This is rather unsettling to see, Humble Bundle has now officially joined with the massive media site IGN.
A small cut from their official announcement:
Announcing our biggest bundle ever: Humble Bundle is proudly joining the IGN family! We will continue to bring you all of our humble products, but with more resources and help from IGN.
I'm not entirely sure why Humble needed to join with anyone, considering the amount of money they were pulling in they must have been pretty secure. I'm sure they have their reasons, but something about this doesn't feel right to me. A media company controlling one of the biggest online stores and an occasional games publisher, it feels like a conflict there.
Gamasutra has reported that IGN executive VP Mitch Galbraith said that they don't plan to change anything, "If it's not broken, don't fix it", but then John Graham from Humble said "We want to stick to the fundamentals in the short term.", the key there is "short term". How long will it be until IGN start throwing a bit of weight around to change things up?
In the end though, it could end up being positive. There's no denying how big IGN is, so their extra resources could well help out Humble in a lot of ways.
Honestly, I would be really surprised now if we ever saw a proper Humble Indie Bundle again, I certainly doubt that Humble would ever be getting Linux games ported like they used to. We are more likely to see even more bundles from bigger publishers, likely more console bundles too.
See the full announcement from Humble here (Archive link). How do you feel about this?
How long before something resembling that happens eh...
(that and checking out how to close the account when things turn IGN)
Reality: Humble Bundle Windows app for wider DRM implementation.
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