I had heard of the website Bundle-in-a-Box before, but never really looked into it until one of my friends Robb Sherwin had one of his games added to a bundle. What Bundle-in-a-Box does is group several games together and allow their customers to pay whatever price they think the bundle is worth. The games are downloadable and DRM-free so you can install them wherever and to whatever you want.

This week’s bundle contains five games and the minimum price you can pay is $2, which works out to be 40 cents per game. If you go crazy and pay more than the average price (which is currently $5.85), you get four additional games for a total of nine in all. $5.85 for 9 games is 65 cents per game, big spender.

This is the part where I talk about what you else in this world you could get for 40 cents instead of a game. McDonald’s now charges 25 cents for additional tiny plastic cups of McNugget dipping sauce, so with 40 cents in your pocket, you could buy one additional container of sweet and sour sauce there. For 40 cents you couldn’t afford the cheapest item on Taco Bell’s menu, a “cheesy roll-up,” which is a tortilla with some melted cheese inside it that costs 79 cents. At the mall, a single gumball from the gumball machine costs fifty cents, so you couldn’t buy one of those either. The cost of a single stamp is 46 cents now, so with only 40 cents to your name you couldn’t buy enough postage to mail a latter to your next door neighbor. I suppose on iTunes you could buy 40% of a single song. I’m not sure they pro-rate them that way, but you get the idea.

One of the downfalls of digital distribution, be it games or music or movies or books, is that many consumers think digital goods should cost less than their physical counterparts. And I agree, to an extent. When I first added my book Commodork (which retails for $15 in paperback) to the Amazon digital bookstore, the initial price Amazon suggested was $9.99 which I was told by potential consumers was too high. I almost immediately lowered the price to $4.99, which I was also told was too high. Currently you can buy DRM-free PDF copies of my books Commodork and Invading Spaces for $2.99 each from my website. Each of those books represents a year’s worth of work. I wrote Commodork by waking up early and writing, staying up late and writing, and writing on weekends. For a year. If you figure I worked on Commodork 10 hours a week for an entire year, at $2.99 that means I earned a whopping .006 (six one-thousandths) cents per hour. Robb Sherwin told me last night he spent 2 1/2 years working on Necrotic Drift, his game in this week’s Bundle in a Box. A game which, again, you can own for 40 cents.

For Christmas, my son and I each got a new game for the PlayStation 3 (Call of Duty and Need for Speed). The total price of these two games combined with tax was $130. The cost for 5 games here is a minimum of $2. I won’t lie; I paid the whopping $6 to get 9 games. That’s more than “cheesy roll-up” money, but it barely covers the price of a combo meal.

Bundle-in-a-Box takes PayPal, Google Checkout, and credit cards. When I bought my Bundle it took about 8 seconds to pay and then I received the e-mail containing the download information about 4 seconds later. It will take you much less time to buy these games than it will take you to read anything I’ve ever written. Ever.

This week’s bundle contains an RPG, puzzle games, a couple of graphical adventure games, and of course my friend Robb’s text adventure. Won’t you consider buying a bundle of 40 cent games this week?

Link: Bundle-in-a-Box