Humble Bundle Stops Purchasers from Giving Full Payment to Charity
upstart writes:
Humble Bundle stops purchasers from giving full payment to charity:
Since the first Humble Indie Bundle launched to much acclaim in 2010, users have been able to allocate up to 100 percent of a bundle's pay-what-you-want purchase price to Humble's partner charities. That option will be going away in mid-July as the company institutes a new 15 to 30 percent minimum cut that will go to the storefront itself.
If that new policy sounds familiar, it's probably because of a test Humble Bundle in April that hid the charity sliders from some customers as a form of early user testing. In light of negative feedback, Humble Bundle apologized for not being "more proactive in communicating the test." But at the time, the company also said it was planning to limit total charity donations to 15 percent of the user-set purchase price in the near future.
By May, though, Humble Bundle backtracked and said it was leaving the charity sliders intact and turning them back on for all customers "while we take more time to review feedback and consider sliders and the importance of customization for purchases on bundle pages in the long term."
Today, that review seems to be over, and Humble Bundle has once again decided to set limits on the proportion of payments users can allocate to charity (though at a higher level than it publicly mulled back in April). In a blog post Thursday, the Humble Bundle team attributed the 15 to 30 percent minimum store cut (which will vary from bundle to bundle) to the fact that "the PC storefront landscape has changed significantly since we first launched bundles in 2010, and we have to continue to evolve with it to stay on mission."
[...] Humble Bundle was acquired by gaming and media conglomerate IGN in 2017.
It's a slippery slope
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