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IGN acquires Humble Bundle
- lightedman 9y agoI can't wait for IGN to put their name all over stuff like they own it, like they did with almost everybody's cheat codes submitted to the old cheat codes site that they bought, including codes I had submitted. Any they've never bothered to fix them even after notification, either. Just wait and see. The garbage self-marketing begins now.
- k_sh 9y agoDid Humble Bundle let IGN name their own price?
- TeMPOraL 9y agoBetter question: how much of that did IGN decide to give to charities?
- Avshalom 9y agoN.B. Humble has been as much a traditional retailer as it has been a charity focused pwyw shop for quite a while. As well as no longer caring if games are cross platform. I mean I still shop there because it's as good a retailer as any but they are no longer significantantly different than GOG or Steam.
- thristian 9y agoAt the very least, GOG is an independent game retailer. For most of the games you'll see on the Humble Store, what you actually get is just a Steam key for that game. There's a few indie games where they've funded porting work for one of the Humble Indie Bundles, but I doubt many of those are exclusive to the Humble Store.
- paulmd 9y agoI was looking through today's GOG sales and I saw they've started to introduce DRM on some of their titles, so buyer beware, they're starting to go downhill too. https://www.gog.com/game/aliens_versus_predator_classic_2000 https://www.gog.com/game/aliens_versus_predator_classic_2000
- icebraining 9y agoEh, I'm not sure that I consider controlling access to their servers the same as DRM. The lack of LAN multiplayer is bad, but is GOG responsible for that?
- makomk 9y agoFrom what I can tell, the original retail release had support for LAN play, direct connections, and various third-party server browser options, all of which they removed so they could lock multiplayer behind a DRM wall that requires the GOG Galaxy client.
- icebraining 9y agoRight, but the game wasn't released by, or even exclusively on GOG; it's also on Steam, for example. So I doubt the decision was theirs. And while it may suck, I don't think it can be considered DRM.
- ehsankia 9y agoI honestly had completely forgotten about their charity contributions. In my mind they had become another digital game shop. 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.
- Freak_NL 9y ago> As well as no longer caring if games are cross platform. 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.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoSteam too annoys me in this respect, would be nice to have the option to hide all promotions (and indeed content) about games one can't run.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago"Pay-what-you-want" isn't exactly how I'd describe "pay what you want, but unless it's at least X, we won't give you the merchandise". That's more "ordinary commercial transactions".
- Karunamon 9y agoIIRC, it’s always pay what you want (even a penny) in the bundles, but paying more gets you more games.
- wazanator 9y agoThey had to add a dollar minimum because of abuse.
- SquareWheel 9y agoOnly for Steam keys. $0.01 still nets you DRM-free downloads.
- nottorp 9y agoThe OP may be talking about the bundles that have "pay what you want, get 3 titles, pay more than the average, get 3 more etc". Which is not exactly pay what you want. Especially since "pay more than the average" will actually bring the average up across the life of the bundle. I used to pay significantly more than the average for a bundle when they were new and truly pay what you want. Now I happily get the lower tier of games for $1. If I bother.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoSo, if you can get a bunch of games for $1 you'll happily pay $5, but if you can get a bunch of games for $1 and even more games for $5, you'll pay $1 and gripe about it? I'm not sure I follow your logic.
- Avshalom 9y agoThat's a change that's happened in the last year or two. Before they decided they needed to be running 2-3 bundles at a time all the time it was actually pwyw.
- baddox 9y agoMy gut reaction any time a beloved company/product is bought by a “big” or “old” company, particularly in gaming or media or tech, is “oh no, they sold out” or “uh oh, that’s the beginning of the end.” This type of reaction seems to be the dominant “hot take” in online communities as well. I don’t think this is necessarily a reasonable reflex, but I confess I feel it here, even when the buyer (IGN) is a company I trusted and enjoyed for many years for video game reviews and news (in this case, from about 2002-2012). I welcome interesting arguments for why my reaction is inappropriate, or for that matter, appropriate. It’s pretty easy to enumerate acquisitions that went well and others that went poorly, but I certainly wouldn’t claim to have sufficient data to make a reasoned prediction about how this will go.
- TylerE 9y agoDidn't Humble Bundle essentially sell out long ago? They just sell indie games in bulk, and generally the stuff on offer these days is nothing special.
- baddox 9y agoI couldn’t say. I haven’t followed them for at least a couple of years. I seem to remember them branching out into other digital media like books and music. I still admire their ideas (although I’m not sure if they’re still in place), like adjustable payments, charity contributions, DRM-free (or even open source) games, and games supporting Linux and OS X. I’ve been away from the gaming scene for several years, so I’ll admit to being very out of the loop.
