Humble Bundle to cap charitable donations to 15%

Overheal

Starting in May

https://kotaku.com/humble-bundle-moves-to-limit-charitable-donations-to-15-1846751524

This is an abrupt departure from the ability while buying their trademark bundles to donate the money from your purchase to the sponsored charity. This let people who wanted to get 100% to charity and 100% to the developer etc. coexist and everyone involved was fed.

This change seems like brand suicide if I’m being honest. It’s Humble Bundle, after all, the “pay what you want we support charity” video game license seller.

Mr Crispy

Yeah, it was the main reason I bought bundles there, especially since the IGN buyout when the quality of the bundles went downhill. When my Monthly sub expires, I doubt I'll be shopping there again.

Dave_The_Sheep

And ... that's me not using them again.

TheChrisD

Overheal wrote: »

This change seems like brand suicide if I’m being honest.

Pretty much. They've already lost me as a future bundle customer.

Morte

To be honest, I'm happy to still use them. If I wanted to donate to charity I would do it directly. Many of those promoted tend to be US based anyways. I think they've always been pretty upfront about the fact that they want to make money themselves. I'm there for the cheap game bundles, which publishers offer either because the games have long reached the end of their useful life or because they want to promote a sequel. The charity thing is only a nice bonus for all concerned rather than the critical point.

What they've done is a PR disaster though, having a load of customers up in arms for several days with no word as to why a fundamental part of the site is gone is terrible. The new scheme also has a major flaw in that if you donate over the amount for the games only 15% goes to charity. All of the excess should. I can't imagine many did but some people donated hundreds or thousands.

I'd say Humble is under huge pressure from Microsoft's game pass and from Epic. You have two cash rich billion dollar companies throwing money at providing cheap or free games with no intention of making a profit in the short term. That's a killer for a company based around selling cheap games, I'm sure it's a more attractive proposition for the type of game that might have appeared on humble before.

YFlyer

Guess percentage for Chuck Feeney?

Overheal

Their new covid bundle is 100% to Charity so idk if they've done it to repair their PR

https://www.humblebundle.com/humble-heal-covid-19-bundle?hmb_source=humble_home&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=mosaic_section_2_layout_index_2_layout_type_carousel_tile_index_1_c_brazilindiacharitybundle_bundle

Mind you most of this bundle is shovelware

Mr Crispy

I think I read they were walking back the initial decision to remove the slider after the bad publicity, but it might be a temporary measure while they "review" the situation.