HumbleBundle acquired by IGN

RayCathode

Member
Oct 10, 2001
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Good news, everyone!

http://blog.humblebundle.com/post/166366386976/humble-bundle-is-joining-forces-with-ign

Oct 16th Edit:
For those who still care here is someone's thoughts on why the sale happened:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/humblebundle-acquired-by-ign.2522719/#post-39124692


Humble Bundle is Joining Forces with IGN!

Announcing our biggest bundle ever: Humble Bundle is proudly joining the IGN family! We will continue to bring you all of our humble products, but with more resources and help from IGN.

We chose IGN because they really understand our vision, share our passion for games, and believe in our mission to promote awesome digital content while helping charity. I can’t think of a better partner than IGN to help Humble Bundle continue our quest.

We will be working harder than ever to bring you the best gaming bundles, book bundles, and store sales, while nurturing the Humble Monthly and our new publishing initiative. We will keep our own office, culture, and amazing team with IGN helping us further our plans. We will raise even more money for charity.

John and I started Humble Bundle from our childhood homes. When our parents found out that our “big idea” was basically the honor system of pay-what-you-want plus charity, they braced themselves for the possibility that we might never move out. Seven years later, thanks to the generosity of over 10 million customers, we’ve now raised $106 million for charity. We are incredibly proud of this figure, of our team, and the Humble community which got us here.

But as far as we’ve come, we know we are just getting started. Even bigger things lie ahead, and we think IGN is the perfect partner to help us get there.

If you like Humble Bundle now, stay tuned, because we’ll have more exciting things to share in the near future.

-Jeffrey Rosen
Co-Founder, CEO
Humble Bundle
 
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Craig234

Lifer
May 1, 2006
38,548
348
126
"While everyone is focusing on the Humble Bundle being owned by IGN now, I'm going to encourage people to remember QuakeSpy, Gamesply, PlanetQuake, Captured.com, Fileplanet and so many other websites destroyed by IGN eventually after a round of being owned by them." - some guy on the internet.
 
Feb 4, 2009
34,494
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"While everyone is focusing on the Humble Bundle being owned by IGN now, I'm going to encourage people to remember QuakeSpy, Gamesply, PlanetQuake, Captured.com, Fileplanet and so many other websites destroyed by IGN eventually after a round of being owned by them." - some guy on the internet.

I was going to say something similar look at look at whatever it was called before GameStop bought them.
The site was a mess and now it's even messier plus nothing is ever on sale

And HOLY LURKER OP! I salute your ability to remember usernames & passwords.
 

BSim500

Golden Member
Jun 5, 2013
1,480
216
106
"While everyone is focusing on the Humble Bundle being owned by IGN now, I'm going to encourage people to remember QuakeSpy, Gamesply, PlanetQuake, Captured.com, Fileplanet and so many other websites destroyed by IGN eventually after a round of being owned by them." - some guy on the internet.
^ An example of which is the same IGN who previously hosted the entire huge Neverwinter Nights 1&2 modding community containing a decade's worth of thousands of different community modules, assets, etc, then shut it down abruptly in 2014 without warning under the pretence of "temporary maintenance that will soon be restored as quickly as possible". Three years later it's still down, the temporary maintenance placeholder page looks absurd, and the NWN community has instead painstakingly rebuilt and archived the lot under a new site Neverwinter Vault, well outside of IGN's influence to ensure it never goes "missing" overnight again...

As for the Humble acquisition, the very first thing I did on hearing this news was download all Humble Store DRM-free offline installers "just in case"...
 

wanderer27

Platinum Member
Aug 6, 2005
2,173
15
81
Yeah, there's more to this story than just this.

I believe it was actually J2 Global that acquired them . . . the same J2 Global that also acquired ZDNet (aka Ziff Davis) and also controls AskMen, PCMag, and others.

IGN might not be the one calling the shots, and it's possible that HB may essential be running things pretty much to a large degree.

One can only hope so, but I guess we'll see.

.
 

Malogeek

Golden Member
Mar 5, 2017
1,390
778
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yaktribe.org
So if Humble is also a publisher now, does that mean no HB published games will appear on IGN reviews? I bet they will lol.
 

RayCathode

Member
Oct 10, 2001
194
18
76
I was going to say something similar look at look at whatever it was called before GameStop bought them.
The site was a mess and now it's even messier plus nothing is ever on sale

Stardock's store? I think they sold that to GameStop when one of their tent-pole games tanked. Not videogame related, but the general consensus is that Woot went downhill after Amazon bought them.

And HOLY LURKER OP! I salute your ability to remember usernames & passwords.

Haha. Technically I go back to '99 as I was part of the whole "WMC" drama with Buy.com if that makes it any more impressive (or depressing). I've seen things, man... things no one should see.
 
Feb 4, 2009
34,494
15,729
136
Stardock's store? I think they sold that to GameStop when one of their tent-pole games tanked. Not videogame related, but the general consensus is that Woot went downhill after Amazon bought them.



Haha. Technically I go back to '99 as I was part of the whole "WMC" drama with Buy.com if that makes it any more impressive (or depressing). I've seen things, man... things no one should see.

Yes StarDock, not that i liked their site that much but it was nice how they ran sales at different times than steam.
I only had Supreme Commander & Sup Com F/A plus some other dumb game from them but what it's become is utter crap.
 

