[DEAL EXPIRED] [Humble Bundle] 12 months subscription for only $99 (And ofc it's for new subs only)

Yep poor subs you get nothing I didnt even get those coupons for like $4 or $8 so it sucks even worse for me XD

It's a bit of effort but it's possible to create a new account and gift yourself the $99 sub, unless you have friends and family without a monthly sub that would be willing to help you out.

Pretty much yes, but I'm also up for trading on SteamTrades, asking my friends or otherwise getting titles that I actually want and care about. Depending on whether it was standard unlock or early unlock, and whether it's good/bad game, prices usually go from $2 to $6. Compared to whole bundle you usually do pay more than the title would cost standalone if you bought entire bundle, but you're also not overpaying for titles you have not even a slightest interest about, so in the end you still save more money than getting the full bundle.

And the best part, you do not go into group buy/trade blindly. If on average you always get 1-2 monthly titles then very likely you should just get the monthly itself and trade the rest. But if like me you're getting those titles pretty rarely because you consider majority of the latest bundles to be utter trash, then you save a lot and get the titles you want anyway, because everybody trades them around. Especially early on they go very cheap, and there is no reason for me to pay $12 per bundle each month if I can spend $12 per half a year on 3-4 titles I actually care about.

HB's monthly biggest selling point is a naive hope that the games you get are good. I'm not depending on that naive hope, if they really create a bundle out of the space with every single title being top-notch, very likely I'll just buy the entire bundle from somebody for $15. Problem is, this has never happened to me before, and I can say that we're only more unlikely to see that happening in the future. At best I had 2-3 titles I wanted from a single bundle, nowadays even 1 is a huge deal. The more picky you are and the more games you skip, the more you gain from going this route. I'd probably still consider it even if I indeed grabbed good half of each bundle, just for the sake of knowing what I get and not gambling with a company that digs itself a grave with each month.

Of course there is always other side of this, where you can buy monthly and make some easy profit (most of the time) from trading with people like me, but you need to be aware that there is a huge competition, which is why the prices are pretty standarized and nobody experienced is going to overpay if he can just choose cheaper trader. This is mainly because people buy those bundles on massive scale, so you have a real surplus of trade offers, especially for games that are not the sole reason why people grabbed that bundle. I save so much on avoiding the swamp that I can afford paying a little extra while still very cheap for the games I actually want.

This is on top of the fact that this whole situation just screams big fat SCAM ALERT and eventually the bubble will blow up with IGN hoping that the frogs in the pot will not notice that they're getting cooked if you increase temperature gradually and not all at once. The money is not generated out of nowhere, every marketing step costs and eventually new customers will not be enough to pay for the quality that everybody expects. Whether it happens now, in a few months or in the next year is pretty irrelevant, but it will happen eventually, regardless of how much people want to believe otherwise and how much they're fooling themselves that this year sub for $99 is indeed of the quality of $132. Just because I'm selling used socks at $100 does not make $70 a great deal.

You're also overlooking a few details:

• What you get is highly based on number of subscribers and HB royalty paid to devs. The less people subscribe and the more discounts HB offers, the less of that money actually goes to the people responsible for giving you quality content. The less quality content, the more people get discouraged and cancel their subs.
• Majority of people would probably agree that the quality of games goes downhill, not uphill. Before IGN, HB didn't have that aggressive marketing and bundle quality was pretty decent-ish, with better and worse months, but overall stable and expected. Now the quality is worse and worse, with people getting loot boxes as part of the bundle, while everybody else is screwed over with cheaper and cheaper deals. This is not a good sign for anything, neither for existing customers, nor for new ones. Of course "game quality" is pretty personal preference, but you can take into account majority of people.
• Argument about lowest price is painfully wrong. Devs prefer much more to offer discounts on platforms they control (such as Steam) because they can be sure that those games will not be resold for cheaper in the future. When you decide to bundle a game, that game will be forever considered bundled mainly due to G2A and other gray markets, with people grabbing thousands of copies and reselling later on for higher price. Monthly is not an exception for that, if anything, the bundled effect is only bigger because more people have a chance to grab one due to IGN's marketing. This goes together with general preference of being unlikely to put good games in the bundles in the first place.

I generally agree with you that the more subscribers the better the price, except until now everything that IGN showed us was people running away from monthly and not joining it. I don't want to be some kind of prophet and claim that what IGN is doing has to fail, because there is no any sort of guarantee that it will happen, but realistically I can analyze the situation across last few years and clearly say that people are not as enthusiastic as they were before. Whether it relates to sales, I can't say, because I don't know if IGN handles the monthly payments 1:1 for monthly content, or if they perhaps decided to cut it like in half in order to pay for their marketing, which would be pretty realistic considering how quality dropped by more or less the same. And this doesn't only relate to monthlies, normal bundles are pretty weak as well, to the point of fanatical doing better ones.

