Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Saturday October 14 2017, @05:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the making-a-bundle dept.

IGN, a game and entertainment media company, has acquired Humble Bundle, a distributor of video games that raises money for charities:

Media giant IGN announced today that it has acquired Humble Bundle, the company best known for selling packs of indie games at pay-what-you-want prices. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

This is potentially a big deal for game developers, since Humble has expanded beyond its bundling business to publish games, pay devs to make games for its subscription-based monthly game club, maintain a subscription-based online game trove, and operate an online game storefront.

However, a press release confirming the deal also noted that Humble will continue to operate independently in the wake of the acquisition, with no significant business or staffing changes. It will have some degree of support from IGN (which is itself owned by digital media giant J2 Global), specifically in terms of accelerating growth and raising more money for charity.

I think I stopped using Humble Bundle when they started removing the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a charity option for some bundles.

Also at VentureBeat and Humble Mumble (official blog).


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by ledow on Saturday October 14 2017, @08:49PM (3 children)

    by ledow (5567) on Saturday October 14 2017, @08:49PM (#582403) Homepage

    Love them. They often do just good, cheap software deals. And audiobooks and PDF e-books and all kinds.

    A lot of the bundles I never buy (but I think I own about the first dozen or so as they were fabulous) and now I just buy the value-for-money ones.

    Their latest was a set of Pathfinder (D&D) books that I told my technician about, they were really cheap apparently.

    I've bought sets of Make magazine issues via them. And they did O'Reilly books a couple of times.

    I got a lot of value of my purchases, and they're all available to download again, and for the games they were almost all available as just a Steam code which is great for me.

    Personally, though, the charity side of things was always just an afterthought. I buy to get cheap stuff, and I buy the tier that's best for me. But I always just zip the charity slider to nil, leaving the developer and "Humble tip", as far as I'm concerned it's just a software purchase not a donation and I don't part with any money I don't have to (although the first bundles where you could get them for literally pence, I rounded up and gave them something as I wouldn't even notice). They were making millions each bundle at the start, just because it was a good deal and good products for good prices.

    I think they lost it along the way somewhere and the monthly thing - never understood. The bundles that are just indie-tat (there's LOTS of good indie games out there, don't get me wrong, and I found a lot of them via such bundles). The bundles with the one good product locked behind a tier that you just think "I could buy it for that from anywhere" and have no interest in anything else. I'm glad they branched out into mobile games, books, etc. it worked really well. But nowadays I buy maybe... 1 in 5, 1 in 10 bundles? And often it's because it's just ludicrously cheap.

    A friend of mine wanted to play with PDF's. I own the full version of Nitro, and they'd seen it. So when the bundle with SodaPDF came up, I sent them a bundle. It was that cheap I could just click, buy, gift and they now use it to publish all their novels on Amazon's eBook services.

    But the charity stuff? I really couldn't care less. And EFF / FSF / etc. are not something I'd want to give money to anyway. I see it like the supermarkets, PayPal etc. that ask if you want to pay $1 extra to send to charity. It's just a little thing to put on. And, no, generally speaking I don't and I'm quite happy to say no. If I want to donate to something, I donate to them direct, I don't just slap it on to round up the total on some other purchase and then feel good about myself.

    I hope Humble doesn't change. The way it is - where everything is your choice - is why I use them. I can dial down the charity tip. I can choose only the tiers I need. Things like the monthly are a step AWAY from that kind of freedom.

    But I also wish they'd do some more interesting bundles as sometimes it just feels like it's bundled with poor freeware/shareware to make it look like it should be worth the price of the one decent package. I'd like to see some proper developer bundles with some serious tools in there. Install package creators, proper IDEs, O'Reilly like books for multiple languages (not just the kid's "coding" languages and game-makers), things like pre-configured development VM images to save you having to set up a workspace, etc.

    Long may they continue, but reign back in the 12-games-I've-literally-never-heard-of-and-wouldn't-buy-even-after-researching-them-all.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by jimshatt on Saturday October 14 2017, @10:00PM (2 children)

    by jimshatt (978) on Saturday October 14 2017, @10:00PM (#582417) Journal
    I don't usually give a lot of money to charities, so I see this as a chance to contribute a little. I always select EFF. With indie developers I leave about as much to the developers, but larger studios only get 5 percent or so (0 is such a nasty number). Same with the Humble Tip, +- 5%.

    Other than how I distribute the money, I completely agree with you about value for money and choosing the right tier (and not buying into the monthly BS).
    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday October 14 2017, @10:36PM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday October 14 2017, @10:36PM (#582424) Journal

      The way I see it, even if you have to beat a high average to get all the titles (and I don't think the averages have been very high - like $10-15? - considering you get around 5 games usually), it's a chance to support a charity that you (hopefully) want to donate to. People give plenty of money to charities or even political candidates without much expectation of a tangible return (#BernieBTFO), but here you get a few games. Throwing $24 to EFF (and $1 to dev/Humble) is no problem. It would be nice if they added Internet Archive though.

      And if you don't want to participate, you can lowball the donation amount (where there have been minimum amounts, they have been very low) or just pirate it when possible.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]