The Humble THQ Bundle
humblebundle.com
humblebundle.com
The excessive numbers of "Humble X Bundles" that have been coming out recently have been kind of killing my interest in them. When it was an occasional thing with some really good games in the bundle, and I was able to support cross-platform DRM-free game development, I would buy pretty much every one, even if I didn't play many of the games. Now that they've diluted the brand so much, I'm a lot less likely to look when they announce a new bundle.
>Steam-only
>not DRM-free
Seriously, what is this... The fun was cross-platformness (GNU/Linux and Mac OS X support). This is just not typical "Humble Bundle".
I wouldn't mind less humble bundles (a couple a year), but good and cross-platform and a load of them, instead of Windows & Steam-only like this.
The point of Humble Bundles is to make a bunch of cool games available for however much money you want to pay. Sometimes those games are cross-plattform, sometimes not. That’s it.
The thing is, people have certain expectations of a Humble Bundle now; that's what it means to have a strong brand.
It's fine that they are doing new things -- I don't mind the Amnesia Fortnight stuff at all, in part because it's a pretty cool concept, but probably also because they're not calling it a Humble Bundle.
But this one goes against some of the basic tenets of the Humble Bundle series; namely, the DRM-free, cross-platform nature. One of the reasons I support them is that I support choice. I want to have choice in what platform I run. I want to have choice in what machines I run my games on. DRM and single-platform games mean that I don't have that choice.
All I'm saying is that in the past, I've bought Humble Bundles and never even played a single game, just because I supported the idea so much. Now they've violated some of their core principles; they are still "pay what you want" and allow supporting charities, but they are selling games that I am morally opposed to. I'm better off just giving my money to the charities directly.
If you truly support Humble Bundle and what they do, then you would support them in this endeavor as well -- you are giving them some tip as well (and charities if that's your thing). Does anyone really think that since they are doing this with THQ they are going to simply stop supporting the indie community?
THQ made some bad decisions, and they are desperate. This is a pretty clever move for them, and one can only hope a kick in the butt to pay more attention to what gamers are looking for.
I'm really disappointed. I know the site has been doing very well monetarily with their format but stuff like this discredits them to me.
For most people I think Humble Bundle was about doing good while also building awareness of indie developers. I've tried so many games I would never have heard of let alone purchased because of the site.
Hopefully their next release won't be Disappointing Bundle 2.
And anyway, you don't have to worry about this for long, there's not a lot of mainstream publishers out there that are going to give you a bunch of triple A titles to sell for donations. The money is still going where it used to go. I see no problem with this.
But if it were me in charge, I'd list 3 charities. One would be the charity that, last time, had received the greatest portion of the contributions from people who had adjusted the contribution sliders rather than accepting the default value. One would be a new charity never before featured on Humble Bundle. The last would flex, depending on circumstances: it could be a charity favored by the Humble Bundle team, one chosen by the app developers, or perhaps the second-favorite from contributors who adjusted sliders.
That's a large shift.
I generally liked supporting humble bundles on principle. Seems hard to keep feeling good about that now.
Do they intend to be any of those things if they do get back on their feet?
Aren't they publishers themselves? Why can't they just run a sale? It seems like using the humble bundle is purely a marketing thing.
I didn't support the previous humble bundles as a marketing tactic, I supported them because of their goals.
Couldn't you just give your money to the EFF, then ?
My first reason for buying Humble Bundles is the very low price. The goal is the nice side effect.
If I was after low prices there'd be no reason for me to pay more than a dollar or two for a bundle. I pay what I pay because I want to support good art, good code and a good platform for that with good goals.
also they have done none cross playform bundles before (with some of there android bundles.)
why not take this for what it is, the chance to pick up some decent games for cheep, and supporting eather a charity or a struggling games company who make some good games.
And THQ does not need money support, they need to go through an internal crisis, fire a number of people and get back to good basics. What this bundles does is just providing another injection to the drug addict.
Do you support open, DRM-free software? Skip this release and wait for Humble Indie Bundle 7, like they suggest on the landing page.
Are you worried Humble is losing their platform-agnostic magic? Well, they've released two Android-only bundles before.
Do you want to hook up indie devs? Their games are still available on Steam, XBLA, or Kickstarter.
If you're against these releases, why not sit this one out? There will be another indie bundle soon enough.
EDIT: forgot one. Are you really concerned about the social good? Well, the EFF and Child's Play always accept donations on their websites:
And if they did, their staff won't keep.
I think the only way we'll see a lot of AAA games going to Linux is if someone releases hardware that is Linux based and it has a large install base comparable to other major consoles. Most AAA game developers see extremely reduced sales on PC vs console already, so Mac ports are rarely worth it, let alone Linux.
Three of the four games are ones that I very nearly purchased in the past, so I'm thrilled. This is a great deal for me!
"Warning! Please note that orders under $1.00 will ONLY receive the soundtracks and will NOT receive the games! "
This seems to go against the spirit of "pay what you want"? Not that $1.00 is really different from $0.01, but I'm pretty sure that for indy bundles before you could go as low as you wanted? I didn't think to try before though, I guess. Can anybody confirm?
Adding a game to a steam account "validates it" and this can be abused in certain scenarios. For example, steam sometimes has events where you can enter contests, and people were creating hundreds of fake entries for almost no money.
Edit: just to be clear, for other bundles you can pay $.01 and get the DRM free games but not the steam keys (which require a payment >= $1). Here, since the games require steam, the minimum price is $1.
So they have asked (since few bundles) to pay more than $1 when you want to get te steam keys. And since this Bundle is steam-only ... The minimal amount to get the games is $1.
It's only about a dollar, maybe two, lower than average anyway.
edit: After downloading the 9GB game the Mac Steam client just tells me that I cannot play it on my platform.
Edit: Requires Steam and Windows. I though the biggest point of the bundle was proving the market for DRM free cross platform games? They may as well have just made this a steam sale.
Huh? I played Metro from start to finish over the space of about a week during the summer of last year and its a fantastic game. While it was quite difficult at times, I didn't find it so difficult that I would rage quit at any point.
At about 1:40 in.
YMMV of course, I'm certainly not the best FPS player but I found this significantly more frustrating than any other point in the game by a large margin mainly because I kept losing because of a dumb NPC.
When I was googling around I found a lot of people frustrated by this part. I did most of the game on hard but struggled with this part on easy.
Unfortunately the games THQ offers are only available on Steam, but that's the way it shakes. However you look at it, they are still sharing a high-quality selection of games that you don't have to pay them ANYTHING for. You can put 100% of your payment toward charity and THQ still happily gives you the games.
I don't see how that's against the spirit of the bundles.
Is it just a matter of spending too much money on games like Saints Row that are huge money losers?
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ATHQI
So instead of purchasing some games, gamers could've purchased THQ, and released the games for free and without DRM.
we, in conglomerate, purchase THQ, give their games away for free and then what, fire all their developers, close all their studios and sell all the buildings, revelling in our destruction of the future of gaming so everyone can gave some games today for free?
there was much better discussion on this topic on reddit.
http://support.humblebundle.com/customer/portal/articles/867...
>We are aware of the issue going on with Saints Row: The Third Steam keys for German customers who purchased the bundle prior to 23:00 CET on November 29th.
>Please email us at contact@humblebundle.com with your Transaction ID and the subject "Saints Row Steam Key", and we can get you a Steam key for the German version of Saint's Row: The Third.
Still, I bought into this one for the soundtracks and put the majority to charity.