Fanatical put up their own Stand With Ukraine Charity Bundle

Bought it.

The Ukrainian Red Cross is a worthy cause to support, no matter what you think about the war. Couple of games off my wishlist in the bundle as well.

instant buy for me! i bought it two minutes after it went live. So, i bought all Ukraine game Bundles so far.

10,000 keys * $15 = not very ambitious, when the other charity bundles have generated millions?

itch.io > $6.3M
humble > $18.6M

For the Fanatical bundle, even if everybody paid triple, that's still less than $0.5M. Maybe they will add more keys for some of the games?

The bundle is already out of stock !

For the Fanatical bundle, even if everybody paid triple, that's still less than $0.5M. Maybe they will add more keys for some of the games?

That's still a decent wad of cash for the charity. I've directly donated pitiful sums around the price of a brand new indie game (10-30€) to various charities, but I feel like every little bit helps. Maybe it only covers the cost of some basic supplies, but so what? And maybe $150,000 only covers the cost of running a single field ambulance for a month or a blood bank for a couple of days, I have no idea, but surely that's not insignificant.

I suppose Fanatical (a UK-based key store with a limited catalogue of keys they source directly from publishers) takes a smaller risk by limiting the amount of keys they stock to what they're pretty much guaranteed to be able to shift. Which is fine. It's not supposed to be a competition after all. This gets them a bit of PR, making a bigger splash than a blog post or a tweet.

The bundle is already out of stock !

Seems so! And it made a tidy $155,316 for the Red Cross, which actually should cover the annual salaries of a couple of essential Red Cross employees on the ground, so that sounds like a decent haul. 💰


BTW, the minimum price for me was a bit over 16€, which rounds up to $18. I didn't check the receipt yet, but VAT is the likely reason.

I saw this bundle and never realized it was limited quantity instead of limited time period and thought, 'I'll look at that tomorrow.' As it turns out, tomorrow was too late. I probably would have picked it up if it were still available just for The Falconeer and Among Us. Oh, well.

Where were these companies for the Iraq, Afghanistan and Syrian wars? Ow, and lets not forget Algeria. If you want to help the Ukrainians it's better to do this through other official channels than to fatten the bank accounts of these hypocrites.

Where were these companies for the Iraq, Afghanistan and Syrian wars? Ow, and lets not forget Algeria. If you want to help the Ukrainians it's better to do this through other official channels than to fatten the bank accounts of these hypocrites.

Which companies? I know you don't mean ICRC / Red Cross / Red Crescent? If you do, maybe you just don't know that they've been doing their part to aid the victims of pretty much any war you can name since the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and they've done this with funding directly provided by governments, but also by companies and individuals. They're probably the least controversial medical/humanitarian charities around.

They definitely were in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. And in Algeria's war of independence as well. All of this information is actually very easy to find. I'll let you do your own research as they say. Just google/ddg ICRC and whatever region or country you're interested in. Try "Red Cross" or "Red Crescent" instead of ICRC to get even more results. You're welcome.

And if this is about the game stores, think about it for a minute. Game key sellers like Humble Bundle and Fanatical, and especially independent game stores like itch.io didn't actually exist during most of these conflicts. I think Humble Bundle is the oldest at around 11 or 12 years, so they should have seen the end of the Iraq War, but they were a tiny American retail/tech start-up back then, selling smaller bundles of (often excellent) indie games. The founders could have opted to go and do charity work in Iraq instead, but you can say that of anyone.

Of course, they were more recently bought up by a company I'm not happy with at all, but that has nothing to do with this bundle by Fanatical so whatever. And no, I didn't buy Humble's charity bundle, I simply made a donation to an international humanitarian charity I trust, and that I've supported with small donations for years.

Itch was definitely not in a position to push efforts like this even a couple of years ago, even if they've been around for a decade or so. Schemes like pay-what-you-want and free hosting for jam games aren't likely to make them oodles of cash. They did their first big charity bundle in 2020 I think, which raised their profile a bit. And bought them a bunch of haters as well, but that's just the price of being decent these days.

Don't know that much about Fanatical, except that they're British, and used to be called Bundle Stars, but hypocrisy might be a strong word there as well. Not that it even matters. All proceeds of this bundle go to Red Cross, so that's the organization you should be focusing on.


Obviously no charity can make everything better, nor is a game shop likely to suddenly focus on political activism exclusively. And yeah, they will be more vocal when a conflict hits closer to home. That's just how we are. If you say you're different, who am I to claim otherwise, but even the most empathetic person in the world can't take on every injustice. We have to pick our battles, figuratively and sometimes literally, or we'll never get anything done.

The best we can do is to support organizations with a decent track record of getting things done and actually helping people. Like the Red Cross, Unicef etc. Of course there's a bunch of expensive bureaucracy involved with any large organization, private or public, and these days big bosses everywhere are likely to get paid way too much, but at least these organizations are relatively transparent. We know and can actually check that our donations aren't wasted on blackjack and steak dinners.