Humble Bundle Is Joining Forces with IGN

The gaming forums are concerned about this announcement since IGN has a reputation for aggressive ads/branding, which is antithetical to Humble Bundle’s mission.

There is also a potential conflict-of-interest in a reviewing site owning a games publisher. (HB has published a few indie titles)

I'm not too sure how I feel about this. I'm trying to battle my knee-jerk negativity about this, but I'm not sure I can come up with good reasons to. At best, I think my hopes are that IGN will be hands off and Humble will continue on as is.

I'm almost always disappointed when interesting companies that appear sustainable get gobble up by larger entities, especially in the media and technological space.

That said, every time I make a humble bundle purchase I come to a decision point about how much of a "tip" I am going to give to the humble themselves. Over time I have increased this amount as I recognized the value of the service they were providing.

Now that they are owned by IGN, I honestly don't think it will be increasing any further, and instead would be much more likely to decrease. I'll wait and see, at least.

Take from that what you will, but I suppose the money amount I will actually put up in such cases is a stronger signal about my feelings than many other things I could put into words.

I'm of one mind to go and grab all my purchases for backup while I easily can. Total speculation, but I could see this happening: purchases are put behind some sort of IGN Gaming software like Steam. It seems like this acquisition would be a really solid foot-in-the-door for such a thing.