13 votes

Humble Bundle is removing the "choose where your money goes" sliders, intending to switch to a choice between giving 5% or 15% to charity

6 comments

  1. [2]
    Deimos
    Link
    If anyone missed it, IGN acquired Humble in October 2017 (and Humble seems to have deleted the post from their blog announcing that?). This is probably the first major change they've made to their...

    If anyone missed it, IGN acquired Humble in October 2017 (and Humble seems to have deleted the post from their blog announcing that?).

    This is probably the first major change they've made to their model since then. The only other thing I can think of is when they switched to "Humble Choice" for their monthly subscription, where you could see what all of the games were, instead of having most of them be hidden until after you had already paid. That was a positive change in my opinion though, but this one definitely isn't.

    15 votes
    1. emnii
      Link Parent
      The other major change since then was a different change to Humble Choice. They went from one plan, $12 for all of the games in a monthly bundle, to three plans, $5 for trove access only (their PC...

      The other major change since then was a different change to Humble Choice. They went from one plan, $12 for all of the games in a monthly bundle, to three plans, $5 for trove access only (their PC version of Xbox Game Pass), $15 for 3 games out of the bundle, or $20 for 9 games out of the bundle. Those of us with existing $12 plans are getting objectively a better deal than anyone else, even though Humble frequently gives all of the games in a bundle to top tier subscribers too.

      They've also slowed down the Humble Indie Bundle in favor of more frequent publisher bundles.

      Anecdotally, I feel like the quality of the games in the Humble Choice bundles has taken a plummet too. While I definitely have too many games, I've found myself skipping the monthly bundles more often in the last two years than before they changed the Humble Choice model.

      7 votes
  2. Akir
    Link
    Also notable is that you can't choose how much money goes to the developers or "humble tip" anymore, either. I guess that's somewhat fair for how I've been using it, since I stopped giving them...

    Also notable is that you can't choose how much money goes to the developers or "humble tip" anymore, either. I guess that's somewhat fair for how I've been using it, since I stopped giving them tips after they got bought up.

    But this really sucks; I typically gave either most or all of my contribution for these bundles to charity.

    The only solace I have from this change is that I really don't buy the bundles anymore; it's been a long time since they've actually done an indie bundle, and I've noticed that a lot of the packages tend to be made up of archive dumps - collections of PDFs of outdated books, incomplete comicbook series; random video game assets, audio samples, etc - things that aren't likely to make the owners much money to begin with.

    10 votes
  3. Adys
    Link
    Welp, that's it for me then, done buying these. It was rare enough in the first place…

    Welp, that's it for me then, done buying these. It was rare enough in the first place…

    8 votes
  4. kfwyre
    Link
    Most of the discussion I’ve seen about this focuses on the charity changes (and this blog post is no exception), but what they’re being quiet about is locking in the portion that goes to them. You...

    Most of the discussion I’ve seen about this focuses on the charity changes (and this blog post is no exception), but what they’re being quiet about is locking in the portion that goes to them.

    You used to be able to adjust the Humble “tip” on the slider. It defaulted to something quite high (don’t know exactly but it was somewhere around 30% I think?). I would always slide it down a bit — I think Humble still deserves money, just not the default amount they were allotting to themselves.

    I know after IGN bought them out a lot of people talked about dropping the Humble slider to $0 as a slight. I’m wondering if enough were doing that to impact them? I doubt it though and just think this is Humble reducing the variability of their revenue. In the animation on the site, you can see the two Humble tip options given are 20% by default or 10% as the alternate.

    5 votes