Humble Bundle has been acquired by IGN

I need to buy couple harddrives to get all my drm-free content out of there.

Gone but not forgotted.

*pours bit of 40oz on carpet*

QuoteI'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

Hi Liam,

Its all about the money :)

April 2011 was the month that Humble got 4.7mil venture capital (Link.
Now Venture capital Firms don't really care about Games, Linux or Charity, they only care about make more profit.

Now yes Humble probably did rake in a lot of money I guess, but when people can pay what they want and then are free to split it in 3 ways it won't bring much return to them, I would think most people chose charity as the biggest cut. I always did and then the game developer and then Humble. So how much profit did Humble itself make really after costs of bandwidth and servers/storage.

Either way it was inevitable that they got sold to someone who was willing to give more then the 4.7mil that they invested, and I guess IGN was that someone.

Quoting: Lonsforis GOG still "not so linux friendly"?

Well, yes. Now days "no linux build for GOG: became pretty usual thing. When they released Dungeons 3 yesterday and it HAVE linux support from day one i was quite pleased - not expected this.

Time to download all my content for all platforms and music from there. By the way, there's the hib downloader on Linux for that which I could really recommend. Doing this manually could be a day job.

Pros
- They'll have more money and coverage

Cons
- Collusion
- Coverage of humble titles over other indie titles
- Dilution of the charity spirit of the bundles
- Misleading scores of subpar games inside a bundle

IGN 10/10

I bought a year subscription to their monthly bundle and was on the fence about renewing. Thanks IGN for making my mind up for me!

Quoting: GuestOh no :( Worst (IT related) news of the year for me :( The first HiB was such a great surprise, but the spirit got lost.

Imo the core bundles have always kept the spirit: linux support, drm-free and chari-tee.

This acquisition is a huge conflict of interest. Not only because of the potential for scoring the games higher because they may be in the humble store/bundles, but also linking of stores from ign and the possible consequences for humble store affiliates (ign competitors such as youtubers, other sites, etc).

Then, there's the news reporting on the humble store and/or competitors; expect problems in the humble store to be under reported and problems at competitors to be exaggerated.


Last edited by emphy on 14 October 2017 at 11:55 pm UTC

Media company will probably start pushing their weight around, regarding DRM.

Quoting: GuestI was told to contact the dev, who was also not great, expecting me to do many complex workarounds (Humble's packaging was terrible), and he finally admitted it was a 4-year old submission, that he could only submit in the form Humble said (yet Humble seemed to have no knowledge of Linux/installs at all). The impression I got was that Humble care nothing for Linux users, and I'm not surprised at what's happened.

Back then (around 2011) no one had any idea as to how package games for Linux and the quality of the ports was atrocious (did I mention that after half an hour of playtime the sound of "Shadowgrounds: Survivor" had began to stutter and finally ceased to exist due to sound buffer overflow and the developers simply didn't care with the excuse "Either this, or no sound at all; we are done with this game and will not fix it for shitty Linux sound system, deal with it!"?).
What you saw was actually a great deal of care at that time <when "not to care" literally equaled to "GTFO linaps scum">.
Every developer just used what he/she guessed was most suitable:

• separate RPM and DEB packages (Oil Rush);


• (very convoluted) DEB packages (Battle Worlds: Kronos);


• tar.gz and zip(!) interleaved between updates (Shadowrun: Returns -- Harebrained seemed to have troubles making its mind);


• MojoSetup;


• even RAR archives!

Valve also made a grave mistake of (xkcd 927) with its "Steam Runtime" and it took time for GOG to finally settle with MojoSetup (for now).

2008 … 2010 were really dark ages of Linux gaming. There were virtually no commercial Linux games, people played some Open Source games (many of which were clones of commercial games) like "Super Tux Cart", "Freedroid RPG", "The Battle for Wesnoth", "Crimson Fields", "OpenRA", "OpenMV" etc.
"Humble Indie Bundle" was a breakthrough at that time. Sadly, Humble Inc. degraded into "Steam key re-seller" since then, but I believe we will find a suitable replacement eventually.

Pfft, natural progression. Humble has for a long time already swung towards the big players. And it's just an online store (although wrapped in a cute wrapping). The only thing we can be worried about after IGN acquiring them is continuing Linux support. But even that support has long been dwindling anyway.

Natural progression, plain and simple.

