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?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
psycho_driver Oct 14, 2017
*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.
cRaZy-bisCuiT Oct 14, 2017
- 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
burningserenity Oct 14, 2017
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
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.
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