Humble Bundle is currently facing something of a backlash after announcing they will be replacing the sliders on bundle purchases, with two options that are far less generous.
The what: usually when you go to purchase a Humble Bundle, there's sliders allowing you full choice on where you money goes. You could choose all to developers, all to Humble, all to Charity - or whatever. However, recently they vanished for a lot of customers.
Humble has now actually announced their planned changes which include an overhaul to bundle pages. They're replacing the sliders with only two options. The option to give more to charity will be capped at 15% up from the normal option being 5% (which will make it match Humble Choice).
Picture Credit - Humble Bundle
Across Reddit, Twitter and other places they've seen a backlash on this since people feel it's no longer them being "humble". The replies and quoted tweets from the announcement are particularly critical of what Humble are doing.
As a Humble Partner, I'm definitely disappointed they're doing this. To be blunt, personally the charity angle for me was a nice extra while buying a bundle of games now and then when it interested me personally. I do hope Humble are listening to the feedback on this though, while business is business and as a store they want to obviously be sustainable and turn a profit (and so do the developers / publishers involved) - it's clearly not a very humble way to go about it.
How do you feel about this? Will it affect future purchases from Humble for you?
Quoting: GuestHumble used to be something quite different, and I stopped being terribly interested in it quite a while ago. Sure I've made the odd purchase, but rarely for games and instead ebooks.
Equally I'm not jumping up & down about it. It once was something I liked, now it's not, and that's really about it. Meh.
I much prefer to use patreon, itch.io, and purchases directly from developers these days.
I feel the same way. I've been buying more and more from itch.io. They have a lot of DRM FREE titles I can not find anywhere else and many of their online MP games work in linux as is.
Is it because users were confused by the sliders? Have they even done some survey even before starting to develop the new feature?
As most people here, I'm no longer really excited about Humble.
It used to be a bold offer, proposing independent games and, in exchange, you'd give to the devs and to charities. And for the very first bundles some games would even go open source if they were to reach a certain amount.
Most of that is lost and Humble became a mere Steam store with the possibility to give to charities at the same time.
But I can do both on my own, thank you.
I hope a lot of people will simply boycott them...
And
QuoteToday we’re sharing some updates coming to bundle pages and how they will help us continue to support charity.Yeah, sure!
Quoting: CyrilWell, if they’re bleeding so much money that they can’t stay in business, they won’t be able to support charities at all.QuoteToday we’re sharing some updates coming to bundle pages and how they will help us continue to support charity.Yeah, sure!
Last edited by Salvatos on 24 April 2021 at 2:54 pm UTC
Quoting: CyrilI didn't buy anything on Humble for a long time, and I'm pretty sure I won't in the future.The slider change kinda sucks, but who else is doing what they're doing? Don't boycott. What for, anyway? Then we have zero places like them.
I hope a lot of people will simply boycott them...
And
QuoteToday we’re sharing some updates coming to bundle pages and how they will help us continue to support charity.Yeah, sure!
That said, my game buying is lower than it was years ago. And their bundles are often weak on native Linux support. So, I find myself also buying more eBooks from Humble lately than games like mirv.
Quoting: ageresI bought a couple of $1 bundles recently and wondered where did the slider go... I used to give more percentage to GoL. What share will Humble Partners get now? Nothing?We'll just have to wait and see, they've not told partners of any changes.
Last edited by Liam Dawe on 24 April 2021 at 4:11 pm UTC
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