Humble Bundle to Take a Minimum 15 to 30 Percent Cut on Charity Bundles

Humble Bundle, the organization built around providing affordable game bundles that benefit charity, has announced their upcoming plans to change how the donation system will work.

For those unfamiliar: when you purchase a game bundle from their website, you have three sliders that let you determine how much of your money goes towards the game devs, the charity, and Humble themselves. The company came under heavy criticism a few months ago for placing a max donation limit for charities to 15% of the total contribution. They undid the change after enough negative reception.

According to a post by the Humble Bundle team, an update to their system will launch in the next few weeks. This time, there will be a minimum percentage of contribution that will go toward Humble Bundle themselves.

So instead of limiting how much goes to charity, theyre requiring a certain amount go toward themselves.

While splits on each bundle will vary, on average there will be a minimum amount for Humble Bundle between 15 30%. Sliders will clearly indicate any minimums to customers.

They then explain that this is a necessary change to allow further investments into the organization, allowing themselves to grow and generate more money for charity.

While we get why theyd want to establish a minimum for themselves to ensure further business operations, its the numbers that seem somewhat high. Publishers taking a 30% cut is a common practice for normal, non-charity game sales. And even then, there have been movements looking to reduce that percentage. Compare this to other charitable middlemen like Tiltify, who only take a 5% cut, having a 15-30% minimum still sounds greedy.

Why the variable rate, too? Our guess is that smaller contributions or more expensive to establish bundles will have a higher minimum toward Humble. But its hard to imagine that they cant afford to have a static 15% minimum.

Either way, while we dont entirely like this new system, its better than their previous idea of limiting how much goes to charity. Stay tuned for more as this change is implemented