• YC-Backed Humble Bundle Launches Pay-What-You-Want Weekly Deals, Starting With Bastion

    Romain Dillet

    Romain Dillet is a writer at TechCrunch. Originally from France, Romain attended EMLYON Business School, a leading French business school specialized in entrepreneurship. He covers many things from mobile apps with great designs to complex tech achievements. He is a pop culture devotee. He now lives in Lyon and likes to cover New York startups as he used to live there. → Learn More

    Tuesday, March 19th, 2013
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    The Humble Bundles have been an amazing deal for gamers. Today, the company behind the bundles announced that they would introduce a new weekly sale, in addition to the usual bundles that happen every month or so. Everything else remains the same — pay what you want to get DRM-free downloads of indie games that work on Windows, Mac and Linux. A small customizable part of every sale goes to two charities as well.

    The first weekly sale is Bastion, a game that was part of a previous bundle. But for the weekly deals, Humble Bundle introduced a new tier system that is very reminiscent of how Kickstarter works — the more you pay, the more you get.

    For example, you can choose to only pay $0.01 to get Bastion. But if you pay $1 or more, you’ll get a Steam key. If you beat the average (currently $2.63), you’ll get the soundtrack, artworks, ringtones and sheet music. Finally, if you pay more than $25, the company will deliver merchandise to your home, such as a soundtrack CD and postcards.

    The two charities that will receive part of the sales are long-time partners Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child’s Play Charity. New deals will appear every Tuesday on the site. It remains to be seen whether weekly deals will only consist of games that were previously available in bundles.

    By default, Humble Bundle takes a 15 percent cut. While this portion is customizable, many customers tend to buy with the default settings. The San Francisco-based company just finished another bundle, the Humble Bundle with Android 5. It sold more than 210,000 bundles, representing more than $1.46 million in sales. Even though customers can pay what they want, it represents quite a lot of money for indie game developers, charities and Humble Bundle.


    Company: Humble Bundle
    Website: humblebundle.com
    Launch Date: March 1, 2010
    Funding: $4.48M

    Humble Bundle is shaping the best, most consumer-friendly digital distribution platform possible, while making the world a better place through charity. We let customers pay what they want for awesome digital content and allocate where their money goes. Our approach of trust and customer advocacy, has led to $10,500,000 being raised for charity and a growing customer base of 1,800,000 worldwide. Our history is well-documented http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Bundle

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