Ten years after launching their bundles, Humble Bundle is making a significant change. According to a recent blog post, it has decided to eliminate the option for customers to donate 100 percent of their purchase to charity.
Humble Bundle’s decision comes after months of testing and feedback from its community. Originally, the company allowed customers to choose the portion of their purchase that they wanted allocated to Humble Bundle, the publisher, and charity by means of sliders. Back in April, however, it announced a new update that would eliminate the sliders, replacing them with fixed amounts. With these preset options, most of the money would go to Humble Bundle, and the portion donated to charity would be capped at 15 percent. The company ultimately faced significant backlash for not only the update itself but the lack of transparency that accompanied the change.
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Despite the controversy, Humble Bundle wasn’t deterred from making future changes, and its latest blog confirms that another update is coming mid-July. This time, instead of eliminating the sliders, the company has chosen to require that a minimum amount, between 15 and 30 percent, be donated to Humble Bundle. Outside of these limits, customers will still be allowed flexibility to adjust donations, and the specific minimum requirements for each bundle will be clearly indicated.
After the Humble Bundle's initial attempt to remove the option to donate 100 percent of purchases to charity, this announcement doesn’t come as a surprise. In its blog post, the company explained that the update is necessary in order to evolve with the PC storefront landscape, which has changed significantly since Humble Bundle’s launch in 2010. To be fair, it’s true that if a significant amount of revenue is donated exclusively to charity, the company could have trouble keeping up with current industry trends. That being said, users are unlikely to be understanding, especially after the secrecy with which Humble Bundle tried to roll out a charity donation cap the first time.
It will be interesting to see how users react to the news, as the suggested update is significantly less restrictive in terms of the amount that can be donated to charity. It’s also possible that Humble Bundle could’ve earned back some trust from users after it donated over 100 percent of proceeds from one of its bundles to Covid-19 relief, which totaled out at over $1 million. Even so, customers generally value the ability to make autonomous decisions, and the less fortunate are always in need of as much aid as they can get.
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