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For over a decade now, Humble Bundle has provided gamers with bundles of heavily discounted games, while also donating millions of dollars to charity. Traditionally, each Humble Bundle would let you buy in at various tiers, with sliders at the bottom to let you decide how much money goes to Humble Bundle itself, the charity, and the game publishers. You even had the option of giving all your money to one of the three entities, while giving nothing to the others.

Over the weekend, however, Humble Bundle announced that in May they would be testing a new update to the way adjusting donations work. Under the new system, you can toggle between two options: default donation, or extra to charity. The default option will give 85% to publishers, 10% to Humble Bundle, and 5% to charity. The other option gives 80% to publishers, 5% to Humble Bundle and 15% to charity. As of now, it does not appear there are any other customization options that will be available.

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Source

 

[Localhorst86]

Humble's old model honestly never made sense to me. How could they possibly allow customers to allocate all their money to charities? How do the devs and platform make anything?

Presumably people allocating all money to charities was a non-issue. Most gamers only care(d) for the "cheap games" and pay-what-you-want aspect of the bundles and didn't change the default split. I personally have set the charity cut to 0% in the past as well when I didn't feel the charity was right (usually to locally constrained).

 

[The Real Jdbye]

I always gave like 25% to devs and 5% to Humble and the rest to charity so I don't know how I feel about this change. On one hand it might attract more devs to offer their games up for bundles but on the other hand in my mind it kind of goes against what Humble Bundles are all about. The change might have been a necessary evil to improve the quality of the bundles but we will see what actually comes of that. 15% is pretty low though. Considering Valve takes a 30% cut of anything sold through Steam anyway they could have kept that ratio and gone with 25% to charity, 5% to Humble and the rest to devs and devs would be no worse off than they are with the constant Steam sales and charities would actually be getting a decent cut. That I wouldn't mind as much. In the end it's not going to affect my purchase decisions, if I see a bundle with games I want I'm still going to buy it, because I stopped buying these bundles just for the sake of buying them a while ago and I only buy bundles I am actually going to play the games in.

Humble's old model honestly never made sense to me. How could they possibly allow customers to allocate all their money to charities? How do the devs and platform make anything? It makes sense for them to impose this limit, but at the same time the limit's way too harsh. They should make it more like 70% max to charities, leaving 30% to divide between devs and storefront. 15% is just paltry.

I treated them as a nonprofit/charitable organization. In my mind they're not supposed to make anything. Indie devs get exposure for their games that might otherwise not get the recognition they deserve and that might lead to more sales in the end, and Humble gets whatever they get, it's not like operating a website like that is especially costly, most of the bundles are Steam keys only so they are not hosting most of the data.

 

[FAST6191]

Humble's old model honestly never made sense to me. How could they possibly allow customers to allocate all their money to charities? How do the devs and platform make anything? It makes sense for them to impose this limit, but at the same time the limit's way too harsh. They should make it more like 70% max to charities, leaving 30% to divide between devs and storefront. 15% is just paltry.

They did have the standalone shop for quite a while too (late 2013 it launched, and they had widgets before then I think) which would be a more reliable source, possibly then making the bundles almost most advertising.

As far as making sense. I don't know if they were burning venture capital money (it was a spinoff from another company) or actually made something -- strictly speaking operating a casino is chance, however for all practical purposes then no it really is not. If it was the latter then they probably had very good data on how many people did what and what the breakdowns were as well as cost to them. If the devs as above mostly stuffed in games that had run their course* ( https://en.everybodywiki.com/List_of_Humble_Bundles , see list of dates of bundle to initial game release date as well as general lack of anything that is more service than game or multiplayer toy which is much the same thing -- think your minecrafts, terrarias, stardew valley, COD, battlefield, elder scrolls that was not the online that had already failed hard...) or maybe had a new game to advertise then their greater concern was probably cost of support ( https://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=1574 ).
Now I would not be surprised if it was some kind of unfunded liability type deal, or trying to show a consistent income stream for the creditors (if they did one for PETA one month and everybody turned it off then the creditors might only give say 5x credit to some kind of metric, if they can have their charity effort go to grind orphans into stew to feed kitten fighting pits concern and still get 15% then that might be 20x credit to annual income or whatever) that caused them to do this particular course of action but the initial setup probably did make some level of sense.

*the sorts of things that 10 years earlier when things were still all on CD/DVD would be in a less than typical games retailer in spinning racks under expolsiv, sold out software, best of, or whatever your local banner of choice for that sort of thing was, 10 years earlier still maybe pure silver top CDs in a cardboard box proclaiming 5 flight sim/racing game/action game/... in one.

 

[Lodad]

Humble has been absolute dog crap since the IGN shift. This was the last nail for me. The only benefit has been the ability to know all the games you'd be getting and the ability to pause monthly. They haven't gotten my money even though I've kept my classic subscription status. I've literally paused every month since they allowed pausing.

 

[Justinde75]

Sit down, be humble

 

[osaka35]

Humble's old model honestly never made sense to me. How could they possibly allow customers to allocate all their money to charities? How do the devs and platform make anything? It makes sense for them to impose this limit, but at the same time the limit's way too harsh. They should make it more like 70% max to charities, leaving 30% to divide between devs and storefront. 15% is just paltry.

it did seem to rely on devs and publishers to "donate" games. I always wondered if they could write off those sales as "donations to charity", like as charitable actions for taxes and other business purposes?

 

[FAST6191]

While "never say never" when it comes to creative means of accounting, and I reckon I could almost outline a few potential methods (the same sorts of things that see devs give out a pool of review codes as an advertising expense or contest probably being where I would start, some of the comments around the key resellers the other year highlighting the mindset and working models of a few companies too), and I also have no idea what the bundle peeps themselves would have done behind the scenes to secure a tentpole type release for a given bundle (could easily see a "we will give you X now + % after an amount" type deals for that one, or any number of other complicated arrangements seen in any other investment sales pitch -- would some indie dev take a smaller cut of a bigger pie if one of the big devs threw them a juicy bone? If nothing else do you believe for a moment that "oh we thought we would add these surprise extras in" when certain averages/goals was not calculated and had 19 lawyers from 30 different interested parties do things months before then?), I would sooner figure they had a mountain of data to point at ( https://en.everybodywiki.com/List_of_Humble_Bundles has hundreds of thousands per month over the course of years) saying range is typically between this and that, never been below this, never been above that, possibly figured in age of game, time of year, steam activity, sales in months prior... to say nothing of any UI dev will tell you about friction and it is not like you had the sliders or indeed insert amount by default for most of it -- "pay money, giz keys" being the suggested path for most with the added perk of the good stuff being in the beat the average thing. Certainly a gamble but if it mostly costs you a couple of weeks of long tail sales for a game that only brings in a dribble at this point and in all likelihood will boost general awareness for this and further projects...

 

[Julie_Pilgrim]

never say never

You just said it twice

 

[Ampersound]

Remember when you were getting multiple AAA title with a single buck? Good old times.

 

[SonicRings]

Remember when you were getting multiple AAA title with a single buck? Good old times.

That bundle which included the Crash trilogy, Spyro trilogy and random ass CoD was the last good one. I ended up getting all the games for free from different people who already had one of them and thus had no use for their spare.
It was especially hilarious because all the people who bought Spyro at full price (it had only just released a month prior) were feeling cheated and entitled, and, as a result, weren't being humble at all. Guess Humble Bundle had to get the "humble" from somewhere, and "humble" follows newton's third law.