- Avshalom 9y agoThey have in the last bit here (don't quote me on an exact time frame) stopped caring about Linux/osx support and frequently offered things that are only playable through steam. I mean like I said elsewhere, I still shop there because: why not, if it's cheaper; they don't have any noticable mission statement anymore though.
- 9y ago
- schlipity 9y agoI have purchased a fair amount from Humble bundle, and have been a subscriber to the humble monthly bundle since it's inception. Suffice it to say, I have a great appreciation and admiration for the way Humble Bundle works (worked?). Meanwhile, IGN has been around a lot longer, and has earned a terrible reputation for selling reviews and generally being shameless. I lost all respect for IGN long ago, and I absolutely refuse to contribute to it in any way, so I've cancelled my humble bundle monthly subscription. Is there a name for the feeling you feel when you're watching a movie and the bad guy wins? That's what I feel now.
- sdwisely 9y agoalso been subbed since first monthly and will be cancelling. Humble Bundle had earned plenty of good faith from me where IGN has none.
- eropple 9y ago> has earned a terrible reputation for selling reviews 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.)
- gggdvnkhmbgjvbn 9y agoIts got the reputation, calling that reputation a meme is you going out of your way to use a term other than reputation. Whether or not its true is a separate thing.
- eropple 9y agoI think that you failed to pick up what I was putting down, and that is that the important bit of that sentence is not meme, but rather the angrier gamer community--the side of the community that is so very worried about ethics in games journalism except only when women or black people are involved and who are so very mad at Bethesda for making a game about shooting Nazis--who are the source of that meme. It is not credible and it should be roundly shot through when it pops up because of that incredibility.
- Deimorz 9y agoThe official blog post from Humble Bundle is here: http://blog.humblebundle.com/post/166366386976/humble-bundle-is-joining-forces-with-ign http://blog.humblebundle.com/post/166366386976/humble-bundle... It was posted earlier today but didn't get much attention (possibly because the title didn't make it clear it was an acquisition): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15468583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15468583
- minimaxir 9y agoThat HN submission was softkilled almost immediately (it fell of the front page near immediately, presumably by flags by people who aren't interested in random gamer stuff). And now the story is #1 on Hacker News. This is a case where HN's rule of original titles can be somewhat annoying.
- jknoepfler 9y agoIt was good while it lasted.
- j_s 9y agoI collect my bargain-basement digital library, $1 at a time. Wish I could pay for multiple bundles at once.
- schwede 9y agoDoes this mean that they will only stick to game bundles? I really like the e-book bundles they do.
- minimaxir 9y agoIGN covers a lot more than just games nowadays. (Movies, etc.)
- jchw 9y agoTo be honest, I haven't cared for Humble Bundle for a very long time. The first few were amazing: all cross platform, great stuff. Since then they've branched out... Into becoming a glorified Steam sale. It may be a viable business model, but I don't find it terribly enticing.
- devbug 9y agoSame here. 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.
- tachikomagenius 9y agoThey do have more than just games like e-books https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14791255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14791255
- psy-q 9y agoI think that's not really fair, only a few bundles a year are actually labeled "Humble Indie Bundle", and those do usually fit the bill and check all three boxes. 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.
- oh_sigh 9y agoWasn't IGN almost Steam in a previous life?
- Avshalom 9y agoI don't think so. Pretty sure IGN was still a vaguely independent-ish (or at least not owned by any specificly video game concerned parent company) reviewing site between the launch of Steam until it's inescapable crowning as the default bway to buy games.
- vanadium 9y agoYou mean GameSpy? Yes, that merged with IGN and subsequently went into oblivion.
- jack12 9y agoThey did own Direct2Drive to buy, download, and (manually) install games, FilePlanet to (manually) update games and download demos, and GameSpy to chat with friends and find multiplayer servers. That covers most of Steam's functionality, I guess. 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).
- minimaxir 9y agoIt's worth noting that Humble Bundle is YC W11 and raised $4.7M in venture capital in 2011. I am assuming this is not a 10x exit.
- kornish 9y agoIndeed. Hopefully the founders and employees were somewhat reasonably compensated for their risk and trouble.
- taway_1212 9y ago10x exit for a company with the word "Humble" in their name would be very ironic.
- patio11 9y agoThat's a curious way to phrase "Congratulations on making a company which has sold several hundred million dollars of software." 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.
- jimjimjim 9y agowell it was a good run. for a while it will be ok due to them wanting to have good pr. but slowly over time it will get worse and crappier. eventually paid placement, advertising, spin and death by blandness.
