I kept their emails in my inbox for a long time, even after being burnt out of their offerings for some time, just like you.

Recently I saw a humble book bundle that included a book about the healing power of crystals.

At that moment it became clear (crystal clear even!) to me that it is no longer what it used to be, and I finally unsubscribed.

The crystals only work if you let them in, man.

Same here.

They've not been humble, indie, or a bundle for a long time.

Par for the course. Similar disingenuous commercialization is rampant through the games industry: see what Valve has done to Steam, and what major publishers have done to their titles vis monetization.

Unfortunately the games industry is floating in too much money for another crash to clean house.

I think that's not really fair, only a few bundles a year are actually labeled "Humble Indie Bundle", and those do usually fit the bill and check all three boxes.

There were 13 Humble Indie Bundles since 2010 and 94 other types of bundles (not counting the Weekly Bundles). And those other types often include audiobooks, ebooks, comics etc. that one could claim are at least indie, or some indie games sprinkled in with the AAA titles.

There was also extremely commercial stuff such as the 2K bundles, but hey, it's always labeled as such.

I think this feeling is due to evolution. Humble Bundle started as Humble Indie Bundle, only later it turned into a brand.

It's kind of similar as with GOG, on which games are neither exclusively Good nor Old anymore ;).

As long as GOG keeps it DRM free, they will remain the only distributor that gets any more of my money, aside from direct, DRM-free sales by creators. Steam destroyed all rationalization I was using to be ok with DRM by locking my account for 3 weeks shortly after I opened an account.

I still don't really trust GOG after the whole "we're shutting down, too bad" PR stunt several years ago, but it's true they're a reliable distributor of DRM-free games which you can simply download and keep forever.

What happend with that PR stunt?

> not counting the weekly bundles

I think this was where it went downhill for me. That’s 107 bundles, plus 200 odd weekly bundles. They’re not special any more, and especially now that the bundles aren’t pay what you want, they’re pay above the average, which is higher because they hide some items behind a minimum price. It’s lost it’s allure to me, and most of my friends too.

Completely agreed.

There really isn't any confusion on the website about any of that. And the book and audiobook bundles have been fantastic, too.

I have 1 major issue with Steam, you cannot share individual games in your library and play a different one yourself. If you have 200 games in your library and want to share one with your kids, you cannot play any other game at same time.

Interested to see what other criticisms you have.

Actually, you can (I assume you use Family Sharing). Either you or your kids Steam client needs to go "offline" and you'll be able to play games from same collection simultaneously.

I don't believe you can, as of a few weeks ago in any case.

When you drop offline, any shared library you had access to will drop off. When changing connectivity during a session, your games terminate within 5 minutes.

That's why I largely moved to board games. They are by definition optimized for multiplayer and finished in one seating. Dedicated servers by default. "Spawn" system like in StarCraft 1 by default (one person owns the game, everyone plays). Board games practically don't get outdated. Good ones are still widely played decades later. There's high innovation in game mechanics. Many of them aren't even turn-based. There are dexterity games and real-time games. There are games with simultaneous turns, where you only wait for the slowest player. And you get to make friends.

This is assuming that the game opts into family sharing, or else you don't get to share nil.

I've been using Steam as the main means of communication with a lot of people, but these days the chat client is slow, outdated, lacking in basic features and tends to insert annoying redirections before shared links (or remove them outright when you're using a shady site like, I dunno, Google Docs). Hence I'm trying to figure out how to get everyone to migrate to discord.

> Steam [...] the chat client is slow

> Hence I'm trying to figure out how to get everyone to migrate to discord.

ouch!

I know why you're being sarcastic, but the Discord client DOES feel more responsive to me in daily usage. Especially if you're planning on clicking any links, which in Steam does a background API call to the Steam servers to check whether you should see the pointless redirection screen. This sometimes takes several seconds, and there's zero UI indication of what's going on. If you're impatient and you click the link several times, it will the open in multiple tabs at the same time.

Okay, the chat itself in Steam is pretty fast (unless you attempt to send an emote). The problem is, there's zero message delivery guarantees, and the client doesn't even care to inform you whether the message has been successfully sent. If you're on an unreliable internet connection, your best bet is to close and re-open the chat window to see whether the messages made it to the server in the mini chat log that shows the last 2-5 messages (that's the extent of the client's chat history feature by the way). It's an usability nightmare.

This isn't about how fast Discord is but about how bad of a job Valve is doing (I'm not even certain present tense applies here given that the chat client has essentially not received any major new features for like a decade).

The UX for Discord around group chat is also miles ahead of Steam's. Unlimited history, granular notification options with @mentions, rich media embedding, third party integrations, and seamless voice chat support (and now with video chat and screensharing to boot). Meanwhile Steam's chat client has been stagnating in terms of both features and UX for what feels like a decade.

They do have more than just games like e-books https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14791255

i've bought far more books than games from humble

Me too, but mostly because a couple of the book bundles had 50 or so titles. I've bought a lot more game bundles than book bundles.

> The first few were amazing: all cross platform, great stuff. Since then they've branched out... Into becoming a glorified Steam sale.

100% agree with this. I got in a bit late, but the first bundles were still pretty fantastic. I loved the fact that they had Linux games. But eventually quality started slipping.

For example, their claims that a game runs on Linux are very unreliable.

Some games just work out of the box with no sweat at all. Some of them work after some tweaking (installing packages, etc). But I have at least 8 games that either don't work on Linux at all (fail to start due to errors or segfaults) or have some serious issues (random crashes, game breaking bugs). Windows versions of those games worked on wine, so I just swallowed the loss, but it did leave a bad taste in my mouth.

But this is just sloppy quality control. Most of the problems I have mentioned would be detected immediately by simply running the game on the recommended configurations.

All that said, I have since moved on to GOG and so far I have been pretty happy with their claims of Linux support. Had one hiccup ("X3: Terran War Pack"... that was a wasted weekend), but everything else (~30 games) just works. Their quality control seems to be a bit better, and their community forums are helpful (so far), so I'm happy. Pity that they don't have more Linux games I like.

They did an O'Reilly books sale a few months ago that was like 6 or so books for £12, which I felt was a pretty good deal.

But yeah in terms of games the last bundle I bought was probably more than 2 years ago

Yeah, I got a similar deal for a bunch of no no starch press ebooks about a year ago, i'm not a gamer but much appreciate their book sales.

I think they've done rather well for themselves, given their success. They still support charities in a major way, and haven't given into DLCs the way Steam has. Overall, GOG > Humble Bundle > Steam if I must have a game not on GOG, so in that sense, glorified Steam sale, yes.

After the original bundle, I've gotten a few in the last year: Intergalactic, Freedom, Star Wars, and Civilization. All have been great values, if you know what you want. Even if you don't, you're giving to charity and you can gift the games to someone.