This in no way defines what you think of the bundle, or what I think of it. I already said above that the bundle might still be a great deal for people that want majority of the games inside, for one reason or another, but you can't just act like nothing is happening with people being outraged by what IGN is doing and in return providing the exact opposite of what IGN aims for. If you're happy with your purchase then who am I to tell you that you're wrong, I'm glad you consider the current way of things a "good" deal, it gives a small hope for all the people massively cancelling their subs that your annual sub will keep the snowball rolling :3.

I see absolutely no reason to pay $12 for blindly going into swamp of games that I'm not interested in, if I can grab any monthly game for bundle split price and avoid being screwed up like everybody else. I don't need to pay $12 monthly for "curation" of games, I can just, you know, look up what was bundled, pick what I actually like and get it for the same price, if not lower, either from one of the traders, or Steam during the next sale (which most of the time always follows considering people sell on gray markets and devs need to somehow catch up).

The only thing I like in monthlies is how people like you make it possible for me to grab Hearts of Iron IV for 2 TF2 keys. It's very unlikely I'd grab it that low otherwise, if it wasn't bundled in monthly together with other games I don't want :3. I already said that I'm not complaining, I'm pretty happy with the state of things, only asking myself when the snowball hits the wall.

Which is a bit sad because first monthlies didn't look like that. You paid $12 monthly and you got $12 of the content, now you pay $X monthly and you get half of that, because HB has to cover up for all the free money they offer to new subscribers in order to balance people running away exactly because of that happening. Answer yourself how much longer this can get going, and then what amount of people can get fooled to the point of subscribing again after being treated like this. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong and it's a pretty normal thing that every week you see better offer for annual HB monthly, all for new subscribers, while monthly quality only goes downhill :3. I prefer to sit here and watch the world burn, while having my +$12 of monthly profit spent on games I actually want to get, not forcing myself to believe that I want the ones HB decided to bundle only to justify my own sanity.

I think it already happened a while ago. Although in this I have to agree that they're still trying and those bundles are not just rebundles of stuff that didn't sell. The problem is, future bundles are often rebundles of monthly titles, some receive heavy discounts, others are being given away for free shortly afterwards. I think that at least a good 33% of all monthly titles were rebundled or given away for free shortly afterwards, but this is pretty inevitable I guess, especially considering you already have a deal with those publishers/devs.

SG is my cloud.

This time they specifically state it's for new subscribers only. Unless there's a bug it shouldn't work this time

View attached image.

Oh, they care about the old subscribers only if you try to cancel the sub. They will offer you a coupon (2 or 3 bucks) for the next monthly sub. I still cancel.
I bought month by month plan and i cancel when i want to.

Sales tax. It says $132 for the subscription, but when you go to checkout you have $11.35 sales tax added, so you are charged for $143.35 total.

done. thank you

Cause I'm stupid. Also, I'm a freeloader so whenever I see a fancy offer I take it.

Yes, but my 12 months plan ends in November, so it will be nice to pay $99 for next 12 months not $132 because im not a new subscriber...

I pay for hbo nordic 4-6 months each year to watch game of thrones & west world.

Also even if humble did shitty stuff last year (what did they do? other than sell themselves to ign?), it really doesn't have much to do with people crying just cause a deal is for new subscribers only.

F

Many thanks for all the information!
I already found the answer to a follow up question in the FAQ at the bottom of your link: To skip multiple months, one has to manually re-pause again as the pause gets automatically un-paused after a month.

Just to make sure I got it right:
To get a subscription that ends automatically I should get it as a gift and redeem it myself. To not get the current MGS V & Cities Skylines bundle I have to only redeem it the first time I see games in an early unlock that I actually want (which could be in December or in January... or is there a limit for how long a gift can stay un-redeemed?).
To only get those bundles that I want I simply pause the subscription and whenever there's games that I'd like to have in the early unlock I un-pause the subscription, get the early unlocks and pause it again right after revealing/redeeming the early unlocks. I'll still get the rest of the bundle once the bundle ends. And then I keep it manually paused on a monthly basis until there's again games that I'd like to have. I have to pause it though before the last Friday of a month at the latest or else I'll automatically get the next month's bundle.
Is that about right or are there any misconceptions?

According to their support page I can pause a month until its last Friday - but then how does the early unlock work? Do I have to click something like a "redeem early unlocks" to get them? Because if I automatically get the early unlocks, how would I be able to pause that same month if I don't like any of them? That's what's still confusing me. [EDIT: Found the answer to this question here]