Mile
Zero

The fourth Humble Bundle for Android is wrapping up today: if you like games and charity, it's a ridiculously good deal, even if you don't own an Android device--everything works on Windows, Mac, and Linux as well. Although it turns the Nexus 4 into a toasty little space heater, it would be worth it just to get Waking Mars, the loopy botany platformer I've been playing for a couple of days now.

If nothing else, I like that the Humble Bundle proves that it's still feasible to sell software the old-fashioned way: by putting up a website and taking orders yourself. Digital retailers like Steam or the various mobile platform stores are all well and good (the Bundle comes with Steam keys, which I usually use to actually download the games), but a lot of my favorite gaming memories come from this kind of ad-hoc distribution. I don't want to see it die, and I think it would be bad for independent developers if it did.

In the last few months, people like Valve's Gabe Newell and Mojang's Markus Persson have raised concerns about where Windows is going. Since the PC has been the site of a lot of really interesting experimentation and independent development over the last few years, Microsoft's plan to shut down distribution of Metro-style applications on Windows 8, except through a centralized store that they own, is troubling. At the same time, a lot of people have criticized that perspective, saying that these worries are overblown and alarmist.

There may be some truth to that. But I think the fact that the Humble Bundle is, across the three or four mobile platforms in popular use, only available on Android should tell us something. Why is that? Probably because Google's OS is the only one where developers can handle their own distribution and updates, without having to get approval from the platform owner or fork over a 30% surcharge. That fact should make critics of Newell and Persson think twice. Can the Humble Bundle (one of the most successful and interesting experiments since the shareware catalogs I had in the 80s) and similar sales survive once traditional computing moves to a closed distribution model? It looks to me like the answer is no.