Quoting: GuestI'm sure you're right; anyone watching how popular Humble was on Linux and why, could do well by bringing in what worked, but learning from any mistakes. There didn't used to be GOG and Humble etc, or much, as you describe, so I'm sure you're correct that new organisations emerge, especially as so many people have come over from Windows or dual-boot with Linux ... there's a whole new wave of people who are very pro-Linux, so I'm sure the future's bright.

Well, yes and no. I guess Linux is growing and it seems a beautiful place for Indie and AA games. I'm sure we will see more and more smaller games on Linux in the future, so looks good. Regarding the big AAA titles I guess the next years will be similar to the last 2 years, something like 5 AAA titles a year from porting houses like Feral. I guess the market is still to small to justify more big titles and furthermore the big publishers want DRM/at least Steam for their titles which is rejected by part of the Linux gamers. Dunno how it will look in 5 years.
But indeed, you can't compare today with 5 years ago.

Quoting: kibblesI have given HB a fair amount of sales and I gave it to them on principle. Now that IGN is in the mix I will stop buying from them altogether for the same reasons.

Why does it matter to you who sits in the board, if they still operate like before? (genuine question, not meant rhetorical)

Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: kibblesI have given HB a fair amount of sales and I gave it to them on principle. Now that IGN is in the mix I will stop buying from them altogether for the same reasons.

Why does it matter to you who sits in the board, if they still operate like before? (genuine question, not meant rhetorical)

For me, I never liked the way IGN did business. I've already asked for HB to delete my account. No response from them, yet. I like to put my money where people do business the way I want them to.

Quoting: RafiLinux

Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: kibblesI have given HB a fair amount of sales and I gave it to them on principle. Now that IGN is in the mix I will stop buying from them altogether for the same reasons.

Why does it matter to you who sits in the board, if they still operate like before? (genuine question, not meant rhetorical)

For me, I never liked the way IGN did business. I've already asked for HB to delete my account. No response from them, yet. I like to put my money where people do business the way I want them to.

I agree, who controls a company makes a big difference. The problem is that no one expects them to operate as before. Even if humble doesn't change, what if IGN just starts adding links to purchase games... a thought that more than one person has asked since the news of the deal. IMHO, that is clearly crossing the line in matters of trust.

If the reviews lack integrity, you are supporting the company with every purchase you make, regardless of whether or not it was related to any content on IGN's site.

If it was any good, would you buy a Zune? (just an example, I don't think that they still make them) Regardless of whether or not the zune is a monopoly product (it surely isn't) buying one gives profits to microsoft... a company that sells windows 10 telemetry data on its users to 3rd parties and built and maintained a monopoly with shady business practices. Why would you want to support those people?

On the other hand, no longer supporting the humble store will make the long term profits of IGN that much less... possibly convincing themselves or other companies thinking about doing the same thing that it isn't worth it... hopefully showing others that integrity actually matters to consumers.

However, I do not plan on deleting my account either. I do plan on canceling my Humble Monthly when it comes up for renewal, I will be looking for sales on other sites more... but I have so much through HB... (I have bought a ton of games since learning about them with the HiB#2...) I plan to use my account to keep downloading... to use my steam keys. I don't plan on buying more from them...but I plan to use the resources they have to support the items that I have bought from them already. Heck, if they have a 2 day free game special... I plan to get it... I just don't plan on giving them any more money.

Quoting: kibblesHowever, I do not plan on deleting my account either. I do plan on canceling my Humble Monthly when it comes up for renewal, I will be looking for sales on other sites more... but I have so much through HB... (I have bought a ton of games since learning about them with the HiB#2...) I plan to use my account to keep downloading... to use my steam keys. I don't plan on buying more from them...but I plan to use the resources they have to support the items that I have bought from them already. Heck, if they have a 2 day free game special... I plan to get it... I just don't plan on giving them any more money.

I hear you. I am saying GB to over 100+ games in addition to some great comics but I backed up the games and books and just don't want anything to do with IGN at all.

Also this is the modern age, you don't have to give them money to support something anymore.


Last edited by Mezron on 16 October 2017 at 3:46 pm UTC

Canceled my monthly subscription with the reason being "IGN ownership"

*Update*

If you remove your HB account, they still provide you permanent links to your games.

Well, it's too early to tell, maybe it will turn to be a real mess really soon, like lots of consoles bundles, crap games, much less Linux supported games etc. But maybe we will only have MORE bundles, only MORE choices.

I don't like the idea of HB being under IGN flag. It's against the "indie" mood that should prevail.