IGN acquires Humble Bundle

After seeing that this was a successful formula, they went on to raise funding in 2011 and pushed for larger publishers / developers to target with their acquired audience of heavily engaged gaming fans (mostly indie people). There was quite a strong note of sourness at the commercial interests being spun out of what was originally a charity + grassroots initiative.

Now, as many other people have mentioned in this thread, they've largely fallen into another same again steam sale outlet.

My attitude is more of indifference - they sold out long before being acquired by some big old company. I feel they put too much emphasis on aggressively acquiring new sales at the expense of their old customers.

So if you were wondering why you dont see a new Command and Conqueror or Wing commander game, now you know why.

Gaming is a cynical industry full of talented idealusts, much like music and film... But even worse because they innovate a lot harder and faster on business models, to the detriment of the consumer.

Consumers are right to be concerned, it's born out many times how idealistic creative small companies get absorbed into huge cynical businesses that are focused on extracting the maximum value from the asset, and the customers lose out.

That certainly matches my impression. My subjective opinion through friends is that acquiring companies rarely fully understand what they've bought, and pretty regularly kill what makes the acquired company special. Not on purpose, really. I imagine an enthusiastic cartoon monster running around trying to hug people it takes a fancy to. Some it squishes to jelly, some merely end up bruised, and some it neglects or drops when its whims turn elsewhere.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/1999/nov/29/10

IGN editorial is separated from the rest of the company like just about every other media outlet and those extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. One or two anonymous allegations does not a "reputation" make. When someone puts their name to it and brings evidence to back it up, we'll talk. As-is, this is just a meme among the angrier gamer community.

(n.b.: I don't read IGN or care about the company, but I do care about mendacity a little bit.)

I don't get why HN, of all the places in the world, would seek to tear down software companies, literally started on HN, which produce a service that people love and which achieve a successful outcome for all concerned.

I also don't think we should teach people that a middlebrow dismissal passes for financial analysis, so some toy math using their public data: they report ~$106 million in charity. Their users probably don't alter their split materially, so if one models their bundles as their main revenue source (which, knowing nothing about the internals of the business, I would), that implies $106M / .15 = $700M in gross sales. Their cut of that is 20%, or ~$140M over the lifetime of the company. I model them as being a rather briskly growing business, so I'd estimate last year's revenues in the ~$30 million range. I'd also estimate probably ~60% margins.

You want the lower on a $47 million acquisition price on a quickly growing software company with $30 million a year in revenue? Yeah, I'll take the upper. Not a hard call. This was clearly a very successful outcome for all concerned.

[Edit to add: Above paragraph is incorrect because I misread the parent as raising at a valuation of $4.7M. If they raised $4.7 million the valuation was probably ~$20M. Do I still think 10x is plausible on that? Plausible, not nearly a given.]

Disclaimers: no non-public information used above, no commercial relationship, although I did pitch them on a consulting gig once. I have paid them a few hundred dollars over the years for video games.

They've not been humble, indie, or a bundle for a long time.

Par for the course. Similar disingenuous commercialization is rampant through the games industry: see what Valve has done to Steam, and what major publishers have done to their titles vis monetization.

Unfortunately the games industry is floating in too much money for another crash to clean house.

But yeah in terms of games the last bundle I bought was probably more than 2 years ago

After the original bundle, I've gotten a few in the last year: Intergalactic, Freedom, Star Wars, and Civilization. All have been great values, if you know what you want. Even if you don't, you're giving to charity and you can gift the games to someone.

Recently I saw a humble book bundle that included a book about the healing power of crystals.

At that moment it became clear (crystal clear even!) to me that it is no longer what it used to be, and I finally unsubscribed.

100% agree with this. I got in a bit late, but the first bundles were still pretty fantastic. I loved the fact that they had Linux games. But eventually quality started slipping.

For example, their claims that a game runs on Linux are very unreliable.

Some games just work out of the box with no sweat at all. Some of them work after some tweaking (installing packages, etc). But I have at least 8 games that either don't work on Linux at all (fail to start due to errors or segfaults) or have some serious issues (random crashes, game breaking bugs). Windows versions of those games worked on wine, so I just swallowed the loss, but it did leave a bad taste in my mouth.

But this is just sloppy quality control. Most of the problems I have mentioned would be detected immediately by simply running the game on the recommended configurations.

All that said, I have since moved on to GOG and so far I have been pretty happy with their claims of Linux support. Had one hiccup ("X3: Terran War Pack"... that was a wasted weekend), but everything else (~30 games) just works. Their quality control seems to be a bit better, and their community forums are helpful (so far), so I'm happy. Pity that they don't have more Linux games I like.

I'm curious, does it say somewhere what the total amount they have contributed to charity over all the years?

EDIT: Found it on wikipedia:

> By September 2017, the total charitable amount raised by the Bundles exceeded $100 million across 50 different charities.

That is pretty impressive.

As a Linux gamer, the fact that some of the non-Humble Indie Bundles contain games I can't run is annoying (I am fine with these being offered, just don't mail me about them unless I can run them), but the Humble Indie Bundles tend to contain exclusively or nearly exclusively cross-platform games, like they always have.

This is a case where HN's rule of original titles can be somewhat annoying.

But it was all spread out and I don't think they ever made any moves towards trying to pull it all together into a single offering. It was just a bunch of separate websites / programs that happened to be owned by a common parent company. Which might be a good sign for Humble's continuing independence, if IGN is still running things the same way (but OTOH, all of those separate sites eventually just withered and died under IGN's ownership).