Humble Bundle, Inc. is an online store for video games. It started by offering special collections of games called Humble Bundles. In these bundles, buyers could choose how much to pay, and part of the money went to charity, while the rest was shared with the game creators. Humble Bundle still sells these limited-time bundles but has also created a larger, more permanent online store for games. The idea for Humble Bundle began with Wolfire Games in 2010. After the second bundle, the company was formed to handle selling, paying, and distributing the bundles. In October 2017, Ziff Davis, through its IGN Entertainment division, bought the company.
Early bundles usually included games made by independent developers. These games worked on multiple platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux, and did not use digital rights management (DRM), which is software that limits how games can be used. The bundles were released every few months and lasted two weeks. They gained media attention, with some bundles selling over $1 million. Later, the bundles became more frequent and included games from large companies, games for Android devices, and collections that promoted game jams or included digital copies of music, books, and comics. Today, bundles are offered more regularly, and the company has a permanent online store for buying individual games.
Humble Bundle supports many charities, such as Action Against Hunger, Child's Play, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, charity: water, the American Red Cross, WaterAid, and the Wikimedia Foundation. By the end of October 2014, game creators had earned more than $100 million. By September 2021, the bundles had raised over $200 million for 50 different charities. The success of Humble Bundle inspired other companies, like IndieGala and Indie Royale, to create similar "pay what you want" bundles for smaller games.
Humble Bundle has grown to include a dedicated online store called the Humble Store and a publishing division called Humble Games to support independent games. The company is based in San Francisco, California, and employs about 60 people.
History
The idea for the Bundle came from Jeff Rosen of Wolfire Games. Rosen said he got the idea from similar sales on the Steam platform. He noticed that these sales spread quickly through people talking about them online. He was also inspired by a "pay-what-you-want" sale for the game World of Goo on its first anniversary. During this sale, over 57,000 copies were sold, making more than $117,000 after fees from PayPal. Rosen had strong connections with other independent game developers. For example, his brother, David, worked as a game tester for the Penumbra series, and the composer of Penumbra, Mikko Tarmia, helped with Wolfire Games' Overgrowth. Wolfire had also partnered with Unknown Worlds Entertainment to create a bundle based on their game Natural Selection 2. Ryan C. Gordon, who helped bring Lugaru and Aquaria to Linux, was involved in the project. With these connections and support from companies like PayPal, Amazon Payments, and Google Checkout, Rosen was able to create the Bundle. Later, the option to pay with Bitcoin through Coinbase was added. However, as of 2025, this option is no longer available.
Rosen knew that making the purchase process simple was important for the Bundle’s success. He avoided steps like requiring user accounts or special download tools, which might have made it harder for people to buy. He also included charities in the Bundle, letting buyers decide how to split their money between developers and charities. Rosen supported Child’s Play, which helps hospitalized children with games, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which works against digital rights management (DRM) restrictions. The "pay-what-you-want" model allowed buyers to give money directly to charities, and Rosen said this would be a success even if no one chose to do so. Rosen and Wolfire employee John Graham handled technical support during sales, answering thousands of questions through long hours of emails and chats.
Rosen and Graham planned a second Humble Indie Bundle, which started in December 2010 and raised $1.8 million. They saw the value in continuing this model and created Humble Bundle as a separate company after the second Bundle was released. Rosen and Graham were the founders. By April 2011, Sequoia Capital had invested $4.7 million in Humble Bundle, allowing them to hire more staff to manage future Bundles and customer service.
On October 13, 2017, Humble Bundle announced it had been bought by IGN Entertainment, a part of Ziff Davis. Humble Bundle would continue to operate as its own company within IGN, with no immediate changes to its business. Graham said the partnership with IGN offered new opportunities to improve sales and charity efforts using IGN’s resources. Mitch Galbraith, an executive at IGN, said Humble Bundle was a good fit for IGN and would help support its charitable efforts. He also said IGN would keep its editorial team separate from Humble Bundle and follow rules to avoid conflicts of interest when reporting on games sold through Humble Bundle.
In March 2019, Rosen and Graham stepped down as CEO and COO of Humble Bundle, respectively. Alan Patmore took over as the company’s leader. Rosen said the company had become stable and had many growth opportunities, but he and Graham wanted to focus on other goals. They planned to stay as advisors for the rest of the year.
