Quoting: "berarma, post: 7471, member: 131"If that's how it works then there's more reasons to be more strict about quality and bugs being fixed in time, they should be held accountable for that while possible.

Not really. As I said before, I haven't seen a Humble contract, but I am certain that it's the developers who would be signing off on a finished port (so again that's their responsibility).

In case it's not clear, I'm saying it's inappropriate for us as customers to have expectations of porters. They still have obligations to do good work according to their contracts, but that's an internal thing between them and the developers, not us. If a developer's not happy with the work that's been done, they're always free to follow up whatever recourse there might be and get somebody else in to do the job properly, so (for us) the developers are still to blame even if a porter did a poor job.

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Quoting: "berarma, post: 7459, member: 131"Back to the lack of support issue, they should be more strict about quality at launch time, specially when the port isn't done by the HB team.

Since urkle only recently became an employee of Humble Bundle (as I understand it), then only the titles from the last bundle would fit that description.

I don't think it's wise to put responsibility on the porters. Ultimate responsibility has to lie with the developers - if they themselves aren't interested, updates won't happen. Post bundle, they're the ones calling the shots, handing out the money, and setting the general attitude. Contractors generally don't have a lot of control over what they do and don't do.

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Quoting: "Anon, post: 7453"If anyone else is up for this, great, I'm definitely going to have a go at this soon. But there's a different problem entirely first - it doesn't have page for most of those games, so we'll need to do that first as well.

Fantastic. I'd be keen to contribute (and cite it in future writings).

Quoting: "Anon, post: 7453"Hm, I can't find it, is it on flibit's twitter or someone else's?

flibit's tagged in it, but it was the developer who tweeted, I believe. It was also discussed elsewhere (but I can't remember now).

Quoting: "Hyeron, post: 7455, member: 223"There's some truth to that... But OTOH
* You have to pay translators
* You can't be sure that they're good

The thing is though, the Humble Bundle guys are probably in a prime position to assemble a translation team (in house, external, community driven, etc. - whatever method used, the ongoing/regular nature would help bring responsibility/accountability that could ensure decent translations) that they could offer/contract out to bundle participants. It would be pretty neat to see them raise the bar for indie games a bit by encouraging/requiring participants to have a minimum set of translations.

Waveform's translations were crowdsourced and that turned out really well by all reports.

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I'm liking where this discussion is headed.

PCGamingWiki.com might be a decent place for keeping track of the status of Humble titles. I'd be keen to help get the word out about such a thing (and try to make sure it's noticed by the Humble Bundle guys).

Hamish makes a really important point which I hadn't pushed so strongly in my article - the recent Windows only promotions (moreso the THQ bundle than the AF promotion as that was a) very clearly distinct from other stuff, and b) selling a look at Double Fine's prototyping workflows instead of just games) can be seen to be compound with already outstanding issues.

The other side of the coin is that it's up to the developers to decide whether to look after their Mac/Linux ports or not, and it's obvious that for some devs, once they disembark the Humble money train, Mac and Linux are no longer a priority.

How much pressure/control should Humble try to exert over developers in that sort of situation? Could this be solved through better title selection? Are there ways to just make supporting ports more attractive? Are developers hearing about the problems with their ports? These are all questions that I hope the Humble Bundle guys are continually asking themselves.

Quoting: "Anon, post: 7450"Btw., anyone have any idea what Flibit's lolno is? Or did he drop any hints about it? I'd love to know what is it since he's so secretive about it.

The developer pretty much mentioned it on Twitter a month or so back, so if you hunt around, you could probably work it out.

Edit: It may also be worth noting that there seems to be a bit of a correlation between titles that have outstanding issues and developers who didn't respond to me whilst I was researching for the article.

