Wolfire Games is running a special sale called the Humble Bundle, where you can pay as little as one penny via PayPal, Google Checkout, or Amazon, for five cross-platform indie games that are completely free of DRM or even serial numbers. Despite that, says the company, it looks like over 25% of downloads are coming from “shared links from forums and other places without actually contributing anything.” That’s not counting anything happening over BitTorrent.

So why the hell are so many people still pirating a bundle of games that are so easy to legitimately purchase? Jeff at Wolfire’s blog thinks the reasons may include:

• not being able to use one of the three payment options,
• laziness (it’s too much trouble to complete any sort of checkout process),
• people who make a bulk purchase of the bundle and then share it with friends, and
• users who want to screw over the man, the man being “anyone.”

It could also be that people clicking the shared links don’t know about the terms of the legitimate sale, and don’t have any incentive to research it. (When was the last time you saw a company bend over backwards like Wolfire to make a purchase so easy?)

Whatever the reasons, Jeff points out that if you’re going to pirate the games, it would be cool if you’d use BitTorrent to reduce the traffic load on Wolfire’s servers.

“Saving a penny — pirating the Humble Indie Bundle” [Wolfire via ars technica]

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