Humble Choice is free. Issues with Humble Bundle?

"the games suck." is not constructive and silly when no game in the bundle is below 80% and they are/were all free. People will complain about free games, let that sink in.

"He didn't need to get shit from you for it."

Then the person shouldn't post shit about games which are highly reviewed and free.

"Now I remember why you were on my ignore list."

I assume because you don't like being called out for bad takes.

In the dark chocolate world though, 70/30 is considered to be the best ratio of chocolate to sugar. Whereas 60/40 is more common and less expensive, but not quite as good. Still tasty though.

Although people do like to punish themselves by eating 80/20, 90/10, etc.., lol.

It's an amazing combo.

Yeah. I thought it was a long shot and I was surprised that they actually were able to help me out. They provided me with a new key after a day which I activated on the correct account. I got the revoke notification on the other account the next day.

activating the key does not make it any harder to revoke. Any key can be revoked by either Steam directly for any reason or the developer can contanct Steam and tell them to revoke the key activated or not activated. The only difference is IF the key is activated whoever activated that key gets a notice that the key was revoked and the game was removed from your game library - had this happen many many times. The only good thing is you get to keep the cards or anything else you have already got from the game.

Why not, why would they wait to see if the keys get revoked, when they could sell right now on grey market, make some money, and screw off after with the money.

You say no sane grey market seller is going to sell them fast, but this again makes no sense, because it looks like you're talking about individual sellers with a few keys. Someone who has the skills and knowledge to make a bot to steal thousands of keys from humble has the skills to find a way to get multiple merchant accounts on a grey reseller so that's the least of their concerns. Lose out money on refunding customers why? Its in their best interest to sell asap, so the payment clears as fast as possible with the site, once they receive the money likely they'll swap it between who knows how many accounts till it's gone. You make it seem like they'll use their personal bank doing this.

"If 1000s of accounts were indeed created, and Humble didn't revoke the keys, you would see the prices of those games go down instantly"

You just said they wouldn't post them instantly so you wouldn't see the prices go down instantly, you'd see it in a few weeks, months or whatever timeframe makes you feel safe the keys wont be revoked, except keys get revoked even 5 years later so it still doesn't add up. However, I already specified, if thousands of accounts had been made, you would've seen it instantly, except the prices for this game has went up today, compared to the release of the bundle, so the games are more expensive atm than they were the day the bundle released. So prices are adjusting, and people aren't listing their keys. My estimation is not enough people were able to do this.

Could happen with humble if they sold hundreds of thousands of copies of choice for free, we'll have to see. As I said, they can always revoke the keys, I think people are stressing for no reason. I just can't imagine humble being that poor or unprepared and without solutions. Humble and Fanatical are like the primary bundle sites. If these websites aren't successful it should mean by the end of this year we wont have bundles anymore. If they are successful, they can afford a mistake once in a while. It's also possible it was never a mistake, except maybe they never meant for people to be able to gift it. From what I read, people gifted their e-mail 24 monthlies and redeemed them to get 24 free months. Not sure if that was actually possible, but those people deserve the worst. On the site it said "$0 for the first month, subsequent month billed at $x.xx"

This isn't a little online game store. IGN was acquired in 2005 for $650 million. I didn't look too much into their history, but my guess is they're worth more now, because all them corpos are worth more now or they're already dead. I know no company likes to take losses, but we'll have to see, will they shut down humble bundle in the next 24 hours? I'm betting on no. $100. Is betting allowed on sg? Bet against me and donate it to charity. If I'm wrong and humble will permanently shut down in the next 24 hours I'll donate $1000 to whatever charity you want me to as long as I can use paypal. If betting is not allowed consider this void xD. I'm gambling for good here ok.

While I get your point, some small obscure online reseller, selling a $60 game for $12, means a $48 loss on every single purchase. Brand new game, huge demand for it day of release, many people will look it up. Available overnight so I'm assuming you mean like 6 hours or more? Compare that to this, bundle released 3 days ago and plenty of people already bought it or were afraid to buy it when it was given for free, the most humble could lose per bundle is what, $12 assuming an average based on regions? Also if the price is $0, there's no 5% of $0 going to charity so they're not locked in to a loss there, so if they cut their share of the profit, and only have to pay the devs split, for the other bundles it's 50/50, it doesn't seem like it could be that bad, considering this was unannounced, unexpected, and available for 3 hours.

I thought they claimed to be paying the full item price, but paying a sum straight up makes more sense. Yet, they still consistently claimed they weren't weren't profitable. Also, if it's the Epic v Apple lawsuit, isn't that number going to be much smaller as it relates to apple users, or they disclosed pc/android data as well? Not that many of those games will work on an apple device especially considering it's UE and not Unity. I'd expect the PC numbers to be significantly higher.

