And.....Jeff is knocking off the reasons to pirate, one by one.
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When Jeff asked pirates why they pirated the bundle (instead of buying it for one penny), some responded that they just prefer to use BitTorrent. It reduces bandwidth costs, increases download speeds, reduces file corruption, and makes it easy to pause and resume downloads.
With that in mind, Jeff added an official BitTorrent download method inside of the Humble Indie Bundle #2. You can get the games and soundtracks via BitTorrent by clicking the BitTorrent toggle:
The BitTorrent links are seeded using webseeds from our MaxCDN servers, and then accelerated further by all of the other users, so they should be the fastest way to download. As more and more people start seeding it, it should start to cost us a lot less per download, so please use BitTorrent if you are one of those who paid a penny or less for the bundle!
BitTorrent gets a bad rap because of its association with piracy, but we may actually be able to reduce piracy by supporting it. The most common search term for the Humble Indie Bundle is "Humble Indie Bundle torrent", so we hope that by supporting BitTorrent we can help convert at least some of the pirates into legitimate users, or at least give one less reason to pirate it.
If you got to this post via Google, looking for a way to get it on BitTorrent, now you can purchase the Humble Bundle, and use our premium torrents!
Do you prefer direct downloads or torrents? Please let us know if you can think of any other ways we can improve our download service.
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In my anonymous piracy survey, I received hundreds of responses. We already addressed one of them by adding BitTorrent support to the bundle, and now I'd like to discuss another one:
"I'm pirating the bundle because I have no credit card and can't buy it."
To a certain mindset, this seems like a good excuse. You can't buy it, and you feel entitled to have it, so there's no choice but to pirate it, right? However, for some people, piracy just isn't an option -- they believe in what we're doing and want to support the bundle. For example, I recently saw someone on Reddit who didn't have a credit card. Instead of feeling entitled to pirate the games, he actually took the effort to gather up all his spare coins and convert that into a $12 Amazon Gift Card using a local Coinstar machine.
I'd like to sincerely thank him for going to such lengths when it would have been so easy to Google for a pirated version. However, here's where it gets interesting: Amazon Payments doesn't honor Amazon Gift Cards (pretty sad). So the would-be bundle supporter posted on Reddit with his lament at not being able to buy a bundle. Immediately, another Redditor bought a gift bundle for him.
This is truly inspiring to me, both the efforts of the coin-collector and the generous Redditor who gave the gift of the Humble Bundle to someone in need, without expecting anything in return. I have been rather fortunate lately, so I'd like to join in: if you legitimately can't purchase the Humble Bundle and made the decision not to pirate it, let me know in the comments below with a way for me to contact you. I will personally buy 20 or so $10 gift bundles (all to charity), and give them to the people I feel are legitimately deserving.
