that aims to vaccinate millions of children in rural Africa, for instance, would just put a picture of one child on their fundraising pamphlets). Because books are notionally the work of one person and are so publicly tied to that person, I think they might benefit from the same effect. When you buy an indie game bundle your thought process is "I'm buying these games, what are they worth to me?", whereas the book bundle has you thinking "I'm buying this book from Cory Doctorow". It's more human.

Obviously, this is all something of a convenient fiction. Machine of Death is the work of an ensemble cast, and even the individual novelists will have had a lot of help (from editors, agents, cover artists, etc). But they're still seen as individual artists, with their names on the covers. Conversely games can be largely written by one person, but they still usually open with a company logo.

The test of this theory, I suppose, would be to have a humble game bundle built up of mainly "single" creator games (to kick this off, let's say Minecraft, Gunpoint, Elite: Dangerous, for instance), and to market that fact in the same way the eBook bundle was marketed - by having the name of the game and then immediately under that a single creator's name. If I'm right, this would do better than the same games with the company names below the title.

My second gut feeling (I can have up to four gut feelings a time, like a cow), is that this bundle would be hard to organise because most of the game creators would recoil at the idea of taking credit away from their collaborating artists, musicians, etc. But it's interesting to speculate on.

Am I right in thinking that Matt deserves a lot of the props for this process by being the figurative Britain in the long battle to get MoD published, keeping the process going until the technology became available to nuke the traditional publishers? (I may be confused as to how publishing works).