In April 2022, 10 employees were laid off in engineering and customer support as part of a restructuring. In November 2023, an unknown number of Humble Games employees were laid off. In July 2024, all Humble Games employees were reportedly laid off. The company said it was restructuring, but Humble Bundle itself would not be affected.
Business activities
Since its start, Humble Indie Bundle offers usually last for two weeks and include three to five games. Buyers can choose how much to pay for the bundle. Many bundles include extra rewards that are announced halfway through the period. Previous buyers automatically receive these rewards, except after Bundle 9, when these rewards were only given to buyers who paid more than the average price. Some bundles also offer a bonus for buyers who pay more than the average price. Other bundles include game soundtracks as part of the bundle or as extra rewards. Because the games are not protected by digital rights management (DRM), some bundles also include the source code for the games.
Humble Bundle works with game developers to decide which games to include in bundles and when they will be available. Employees consider if the games will excite gamers. Agreements with developers are usually finalized one month before the bundle starts. Humble Bundle earns about 15% of the total money collected from each bundle.
Buyers can choose any price for the bundle. The website lets users decide how to split their payment between the developers, charities, and Humble Bundle itself. Buyers can choose to give all or none of their payment to any group or any combination. Later bundles allowed buyers to gift the bundle to others. Games are usually available for Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux systems. Many bundles mark the first time a game is released on macOS or Linux.
Buyers can also get codes to redeem games on services like Steam, Desura, or Origin. To prevent misuse, later bundles required a minimum payment of $1. Starting in October 2013, Steam keys automatically added to users' Steam accounts when redeemed, to stop key resale. Later, users could gift Steam keys from bundles to others through a unique link.
Android-based bundles began in January 2012. These bundles do not include codes for Google Play but instead let users download Android app files directly. Some bundles included games available for both Android and Windows. In May 2015, the Humble Nindie Bundle was introduced, offering games from the Nintendo eShop on the Wii U and 3DS. This bundle was first limited to North America. In August 2016, Capcom offered PlayStation 3 and 4 games through a Humble Bundle, also limited to North America.
In April 2021, Humble Bundle removed the charity slider, limiting charity donations to 5% or 15%. After feedback, they reversed this decision and restored the sliders. In July 2021, they added a cap on charity donations, ensuring at least 15-30% of revenue goes to Humble Bundle to support the PC storefront.
The Humble Store is a separate service that lets developers sell games directly to buyers. It provides tools for developers to sell games on their websites and for buyers to purchase games easily. Developers can add a widget to their websites to let users buy games. Some games, like FTL: Faster Than Light, used the Humble Store for crowdfunding rewards. Buyers can access all purchased games anytime. The Humble Store also sells single games daily, with 10% of sales going to charities. In 2014, it added a section for books and comics. By 2016, the Humble Store had raised over $4 million for charities.
In 2019, the Humble Store added support for Nintendo Switch and 3DS games. Humble also partnered with Epic Games to sell keys for the Epic Games Store.
After the end of the Humble Android Bundle 5 in March 2013, Humble introduced weekly sales with a pay-what-you-want model. These sales last one week and focus on a single theme, like games from one developer. They work similarly to regular bundles.
The first Flash Bundle started in July 2014. These bundles last 24 hours and may include repeats of previous bundles or sales. They appear as often as once a week or once a month.
In October 2015, Humble launched Humble Monthly, a subscription service that sends a curated selection of games each month. Five percent of subscription fees go to charity. This service is compared to a book club, allowing Humble to choose games based on themes or ideas. Developers may benefit more from this program because it offers consistent revenue.
Analysis
The first promotion was seen as very successful. Rosen said the team thought reaching a million dollars was the best possible outcome, but when the sale began, "it was immediately clear that we were on to something." Rosen later gave credit to Ars Technica writer Mike Thompson for helping the promotion succeed, noting that Thompson "immediately saw the potential" of the Bundle in an article written just before the sale. Brandon Boyer of Boing Boing believed the promotion showed a model that "could and should be repeated." The decision to sell games in a way that matched what consumers wanted was different from larger software companies that limit their content. Mike Masnick of Techdirt said the Humble Bundle worked because it "focused on giving people real reasons to buy, rather than just letting people set the terms of purchase and find ways to limit others." Rosen said other groups have asked Wolfire for the source of the promotion's website, and he believes similar charitable sales will happen in the future because of the Humble Bundle's success. For future Bundles, Rosen wants to include lesser-known games instead of well-known titles like World of Goo and Braid, but he has turned down some developers' requests, saying the quality of their games might harm the Humble Indie Bundle's reputation. He believes smaller games that are "legitimately good" would be better choices for future Bundles.
