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: GuestSo people who run fundraisers, advertise charities and provide incentives to donating to non-profits don’t support charities if they don’t also give themselves? That’s an odd argument. By the same token, I guess people who donate hair for cancer patients should just shut up and do it instead of turning it into an event to increase awareness and raise money? Because supposedly those charities would receive exactly the same amount of money in the end without anyone nudging people to donate?Quoting: SalvatosWell, if they’re bleeding so much money that they can’t stay in business, they won’t be able to support charities at all.They already don’t support charities. We do, when we buy games there and set some amount to go to charities.
Quoting: shorbergAs a side-note: Did it always say "Publisher", didn't it use to say "Developers"? Because those are not the same thing.
Well, originally it was Humble Indie Bundle. Then they started doing other bundles as well, and now Indie bundles have become quite rare in the meantime (if they even still do those). The change therefore makes sense.
That's also the biggest reason why I lost interest in Humble Bundle. The bundles have changed from "really great hand picked Indie pearls" to "just another random selection of 100% replaceable AAA games". So, yeah. I'm a bit sad that the sliders are gone, but personally it won't make much difference for me, as Humble has lost me as a customer a long time ago.
It's been hit-or-miss these days, especially as my library grows and I find more and more duplicates.
Humble monthly also calms down my buying compulsions :)
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