It's a symptom of the failure of the multiplayer game market. Unlike single-player titles, it is much harder to establish an MP title, because you need not only a good game, but also people playing it. An empty community will scare away potential new players. All of these developers believe that they've created the next great MP sensation, and 99% find out the hard way that this is not the case.

Inclusion in an indie bundle is essentially a reflex reaction to commercial failure. Few of them seem to actually plan for this failure, which is why you have the minority of angry early adopters paying full price for it just months or even weeks before it comes out. Another reflex action is a shift to F2P (AirMech, Akaneiro), but that is frought with entirely different risks.

The problem is, devs include these games in bundles on the mistaken assumption that people are actually going to PLAY these multiplayer games. I've just fired up Foreign Legion: Multi Massacre, which is in the current Indie Royale, and there isn't a single person online.

And speaking of Foreign Legion, there's a worrying trend in the indie market to dress up a game superficially as "single player" to lure in unsuspecting buyers. These "single-player" modes are often essentially shallow, short, unstructured bot matches against undeveloped AI and no real progression. Foreign Legion: Multi Massacre takes this trend one step further, dressing up the storefront text to hide the fact that it is a multiplayer-only game and then brazenly adding the "single-player" tag to it.

And when you have to lie to your customers to get anyone interested, you can tell things aren't going well.
No, the directory itself is 11GB. The repeated content for each episode is around 30MB, the episode-specific assets weigh in at between 300MB-500MB.

Stripping out the repeated Unreal engine files would probably save a gigabyte of space at most.

The Steam version is DRM-free, so I'm just creating a SFX 7zip file of the directory. Be curious to see how much it compresses it down to if there is so much repetition.

Booster Trooper is another good example of this, it was in the recent Flying Bundle. I kind of wanted to try it out, since people say it's similar to Soldat which I loved.. but no one plays it. I'm glad I got it free from a friend, but this trend is tiring. Inclusion of dead multiplayer only games doesn't help bundle sales..

Yep. And whereas a single player game can always be "revived" (as GOG proves), it is almost impossible for a multiplayer only game to reach the critical mass of players again. Once they are dead, they usually stay dead. And since many of them never reach critical mass in the first place, they are effectively ... stillborn.

I just checked, and you're correct. Thanks for putting that right.

Bundlestars. ;)

Wasn't it Icarus Online the one where the dev kickstarted the first game, then went ahead and did it again a 2nd time for a follow up? (both multiplayer i believe?)

On topic, anyone checked if any of the 'steam only' can be run without steam? (effectively being drm free anyway)

1953 KGB was also in a Bundlestars bundle - apparently I did not do my research ;-) Thanks for the info!

New bonus @ 20000 - Panda P.I. - The Stars Await EP

Not sure if you read my addendum up there, but just as a FYI: Grimm is otherwise DRM-free and compresses down to just over 2GB with 7Zip on Ultra :)

So you might be right after all - a lot of repetition in the individual episodes

Yep. This is a good bundle, and I can finally take IL-2 Sturmovik from my wishlist.

Also, next bonus is some kind of panda songs... ;p

I had no idea that panda's sang... well you learn something new every day! ;-p

More weird indie music... Oh dear! :D

Thanks. It's getting quite harder and harder to keep track of where all my games come from ;)

Why, when I play Grimm, do I get reminded of Bad Day LA, especially with the graphical style, glitchiness and bizarre controls?

I rather take more weird indie music than more Steam-only bonus games... ;-)

But seriously, the music bonuses on Groupees are very good most of the time. Found some really interesting bands and artists just because of their bundles.

This is the "legacy" :D