14 DAY TRIAL // Developer Pocketwatch Games announced that their small indie heist game Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine has just passed the 750k units sold mark.
The game was featured in the most recent Humble Bundle sale, and it appears that not only Dust: An Elysian Tail benefited from the extra attention. A Humble Bundle Post Mortem post on Pocketwatch's blog details that during the two-week run of the sale, out of a total of 493k purchases 370k were over the average asking price, consequently including both Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine and Antichamber, a weird puzzle game.
That puts the total sales number well over 750k units sold for the small indie creation, and the blog revealed another interesting tidbit: the two weeks of being featured in the Humble Bundle sale did not have a negative effect on Steam revenue during the period, indicating that customers who buy full priced games from certain distribution channels don't care as much about the Humble Indie Bundle, and that those who snag bundles don't do as much regular shopping.
This is a pretty good argument, albeit a solitary one, in the ongoing debate of whether sales are hurting indie devs, as some claim that is it becoming an increasingly occurring trend for users to refrain from buying full priced copies of game on launch day, waiting for them to inevitably be bundled in a much more convenient package sometime in the future.
There have been two reports up until now, from Dust: An Elysian Tail and Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine, showing that Humble Bundles can do wonders for the aggregate number of sales, but there is still the remunerative aspect to discuss.
Bundles usually band together around 6 or more devs, and their creations are offered at a minimum of $1 / €1 and an average that doesn't go much above 5$ / €4. Furthermore, revenue distribution most commonly ends up being the default one, 15 percent to the Humble Bundle, 20 percent to charity and 65 percent to the developers.
In Monaco's case, the devs approximated a revenue of around $215k / €157k from the sale, which is not bad at all as far as indie titles go, especially since the game came out almost a year ago.
The Humble Indie Bundle not affecting the Steam revenue stream certainly looks like an interesting point, and it would be nice to find more such reveals in the future, to further corroborate or deny the general worries about the market cannibalizing itself.