Their pay-what-you-want model is proving very popular with customers, especially when the funds go not only to indie developers but the EFF and the Child’s Play charity.

At the time of writing the pack has received 211,641 orders which have generated more than $1.6m, an average price of $7.68. Currently, anyone paying over this average amount will also get a free gift – Humble Indie Bundle 1.

But inevitably, HIB2 has ended up becoming available through unofficial channels and naturally those include BitTorrent. Just last week a reader wrote to us explaining that users of Demonoid were getting rather upset that the pack was available there, even though its possible to get it for virtually nothing through the official sources.

The fact that BitTorrent was being used to distribute HIB2 didn’t go unnoticed by Wolfire Games either, and on Dec 19th co-founder Jeffrey Rosen tweeted: “If you pirated the Humble Indie Bundle, please tell me why in this anonymous survey.”

Even the tone of the survey shows why people have become so protective over HIB and HIB2. “This is an anonymous survey to try to understand why you pirated the Humble Indie Bundle and what we could have done better,” it says, humbly. No angry finger pointing here, just a willingness to listen. Just how business should be done.

Jeff told TorrentFreak this morning that he had several hundred responses back.

“One of the response types was ‘I just like BitTorrent’. For instance, they have a poor internet connection and can’t sustain a direct download, or more simply, they just hate downloading things in their browser and then having to md5sum it, etc,” he explained.

Indeed, the most common search autocomplete for the Humble Indie Bundle on Google is “Humble Indie Bundle torrent”, not surprising really since for those already familiar with the protocol, BitTorrent is an extremely convenient way to transfer files.

Would you prefer to get HIB2 using BitTorrent? You got it.

“I just added a BitTorrent download option in addition to our direct CDN downloads,” Jeff told us. “The BitTorrent files include the new web-seed feature pointing to our CDN, so even if there are no seeders, people still get fast download speeds.”

Jeff says customers have really taken to the new distribution method.

“I added this about 20 minutes ago, and so far the response has been phenomenal. Everyone is happy about it and we’ve already gotten hundreds of people donating their bandwidth to help seed it.”

Of course, the benefits of using BitTorrent don’t stop with the customer, Wolfire Games are saving money too.

“We are going to reduce our bandwidth costs dramatically because of this while providing better service and faster speeds,” Jeffrey concludes

Wolfire Games really have got it absolutely right with both their attitude and their HIB2 offering. We wish them every success and ask our readers who are interested in the game pack to donate a few dollars and get it here.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

“Pay what you want. If you bought these five games separately, it would cost around $80 but we’re letting you set the price! All of the games work great on Mac, Windows, and Linux. We didn’t want to leave anyone out,” the Wolfire team announced a week ago.

Not only can downloaders choose the amount they want to pay, they can also decide whether they want the money to go to the developers, charity or any combination of both. The minimum amount required to get a download link is a penny.

Thus far the project has been a great success. The games have been downloaded more than 80,000 times and have raised $683,090 at the time of writing. Linux users have been the most generous with an average donation of $14.01, while Windows users are stuck at $7.31.

Over the past days Wolfire has covered the results of the “Humble Indie Bundle” project in detail. Overall they have been very satisfied with the results, but they also found that there is still a high percentage of people who didn’t even want to pay a penny, and pirated the bundle instead.

Jeffrey Rosen, the co-founder of Wolfire Games, alerted us to this issue and reported his findings in a recent blog post. According to their analysis of the incoming donations and the amount of data that was transferred, some 25% of downloaders did not pay for the bundle.

If Wolfire Games were the RIAA, they would have quickly characterized this group as evil freeriders without any sense of ethics, but Rosen and his colleagues are more realistic in their analysis. Obviously money can’t be an incentive to pirate here, since the games can be legally owned for just a penny.

So what motivates people to download the bundle without paying then? What are the barriers that prevent people from coughing up a single penny?

Rosen mentions that the download links have been posted all over the Internet and that some people would rather click on those directly, than go through the entire payout process just to send over a penny. We could call this the laziness or convenience argument to pirate.

Another explanation is that the payment processors that are used are not available in every country, so some people couldn’t pay even if they wanted to. In a similar vein, but not mentioned by the Wolfire team, is that many people in the target audience are young and don’t have access to a credit card.

These two payment restrictions are related to availability, which is a common reason for people to pirate. Even if they want to buy something legally, they can’t because they don’t have access to a credit card or are in a country where they can’t use the required payment processors.

Other reasons for downloading without paying could be that one downloads the bundle from different computers after having paid, or that the download is shared with friends who made a joint donation. These should not be counted as ‘piracy’ either.

Lastly, there could also be a group of people that think that paying a penny is too much, choosing to grab a free copy instead just to be rebellious pirates. We don’t think that this group is very large, and even if it is significant we’re sure that money is not their incentive.

Rose said that they do not intend to add any restrictions to the download links because that would only make the download process more cumbersome for those who do donate generously. He does have a request for future ‘pirates’ though.

“If you are deadset on pirating the bundle, please consider downloading it from BitTorrent instead of using up our bandwidth! Also, even though you are pirating our games, please tell some of your friends about the Humble Indie Bundle.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.