A bit of extra info, not necessarily related to your comment:

Epic was worth 22.5 bil in 2024, and around $660 mil in 2012 when Tencent bought 48%, I can't find data from before. But in 2005 IGN sold for $650 mil, it's fair to say IGN is maybe a few bil now but not even close to Epic. Still even if you take epic being 34 times more valuable than ign at the 22.5 vs 650 mil, there's other things epic can afford to do no stress. Every month for how many years, they do the same with UE marketplace content, they have creators apply and make their content free for a month for which they probably get paid a sum. Then they bought quixel megascans and made it completely free. Now they changed the marketplace to Fab.com, which they own as well, which also does unity assets etc.

If the lowest game epic paid for a month was Rime at $45k and the highest was Batman at $1.5mil, and we consider they've given away 585 games starting Dec 2018, we can then make some middle or lower average as to what they paid for each game and see how much they spent in total. The average between those two values is around 770k, but most games will likely not generate the 50% mark average and maybe the 25% mark, which would be 385k, but lets say it's 350k so it's even lower. Assuming they paid $350k per game, looking at their bests and worsts, and multiplying that times 585 games that's $225 million epic has spent on this project since inception. Maybe it's 100 million, maybe it's $250 million, etc. If I divide that 225 mil by 34 so it's 34 less valuable like ign was in 2005 it's still $6.5mil when they're valued at $650 mil, aka about 1% of their valuation.

Looking at IGN, 34 times less worth company, the most they could've owed per bundle, should not be higher than $12 per person, in the US this would mean they are not making any profit at all from choice, and I highly doubt that. Even if they sold 10 000 bundles at $0 and owed the full $12 amount to the devs, it comes to around $120k. Humble reported 12.4 mil given to charity in 2024, my guess is their profits are actually higher than that. But they'd still be able to do this 100 times out of their revenue assuming 10k bundles sold, so it's 1% of their profits. So even if IGN wanted to do this until they run themselves dry, they should be able to do this free choice event 5416 times at around 10 000 bundles given away for free each time. Assuming they wanted to do this just 54 times, it would cost them that $6.5 mil or 1% above. This of course shouldn't assume them having to dip into their trouble funds. And again no company likes to lose any money or make mistakes, but they happen.

It looks like a massive mistake to some because $120k is a life changing amount to most of us but we're individuals. We're not companies with 64 employees. If you gave 64 employees $120k that's around $1900 to each. Good bonus, but they already get paid decently high between $40k(for customer service) to $200k(for senior software engineers) according to glassdoor. $2k isn't life changing to any of them. Maybe get you by a month. To the guy making $200k+ a year, that $2k looks like a joke compared to his bonus.

I also don't think it's more than 10k bundles they could've sold, because humble has publicly listed the other bundles sold data, and even with repeat sales of those book, software etc bundles that have shown up many times, even those barely go a bit over 10k. As for game bundles active for weeks, they generally stay at around 3k - 8k. So am I to believe that in those 3 hours, millions of choices were redeemed, when over the course of weeks they reach just about 10k users getting their newest bundles? Like this might not have even appealed to many people, it was already 3 days old so some already got it, people didn't know about it, some had to be sleeping, at work, outside, playing a game, unaware this was even happening etc.

I guess what I was trying to explain is epic decides to reinvest in their community because they want to build a store like steam. You call that budgeting. IGN decides to keep their profits and not reinvest it like this normally, other than maybe a free game giveaway they've done here and there on a very small scale. They just budget in a different way. Their budgeting likely includes the possibility of something like this happening and them having a budget to be able to cover for it. Maybe it was intentional, and it was budgeted for 1k bundles at 0$ and they made a mistake on the gift links hence why people were able to redeem those.

They're both able to afford it, you just call it budgeting for epic because they made the decision to take a loss from this in the hope that it pays back later. Humble could've just done the same thing, taken a loss on x amount of bundles in order to reinvest in getting members subscribed to choice again. We'll know for sure in anywhere from a few days to a few years right?

Costly is depending what that means to you. As I said, Humble is owned by IGN, which in 2005 sold for $650 mil, when Epic was valued at $825 mil in 2012 and then $4.5 bil in 2018 and 22.5 bil in 2024. We can kinda assume IGN's valuation went up in this time, considering they've added humble, ign plus and other things to their portfolios, but certainly they're not as big as epic. At the same time, tencent doesn't own 48% of ign, it does of epic, so ign gets to keep their money, which tencent owns 48% of epic, and epic still can do all that, with 585 free given games, 3 assets with standard/professional licenses free every month and other things for years now. They've also given $10 coupons on their store, in game currency in games they don't own, etc. This is costly, and I did the math somewhere above, should average to around 225 million dollars.