Because of the success of the Bundle, other groups started similar pay-what-you-want plans for indie games, including IndieGala, Indie Royale, and LittleBigBunch. PC Gamer named the Wolfire team as founders of the Humble Indie Bundle as their 2011 community heroes for supporting indie game development. Forbes listed John Graham in its 2013 "30 Under 30" list for his work on Humble Bundle, and Rosen was recognized for the same in 2015.
After the Humble eBook Bundle ended, John Scalzi said factors like brand recognition, no DRM, a focus on charity, the bundle's unique format, and the variety of included authors helped make it a success. Scalzi noted that while participants might get less profit from the Bundle compared to buying directly, the Bundle sold 42,000 eBook copies in two weeks, nearly as many as the average monthly bestseller. Scalzi praised the idea of the Humble Bundle and said it is low-risk even though it has low profit margins. Novelist Cory Doctorow, who organized the eBook bundles, said no publishers except Tor Books joined the Bundle because of the no-DRM rule, but they still raised about $2 million for books that had earned their authors little or no money.
Terence Lee of Hitbox Team said the Humble Bundle was a success for their game Dustforce, even after the Bundle ended. When Humble Bundle first asked if they could port the game to Linux and include it in a Bundle, the game sold about ten copies daily on Steam. When the game was included in Humble Indie Bundle 6, sales through the Bundle jumped to over 50,000 copies per day. While Hitbox Team received $178,000 from the $2 million the Bundle made, the increased number of players caused daily sales of the game to rise from less than a dozen to around 50–60 copies per day.
On the other hand, Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy developer Edmund McMillen said in a Tumblr post that the Bundles are "not as successful as many would think." While the Bundles helped popular games gain more sales and gave lesser-known games more attention, sales for Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy dropped more in the years they were in Bundles compared to the years after. McMillen said the Bundles neither hurt nor helped in the long run and now seem more like a tradition than anything else.
Despite the ability to get the games for nearly free, Wolfire Games estimated that 25% of the traceable downloads for the first Bundle came from software piracy through links shared on forums and peer-to-peer services like BitTorrent. Rosen said Wolfire removed much of the DRM from the games to appeal to people who might otherwise pirate them. He also said he personally donated on behalf of ten users who could not pay for the software. Rosen noted some users might have legitimate reasons for pirating the games, such as not being able to use the payment methods provided or having made a single large donation for multiple copies. He also said some users might have shared the download links for fun. Wolfire took action to stop sites like "wollfire.com" from selling illegal copies of the Bundle.
Rosen said Wolfire would not take steps to limit piracy, believing that "making the download experience worse for generous contributors in the name of punishing pirates doesn't fit with the spirit of the bundle." He said offering the source code of the games as an incentive would help the community improve the games, just as others might improve them by removing DRM.
When preparing for the second Humble Indie Bundle sale, John Graham acknowledged that some might still download the game illegally, but he said the organizers tried to make the purchase process simple and wanted to create a social impact by donating to Child's Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. An anonymous survey by Wolfire showed some users preferred using peer-to-peer services like BitTorrent to download the Bundle faster, so Wolfire added a BitTorrent download option to encourage more people to buy the game legally.
Several games in the Humble Indie Bundles were released as open-source software after reaching certain sales levels. One example was Wolfire's Lugaru HD, where they released the game's engine under the GNU General Public License and included art assets, level designs, and other creative elements under freely redistributable licenses. Their goal was to let programmers improve the game's engine using the associated assets. Wolfire later sold Lugaru HD on the Mac App Store for $9.99. A company called iCoder used the open-source resources to recreate the game for the App Store, charging $0.99 for their version. iCoder claims they have the right to do this under the GNU license, but Jeffery Rosen said this did not apply to the art assets.