This is actually quite easy to do. You just add a reasonable timer to the product being bought when it is added to the cart(ie. 10 minutes or something); this keeps people from sitting on the cart for days, but allows the customers to get what they want. The only downside to this system is the loss of control over how much product is moved at a specific price point.

Now all they need to do to finish pissing off their buyers is to sneak Starbound back in as one of next week's added games. I only went for non-BTA for To The Moon, so now I'll sit back and watch everything unfold.

I'm gonna buy this - just so I can gift To The Moon and the sound track to my niece!

Quite a meh bundle for me. Only Reus is semi interesting and in BTA so unless the games added after first week are something I want, this will be first huble bundle I'll pass :-/. Wish they'd put something else in Surgeon Simulators place.

Sheesh, $6+ for games which take 2-3 hours to play. I'll wait till these games are much, much cheaper.

You could see this coming a mile off. Looking at Reddit and these forums, it's become a bit of a PR nightmare for Humble Bundle as expected and has kinda steamrollered the positivity of the rest of the bundle.

You'd have thought that the negativity that GOG's use of this tactic brought about would have discouraged limiting quantities, but it seems that the wider industry is pinning its hopes on this approach to counteract the heavy-discount mentality among PC gamers at the moment.

Now they've got themselves in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. There's no way that they can cater for everyone who tried to buy it when the copies were still there, and they'll end up with a lot of pissed off buyers. The only way they can do this, as you say, is to make it a BTA bonus game, which will piss off the early adopters.

if they said clearly that the first 1000 buyers get it, then no he do not have any basis for a refund.

But I do not know what the wording on the page was at the time, as I was only aware of the new bundle about half an hour after it had started, so I do not know how it presented at the time.

It would be quite the show next Tuesday. I'll make sure to get the pop-corn.

yeah, then it would be for the buyers in the first 10 minutes of the bundle, not for the first 1000 buyers.

They're going to find out that less and less people will buy their shit, then.

yeah, it could have been handled differently. I hate these sale tactics myself. I wish Humble did not participate in these types. But there you go, first GoG, now Humble.

Well, they dug their grave, now they have to lie in it.

You don't create a market with infinite supply and zero-cost replication without economic consequences.

edit- sorry, misread.

Desura/Indie Royale came between them, with hilariously bad results.

Seriously, it's been like Jack Keane 2 every day.

Indiegala got into the act as well at one point (i think - ill have to check)...