At the same time, even if they didn't budget, they have budgets for these situations. Suppose it wasn't intentional, is it worth spending the money/time to get all the keys revoked, contacting all the publishers/devs to have them issue new keys, have steam maybe approve or not approve it fast enough, resync all of them, refund people, pay support for the spam of tickets that's going to happen, etc. when they could've maybe sold around 1k bundles in this time frame, which would amount to about $12k. Will they spend $12k in process fees just to be petty because they don't have to and end up at $0 or worse anyways? It's going to be costly to not absorb the costs of this. Either way it's costly if it was a mistake, so better pass the cost on later or use the fund meant to be used for these kinds of things.

TLDR: They do have a budget for this and they did budget planned ahead of time for this. Doesn't mean they still wont revoke them if it was a mistake, in the end people did get free games, they might have some clause in their contract that they can't do that, and they might just decide to take the cost of it themselves in process fees but revoke the games so the users don't keep them. This still costs money,

I'll give you an example of that last sentence. Retail stores which have clearance will at a certain point decide it's more efficient and cost worthy to throw it straight in a compactor and destroy perfectly good items than to pay an associate to maintain and clean that bay, since the return from that bay is $0, and that associate makes $x an hour, and that time can be used for that associate to tend to a bay that needs it.

I love it, when "european-friendly" ingredients create something so unique ^^

I don't know about that. I was wondering whether I should cancel for this month, but got encouraged to stay subbed with a cross-out pricing promo. No loopholes and no odd front-end behaviour. Just claimed keys as usual.

But revoking others' joy now will make your spent dozen bucks feel better

I already paid for my bundle in november?
I wish the best for HB and people trying to claim their keys, but that others got (or not!) a free bundle days after I claimed my keys doesn't matter to me.

I'd definitely cancel the gift purchases some people may have hoarded, but that's all that I'm adamant about. But...
Making people pay for something that was accidentally free won't make my past purchase cheaper.

you're wishing for vindication, not fairness, or least harm done.

So it's just jealousy that you didn't luck out on and for that reason everyone else is a bad person? I mean it's not like you never missed anything else, a temp free game on steam, or a game on sale before it got delisted, or a freebie from a bundle site, or a great charity bundle that ended once it met it's quota. Humble can afford this.

You catch some deals you miss some, that's how it works. Some guy went to a garage sale today and paid $10 for something worth $1000 and he doesn't even know it yet. Time should spin in reverse and events change so he is never able to get lucky, because you weren't there before him to do it first. Great mentality.

I missed great deals too, I know how it is, it happens, you're a little salty, you move on. I bet you got a backlog of like 3k+ games. Enjoy some of those.

For someone vengeful like you, perhaps. It shows how you think of others. By your logic there should be no such thing as a sale or a freebie.

Generally you are right. I woke up at night and used this "promotion" once but when I noticed i can do it infinite time something said me that it is not fair and did not make it f.e. 24 times, just this one month (and even so I had some bad feeling about it - it it would not be complete 0 it will be probably different story :) ). But I have to say temptation was big. I think it will be revoked but maybe they will have some technical problems. I feel a little bad for this who make this mistake (big mistake) and general for HB). It can also have effect regarding future bundles. Now it will be like damage control. No perfect solutions.

Ps. Probably i am stupid but i have my moral rules :).

So things being free isn't fair? Are you against any game being given for free? Other people paid for it before it was free, so it's not fair, right?

The thing is, it would only attract negative attention if they had to revoke the entire batch, including people who purchased it day one. Because then they'd come here to say "humble screwed up, they revoked my paid purchase, now it says out of stock wtf", so it would be a lot of negative publicity, then there's waiting times for valve to revoke and reissue keys they gotta be approved, for them to be sent through the mail and synced into humbles database, to be assigned to the people who paid full price, then they have an influx of tickets they gotta spend extra on support to answer, etc.

While they have the choice to leave it as it is, fix the glitch, move on. No tickets, good publicity from people happy to get a free month, avoid dealing with 8 devs and having them revoke all the keys, avoid waiting for valve to approve new keys, time by which it could already be mid june or something, aka lost sales because people wont want to buy if they can't get keys, cause they aren't active.

There weren't benefits to revoking other than being petty. This got them a bunch of people subbed, even if they cancel later some will likely stick around to get next months bundle looking at it like me, getting it at 50% off basically right? They got to do something nice so that's a bit of trust + respect win.

It's interesting to study the data on these grey prices. I think what's happening is this. Up until the $0 bundle showed up, things were going fine. Prices were steadily decreasing for most of these games or staying around the same. After that happened, the keyshops stopped selling any new copies of the games because they don't want to deal with tons of customers asking for a refund later if Humble were to revoke. This effectively froze the current supply keys and now people are buying up what's remaining, which is now causing some of these games to actually increase in price, specifically the ones that are in most demand. Soul Reaver is a good example, it got below $3.50 the day before and now shot up to over $5. Havendock on the other hand was already under $1 and won't increase as rapidly because it has a larger base supply of keys to work off of.