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For over a decade now, Humble Bundle has provided gamers with bundles of heavily discounted games, while also donating millions of dollars to charity. Traditionally, each Humble Bundle would let you buy in at various tiers, with sliders at the bottom to let you decide how much money goes to Humble Bundle itself, the charity, and the game publishers. You even had the option of giving all your money to one of the three entities, while giving nothing to the others.

Over the weekend, however, Humble Bundle announced that in May they would be testing a new update to the way adjusting donations work. Under the new system, you can toggle between two options: default donation, or extra to charity. The default option will give 85% to publishers, 10% to Humble Bundle, and 5% to charity. The other option gives 80% to publishers, 5% to Humble Bundle and 15% to charity. As of now, it does not appear there are any other customization options that will be available.

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Source

 

[rusty shackleford]

I guess they are hurting for sales, but that's what happens when you sell books and software instead of games. Too many people kept pausing humble monthly bundle due to quality so they offered a discounted rate for people on the classic plan just to bring them back. And now all this. If they offered bundles like they used to or offer decent bundles like what Fanatical has they would be in better shape.

 

[Deleted member 546149]

Just use a charitable search engine
Like YouCare or Ecoisa

 

[Snintendog]

So where is the option to skip publishers humble and charity? Devs are the only people i want to pay.

 

[Deleted User]

I am curious to know how much of their Business Model can now be written off as the main company's CSR.

If there is such a business loophole then it frames their acquisition a little clearer for me.

 

[CMDreamer]

The redesing should take away the Humble from the name, it should be named Greedy Bundle now.

Publishers greed at its max.

 

[TehCupcakes]

I would have understood this approach if this was how they started out. I mean, how do you convince publishers to submit good games worth hundreds of dollars (retail value) when it is going to be sold for < $15 and the buyers can choose not to give that money to the publishers at all?

Yet somehow, they made it work. Millions of people bought the bundles. Many good games made their way in, despite publishers getting a significantly smaller cut than they would elsewhere. The fact that they made it work all these years is proof enough that it's viable, so why take it away now?

Most people are just going to leave the default split anyway. But for the few who do care about choosing exactly where their money goes, just freaking let them! It's not worth making people angry at your company because of a money-grab like this. Choosing where your money goes was one of the big selling points of Humble Bundle, so this is just outright hypocrisy.

 

[Julie_Pilgrim]

I'm impressed it took IGN this long to fully ruin Humble Bundle tbh

New record!

 

[ZeroFX]

lol, i used to buy some bundles because of the games casually and giving it all to charity (only the ones that wasnt for bullshit topics tho) just because fuck those publishers, now i rather not using it lol.

 

[Deleted member 532471]

Unhumble bundle

 

[eyeliner]

I don't care about charity, i just want to buy cheap games and bundles

--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------


Actually the books bundles are quite good. I bought a lot of data science books from.them

Book bundle from Pakt and "quite good" in the same sentence is the beginning of the end times.
I mostly gave to publishers, anyway. I couldn't find any local charity, and the ones I saw were mostly for war veterans.

 

[Djidane]

I don't mind they force a % for them. But the balance between charity and dev is weird.
I understand they want them to publish on their store and that's a way to do it.

On the other hand there is charities I don't especially want to give money to.

 

[Dubbicakes]

Curious to see if this hurts them, it'll be interesting to see how much the gaming community actually cared about the charity aspect of Humble.
Personally I've always gave at least 90% to the charity and 0% to the publisher.

 

[DoctorBagPhD]

So when're they rebranding to ScummyBundle?

 

[DerpDingus]

Charities are mostly a scam themselves anyways. Much of the money goes straight to the charity organizers themselves who get 6 figure salaries or more.

 

[FAST6191]

I would have understood this approach if this was how they started out. I mean, how do you convince publishers to submit good games worth hundreds of dollars (retail value) when it is going to be sold for < $15 and the buyers can choose not to give that money to the publishers at all?

Yet somehow, they made it work. Millions of people bought the bundles. Many good games made their way in, despite publishers getting a significantly smaller cut than they would elsewhere. The fact that they made it work all these years is proof enough that it's viable, so why take it away now?

Most people are just going to leave the default split anyway. But for the few who do care about choosing exactly where their money goes, just freaking let them! It's not worth making people angry at your company because of a money-grab like this. Choosing where your money goes was one of the big selling points of Humble Bundle, so this is just outright hypocrisy.

You say that but 9 times out of 10 the games given over to the humble bundle were games that had more or less run the course, with likely a pittance each year from those discovering it for the first time (and maybe a few that missed out on the bundle), games that were having sequels (or games from the same dev) come out in the very near future, maybe the odd thing with some DLC or microtransactions. Conversely how many times were new games on it, were older games that became staples of a long term community/multiplayer (think minecraft, terarria, roblox, cod, battlefield) or similar things where games were actively still getting the big profits?

As far as money grab. Yes. Though you may also wish to look up the term unfunded liability (as a hint it is why even the expensive tools don't have a lifetime warranty any more).

 

[1B51004]

never really used it, seems really bad tho. One problem I do have is that I somehow signed up for it once, tried to stop getting emails from them and i still get emails from them.

 

[Julie_Pilgrim]

never really used it, seems really bad tho. One problem I do have is that I somehow signed up for it once, tried to stop getting emails from them and i still get emails from them.

It's nice for getting deals on games if you're into that sort of thing

 

[Kioku]

Haven't bought from Humble in a couple of years.. Haven't offered much in the way of a decent bundle for me, personally. This right here just cemented that notion. Fuck that.

 

[SonicRings]

Humble's old model honestly never made sense to me. How could they possibly allow customers to allocate all their money to charities? How do the devs and platform make anything? It makes sense for them to impose this limit, but at the same time the limit's way too harsh. They should make it more like 70% max to charities, leaving 30% to divide between devs and storefront. 15% is just paltry.

 

[Pipistrele]

Charities are mostly a scam themselves anyways. Much of the money goes straight to the charity organizers themselves who get 6 figure salaries or more.

There's a lot of good ones with extensive financial reports and strict non-profit policies.