- damian2000 9y agoI just bought their crypto book humble bundle - first for a long time - decent price for 11 ebooks... about 1.50 each if you want all 11.
- shoefly 9y agoI doubt this will be good for the little guys. Personal experience in the games industry here. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe.
- wallabie 9y agoIn the words of Adam Jensen - what a shame. Though HB says: "We will stay the same", I'm sure practically everyone knows that that won't be the case. IGN, the go-to place to get sponsored reviews of AAA games.
- drumhead 9y agoWhats the actual strategic thinking behind this? IGN expanding into retail? Why? They're effectively media company. I dont see any sense in this acquisition. And that worries me. Do they understand what made HB so successful, are they going to give it managerial autonomy, what are their plans?
- l3mde 9y agoHope they keep up with bundles on (tech) books.
- wildpeaks 9y agoDamn, I hope they won't close the section that lets you buy (most) Steam games all year round. Unlike regular Steam, it doesn't have the frustrating "geolocation-locked" limitation the Steam store has in Germany (which is very frustrating when you're not German, just an expat). At least Apple's AppStore lets you buy from your own country's store instead of assuming the country from geolocation.
- JepZ 9y agoActually, over the pas month I was hoping Humble would return to the old days, not in terms of qantity but in therms of quality. The first bundles had some great titles like Braid and World of Goo, but later on there were some gems (like Stardew Valley), but in general there were a lot more mediocre games. Sadly, I doubt that IGN has increasing the quality as the prime target in mind.
- JepZ 9y agoIf someone wants to create a new bundle store: How about bundeling every Feral Interactive release (AAA cross platform) with about 5 indie cross platform titles?
- ekianjo 9y agoI guess we can say goodbye to any kind of Linux support then.
- penguinUzer 9y agoI bought several indie game bundles when they were for Linux and/or DRM free. Sadly I had trouble getting most of the Linux games running, at least on Debian (thanks multiarch). I have also bought a few titles off their web store, all you get there is a Steam key. However, I have bought games from the store specificaly hoping that Valve gets less of the cut (PUBG being the latest). However, I just bought two book bundles over the past month. They are still fantastic. 10-15 books DRM free for about dollar or so each, and a portion of that money I specified to be donated to FSF. Hopefully post IGN aquisition the book bundles will continue. PS. I bought Cuphead week of release on GOG to show my support. It may be Windows only but it was DRM free at launch.
- elrobinto 9y agoValve get nothing when you purchase a steam key from another sales platform. They allow the free use of their drm and content delivery platform to acquire new customers, and keep existing customers locked in.
- penguinUzer 9y agoInteresting. This is the closest source I found with a quick search: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys Phil Fish who created the indie game Fez (which I also purchased) stated Steam & GOG take a 30% cut whereas Humble only took 5%. http://www.pcgamer.com/steam-and-gog-take-30-revenue-cut-suggests-fez-creator-phil-fish/ http://www.pcgamer.com/steam-and-gog-take-30-revenue-cut-sug... Personally DRM free takes precident. I haven't bought a AAA game through steam since Portal 2. I buy games through GOG to get a DRM version - for example I bought Firewatch from GOG and played it in Linux. DRM free Humble Bundles next. Humble store steam keys as a last resort.
- Joof 9y agoGG
- coworkerblues 9y agoIs there any possible way to make all my Humble Bundle e-mail and information not be shared with IGN database ?
- ryanpcmcquen 9y agoThis makes me apprehensive, but as long as I can still move that slider to 100% charity, it's probably not too big of a deal.
- gedrap 9y agoI'm a monthly bundle subscriber since inception. I don't check the monthly bundles regularly (more like two-three-four times a year), but always find games that I enjoy and wouldn't have discovered otherwise. For $150/year, that's a pretty good value for a very casual gamer like me, i.e. someone who doesn't follow the gaming industry and just spontaneously decides to play something from time to time. Best of luck to them.
- shostack 9y agoI wonder how much of this is IGN wanting to get into a SaaS business and see this as a way to acquire there way there, and take on Steam? That could add a nice revenue stream and help let them diversify from the advertising model which is increasingly facing downward pressure on RPMs from companies like FB and Google. Interestingly enough, if built up sufficiently, it lets them better align their interests with their users. Instead of making the experience slower and more cluttered with additional display ads, they can focus on creating an awesome UX (if you become a subscriber of course). As a gamer, I have my doubts about this happening given IGNs history, but one can always be hopeful.
- abiox 9y agoa (imo sketchy) media company that reviews games will now own a retail outlet that sells them. i wonder how that will impact their behavior.