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.
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.
There were 13 Humble Indie Bundles since 2010 and 94 other types of bundles (not counting the Weekly Bundles). And those other types often include audiobooks, ebooks, comics etc. that one could claim are at least indie, or some indie games sprinkled in with the AAA titles.
There was also extremely commercial stuff such as the 2K bundles, but hey, it's always labeled as such.
There really isn't any confusion on the website about any of that. And the book and audiobook bundles have been fantastic, too.
It's kind of similar as with GOG, on which games are neither exclusively Good nor Old anymore ;).
I think this was where it went downhill for me. That’s 107 bundles, plus 200 odd weekly bundles. They’re not special any more, and especially now that the bundles aren’t pay what you want, they’re pay above the average, which is higher because they hide some items behind a minimum price. It’s lost it’s allure to me, and most of my friends too.
Interested to see what other criticisms you have.
When you drop offline, any shared library you had access to will drop off. When changing connectivity during a session, your games terminate within 5 minutes.
I've been using Steam as the main means of communication with a lot of people, but these days the chat client is slow, outdated, lacking in basic features and tends to insert annoying redirections before shared links (or remove them outright when you're using a shady site like, I dunno, Google Docs). Hence I'm trying to figure out how to get everyone to migrate to discord.
> Hence I'm trying to figure out how to get everyone to migrate to discord.
ouch!
Okay, the chat itself in Steam is pretty fast (unless you attempt to send an emote). The problem is, there's zero message delivery guarantees, and the client doesn't even care to inform you whether the message has been successfully sent. If you're on an unreliable internet connection, your best bet is to close and re-open the chat window to see whether the messages made it to the server in the mini chat log that shows the last 2-5 messages (that's the extent of the client's chat history feature by the way). It's an usability nightmare.
This isn't about how fast Discord is but about how bad of a job Valve is doing (I'm not even certain present tense applies here given that the chat client has essentially not received any major new features for like a decade).
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.
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.