By Declan Hertel
Staff Writer
Games are expensive. This is the sad truth of all gaming, be it video, board, or roleplaying: it is a costly hobby. However, efforts to make gaming more accessible have been made.
For video games, Valve (Team Fortress 2, Portal) has the Steam platform, a program that allows users to buy and download games, along with providing support for multiplayer gaming and a social network based around games.
Steam is known for its massive sales, especially during the winter and summer, where they mark down every game on their marketplace by a significant percentage and offer bigger deals on popular games day to day. But these huge sales are rare, and gamers are still on the lookout for cheap games.
Enter the Humble Bundle. Every few weeks on humblebundle.com, a bundle of games is put up for sale, and customers can pay what they want for them. You must pay at least $1, but the more you pay, the more you get.
The Humble Bundle typically offers several tiers of games; the first tier is “pay-what-you-want,” and the second tier requires that you beat the average price (at the time of this writing, the current Bundle has an average of $5.51).
The second tier is generally where the better, more well-known games lie. Relatively recently, Humble Bundle introduced more tiers with fixed prices for a third tier, generally around $15-$20 to get the biggest name games in the bundle. If you pay their highest asking price, you’ll receive all the games from every tier, often getting $250+ worth of games for $20.
“How could this possibly be,” you say? Well, dear reader, it can be because it is for charity.
The proceeds are split between the game developers and one or more charities, which have included Child’s Play, a charity that provides gaming consoles to children’s hospitals; Electronic Frontier Foundation, a “non-profit digital rights group”; Charity: Water, which provides clean drinking water to developing nations, and the American Red Cross, among many others.
Customers are given the opportunity to split their money between the developers and the charities however they want, with a default 10 percent going to charity.
When I first heard about the Humble Bundle, after the initial excitement of 10 games for a dollar, I thought, “How could this possibly be a success? Why doesn’t everyone just give the minimum and be done?”
It turns out that many people are very charitable indeed, even when it would be very easy not to be. In the current bundle, the total amount given (with six days left at the time of this writing) is $462,963.85, and the biggest donation is $1,000.
Since its start in 2010, the Humble Bundle has also introduced Weekly Bundles, Book Bundles, Mobile Bundles for Android, and the Humble Store, which functions like the Steam store, but with a charitable angle.
Humble Bundle is a service that is well worth taking advantage of. You get your cheap games, and the rest of the world gets a little bit brighter. I think the world would do well with more such services, but for now, Humble Bundle will do.