DeathReborn

Platinum Member
Oct 11, 2005
2,743
734
136
Stardocks "store" was called Impulse and I had a few of their games on it. I believe it was Elemental that was the game that led to the downfall.

Hopefully this doesn't change HB much but to be safe I have copied all the keys and downloaded everything possible from there for safe keeping.
 

Elixer

Lifer
May 7, 2002
10,376
762
126
They tried this before...
IGN Entertainment today announced the launch of Direct2Drive, the company's always-open digital retail store. D2D provides Internet users with secure purchasing and downloading some of today's most popular PC games directly to their hard drive, at any hour.

... and failed.
On May 25, 2011, GameFly acquired Direct2Drive from IGN Entertainment, Inc. and renamed the service to GameFly Digital.[3] On Oct 20, 2014 GameFly released a statement in their website indicating that it had sold the digital download service to AtGames Holding Ltd., and that the transition would be completed by the end of the year. AtGames relaunched the service under the original name of Direct2Drive.

So, no idea why they want in on this again.
 

Stg-Flame

Diamond Member
Mar 10, 2007
3,494
470
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whatever it was called before GameStop bought them
Electronics Boutique? That place was great. I never went to the website but they were always having deals on games and they would automatically mark down all used games half off.
 

RayCathode

Member
Oct 10, 2001
194
18
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Probably doesn't matter since what's done is done, but here is one take on the deal:

http://gonewiththewin.com/why-humble-bundle-sold-out-itself-and-over-100-million-customers/

So how does Humble Bundle conduct their business? And more importantly, how does that align with IGN’s business strategy, a strategy overseen and developed by Vivek Shah, the CEO and architect of Ziff Davis’s growth. Shah is also poised to become the CEO of J2 Capital on January 1st, 2018. J2 Capital is the parent company of Ziff Davis. IGN is a subsidiary of Ziff Davis’s digital media empire.

On September 14th, 2017 Humble Bundle quietly revised its privacy policy for users. At this point in time, it’s not exactly clear what changed between the prior version of the privacy policy.

However, sometime between October 16th, 2016 and November 7th, 2016 the privacy policy had some major revisions. This timeline of nearly a year ago for the privacy policy changes fits right into the timeline of when acquisition talks started between Humble Bundle and IGN, as reported by Gamasutra: “[IGN VP Mitch Galbraith] explained that IGN started looking to make a deal like this nearly a year ago.”

The pertinent language added was this:
-
If Humble Bundle or substantially all of its assets are acquired, or in the unlikely event that Humble Bundle goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of Humble Bundle may continue to use your Personal Information as set forth in this policy.
-

Make no mistake, that’s exactly what this deal was about. Sure, it’s a solid investment for multiple reasons: it has a good income stream, a huge user base of repeat customers, the model is sound, but the real value was in the collected user data.

And if you look closely at the Humble Bundle privacy policy, the extent of the reach is clear. Not only did they sell browsing history, purchase history, demographic data—they also sold some very niche data that dovetails neatly into how ads work on IGN. If a user attached their Steam account, Humble Bundle just sold all the data collected in relation to their Steam holdings and usage. The same holds true for Battle.net and other linked third-party services.

The shared customer base is IGN’s advertisers getting access to the contextual data of over 100 million users. And of course, there are opportunities for IGN to be enriched by Humble Bundle customers outside of leveraging their data.
 
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RayCathode

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I was planning on retreating back into the shadows from whence I came, but since I posted the accusations I should at least post the rebuttal:
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
David Rosen (WolfireDavid), founder of Wolfire Games, held an AMA yesterday on /r/Games. He was asked about an article accusing Humble of selling out its users to IGN which previously hit the front page of several subreddits, including /r/pcgaming (link to discussion). His response:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/76sb8j/we_are_wolfire_games_creators_of_overgrowth/dogultd/

That article is certainly alarming! I did a few minutes of Internet research to see if there's anything to it. It turns out basically everything in that article is factually incorrect.

  1. The privacy policy was not secretly changed in 2017. According to web archives, that privacy policy has been there since at least 2011: https://web.archive.org/web/20110420145302/http://www.humblebundle.com:80/privacy

  2. Tax write-offs don't work like that. The charity donations given through Humble Bundle are not income, and can't be taxed or deducted. That whole section is not even theoretically possible.

  3. Humble Bundle does not take any cut from bundles beyond what users specify on their sliders. The majority always goes to developers.

  4. I don't think there's anywhere near 100 million customers. Where did that number come from? It seems like the author confused "dollars donated to charity" with "Humble Bundle customers".

  5. Humble Bundle is not an advertising company, and for that reason, even if you think they're entirely mercenary and evil people, they don't want any user info beyond what is absolutely necessary for the service to work. They need your login info so that you can log in, and they need your purchase history so that you can download the games you own. Any info beyond that would only use up effort, storage space, and open them up to liability in case of a security breach.
On the other hand, the website that wrote that article relies entirely on advertising, and is therefore actively selling your information for profit, while condemning that exact activity. The only reason they wrote that article is to get you to go there, so that they can sell you as a product to advertisers. They wanted it to be inflammatory so it would spread.

I have mostly sworn off arguing on the Internet, but I'm a bit touchy about fake news recently, especially when it's about friends and family.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I'm definitely supposed to read this in the voice of Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth. Right?

Of course!:)
 
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