The bundles have generally still been giving me what I paid for (and now I suppose publishers who care about their reputations have everything to do with that), but after finding a rare opportunity to dig through my old purchases, I was heartbroken to find out what I was funding. The subscription which seemed fine from 2018 to 2021 has been dark-patterning me out of claiming what I purchased in more recent years while I was occupied with weighty matters. They hiked the price of my Classic plan subscription this year without giving me any kind of notice (which they are obligated to do by their own ToS, which they also didn't notify me of when they changed it to make things substantially worse for slowpokes like myself in late 2024). I was also given no prior notice of many keys that expired for games I had anticipated highly and had every reason to assume I had already purchased ("yours to own forever", state most of the ads between 2022 and 2024--wording that probably does mean perpetual access from a legal standpoint--including at least one month showcasing one of these self-destructing keys)--in fact to this day you still need to go a few clicks deep into the interface, which you'd probably only do to make a claim, to actually find your first hint the key expires at all (which is seemingly the new norm, in recent months). A number of old keys are basically not possible to redeem even though they're already paid for; there's just an empty promise years later that they're still trying to get more. An interface change coinciding with a change to the subscription in early 2022 made it more onerous to inspect which of your monthly subs still has unclaimed and/or expiring keys from the simple list of unclaimed keys in your account.So normally, what do you call it when a business takes your money, won't deliver the goods, and even obfuscates which goods they won't deliver? Yeah, that's what I thought. I don't know what they think they're doing, but it's not clever. For now? Do not get Humble Choice, not that it's been the tempting offer lately that it used to be. This is not about them secretly raising me the $3 they implied they never would in 2019 (yes, there's only a weak argument for that, yet their ToS still links to a page that kind of says that) so much as it's about a product that set favorable yet reasonable expectations that they have no real intention of meeting any more. I've been there since the first HIB which was DRM-free and stuff; this wasn't really a problem for the first 10 years or so under riskier practices and sleepier markets, so it's clearly not impossible to do it right.Finally, the UI burying and restricting the former ability to freely allocate funds between charity, publisher, and Humble on the bundles should really make Ziff Davis ashamed of itself. But I reckon it won't.Look, if a regulator won't take a look at this increasingly sour operation any time soon, at least it's still within the reach of publishers, consumers, and charities to say no--publicly. Tell your friends.
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Humble Bundle sells games, ebooks, software, and other digital content. Our mission is to support charity while providing awesome content to customers at great prices. We launched in 2010 with a single two-week Humble Indie Bundle, but we have humbly grown into a store full of games and bundles, a gaming membership service, a game publisher, and more.