You might recall that last year I published the Humble Visualisations, a series of aggregated and calculated statistics and charts that (I hope) reveal some extra things about the Humble Bundles and their contributors. Last month I gave it its first major update, which included a back-end overhaul and a bunch of new charts.

I added in "vs time" graphs for Non-Indie bundles to compliment the two sets for all and Indie only bundles, as well as a new illustrative timeline and a table showing the variation in time between bundles. I also added summary stats showing revenues, averages and purchasers for combinations of bundles  (All, Indie, Non-Indie) displayed in the same fashion as individual bundles, showing some interesting figures that aren't immediately visible from any of the other visualisations.

The main reason behind this update was to create additional charts for use in an article I've written to try to interpret all those statistics and trends. I'd always intended to write a companion article to go with the Humble Visualisations, but I'd intentionally steered away for it for the first few months (in the hope that that would encourage others to write about it as well). When I was about halfway through putting the charts together, I realised I needed something to break up the article a bit and keep it fun, so I contacted every contributor who has been listed in the list of top contributors for any bundle (every contributor who was easy to contact, that is), and asked for any thoughts they might have on the bundles, what motivated them to contribute, and any other anecdotes they cared to share.

Cheese Talks To: Himself (about Humble Bundle Statistics)

In the end, the article ended up being over 7,000 words (not counting a thousand for each of the graphs) and covers everything from open source projects that have come out of Humble Bundle promotions to possible causes of individual platform fluctuations between bundles. It took a lot longer than I'd anticipated to wrangle all those quotes together (which was a good thing since it took me longer than I'd planned to write the body of the article), but it was great to talk to everybody who got back to me (even those who declined to offer comment for the article), and I think I've made a couple of new friends, which is always nice.

Looking forwards from that, I already have small updates planned for both the Humble Visualisations and for my article (there are some additional numbers that I'd like to include/talk about, and I've just heard back from another top contributor), and I have an in-progress interview with Frozenbyte, the developers of Trine 2 (which I reviewed last year).

Want to know what else I'd been up to at the same time? Astronomusic, Desurium, Other Stuff