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Quoting: "Bumadar, post: 7429, member: 93"interesting read, I know its probably not possible to really find out, butI do wonder of all those linux games several are simply converted to linux so that the game can join the HiB, but how many are really maintained and fixed ? Dungeon Defenders tbh is a piece of junk right now, Walking Mars I just noticed has a new version (1.1) so that might now not lock up, downloading as we speak, but there are several more. Just feels a bit that when the HiB is over, give it 3-4 weeks, the focus is gone.... quantity vs quality

I touched very briefly on this in the conclusion. I would have liked to have really gone into detail on this subject, but records of outstanding bugs and when stuff was fixed has been difficult to come by. Depending on how things go, I may cover this in a future update.

This is a very real danger though - the potential for Linux to be seen as a place where it's OK to throw titles out and not maintain them seems high, and it would be more detrimental than a lack of titles.

In a recent conversation I had with icculus, he said that there are some things that are being looked at which he couldn't go into detail on (not that these are necessarily things that he would be in control of, being a contractor and all), so perhaps there is some resolution on its way (hopefully some that isn't done merely because a title is appearing in another bundle).

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Updates have been made. Thanks for the comments, guys :)

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Quoting: "Anon, post: 7418"I enjoyed reading this, but one thing - Jack Claw was never on Mac in any fashion.

Ah, my first real correction! This is what I get for forgetting to double check stuff sourced from Wikipedia against my own download page >_<
I'll be making an update soon. Thanks for pointing it out.
The source for the Mac port as done by Alternative Games was [URL='https://github.com/Frozenbyte/Jack-Claw/commit/22af434f21fa527dadc39235f90841616a513b28']added to the repo[/URL] though (which could potentially count as it being "on Mac"). Binaries definitely haven't been made available to Humble Bundle purchasers.

Quoting: "berarma, post: 7419, member: 131"I think Shank 2 was ported by Icculus. Jack Claw wasn't released for anything than Windows afaik. Good read.

Shank 2 was ported by Alternative Games president Tapio Honkonen. Icculus wasn't involved in that one according to the Humble Bundle guys (and he didn't mention it when we were corresponding about the article).
Jack Claw Linux binaries are on your Humble Bundle download page if you have purchased a bundle containing it. They were added 10 days after the bundle launched.

Quoting: "mongrol, post: 7422"Do you have any stats on the actual open sourcing of various games over the releases and the kind of licenses used?

Yeah actually, I touched on that in my [URL='http://cheesetalks.twolofbees.com/humbleStats.php#changing_bundles']shallow analysis of the first 10 Humble Bundles[/URL]. It's towards the end of the "[URL='http://cheesetalks.twolofbees.com/humbleStats.php#changing_bundles']The Changing Shape of Bundles[/URL]" section.

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Quoting: "David Montgomery-Blake, post: 7672, member: 429"Hey there,
I must have missed the comment. Was it a private message on the IGG campaign? I'm definitely interested in talking to you about the campaign and any help that you can offer to us! I loved that your blog recognized porters for the Humble Bundle games.

Yeah, I sent it in a PM through IndieGoGo about three weeks ago. I've shot you a PM through the forums here. It'll be good to bounce some ideas around.

Thanks for the feedback - it's great to be able to lift the lid a little on some porters that many hadn't heard of before. It's easily been the most popular aspect of my most recent article :)

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It sort of feels like this campaign is targeting the wrong audience. I shot them a few suggestions about how they might go about improving their campaign, but didn't hear anything back. it's a shame because the premise is great.

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Quoting: "Hamish, post: 7484, member: 6"Yes, the fact that the later half of the game did not live up fully to the expectations placed on it was my main concern with it. Keep in mind that John and Skyler were both depicted as being very caring individuals, so the fact that Zander's death is not really brought up again or mentioned upon meeting Maximillian (as far as I can recall) seems a bit odd to me.

I guess a rationale (if it were intentionally neglected) could have been that his death was meant to push them to extremes, and then once they were in over their heads, too much was going on for them to stop and linger on it.

It'll be interesting to see whether the DLC addresses any outstanding plot points from the game.

Quoting: "Hamish, post: 7484, member: 6"Yeah, you do sound a lot more critical when you actually have to write about something objectively. Just don't let me or anyone else ruin the fun for you. ;)

No risk of that - I loved the game :D

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