We’re excited to announce the Humble Partner beta program! This program allows a small number of Twitch streamers to promote certain bundles with a special link which transparently inserts themselves into the bundle. Like all bundles, the amount of money that they earn is a customizable slider which can be set to whatever the customer feels is fair.
We are running this program for a limited time with just a few partners to iron out all of the kinks. If everything goes well, we hope to roll this out on a larger scale soon.
It’s transparent
Nothing is hidden. If you are supporting a partner, you’ll see it plainly at the top of the bundle page and the URL includes the partner’s name.
It’s humble
Our partners will receive the same treatment as game developers and charities. As with all of our bundles partners will get a default share of the purchase, but that’s just a default, customers can choose exactly where their money goes.
It supports great games and charities
Of course the best thing about Humble partners is that it supports the same great games and charities you’ve grown to love at Humble Bundle. The best games at the best prices supporting your favorite charity, and now, optionally, your favorite YouTube, Twitch, or online personality.
PARTNER WITH US
We are currently testing things out with a small group of pre-selected Humble partners. If you are interested in becoming a partner please apply below. We humbly ask for your patience though as we are just starting off and it may take us a little bit to get back to you as we iron things out.
Most of Humble Bundle’s customers are located outside of our home country, the United States. To make things easier for our international customers, we’ve been quietly implementing new payment methods. We’re proud to announce that the Humble Store now supports Alipay, SOFORT, and iDEAL, which are the most popular online payment methods in China, Germany, and the Netherlands respectively.
When we added Alipay, it quickly became Humble Bundle’s leading payment method in China. We are looking forward to the same adoption of iDeal and SOFORT.
New initiative brings developers together with Humble’s over 10m customers; Humble will be evaluating games to publish during GDC and PAX East
San Francisco, CA February 9, 2017 – Humble Bundle announced the launch of a multi-platform publishing and funding initiative. The starting lineup includes seven games across a range of genres and styles, for PC, console, and mobile platforms.
A Hat in Time – The perfect ode to old-school 3D platformers, with a hat-swapping spin
HackyZack – A sticker-collecting, precision-platforming, puzzle-stunt game
Ikenfell – A heartwarming turn-based RPG about a school of magic and its troublesome students
Keyboard Sports – A cheeky adventure with Master QWERTY that uses the entire keyboard
No Truce with the Furies – An isometric role playing game that blends cop show antics with a genre busting “fantastic realism” setting, offering absurd new heights of non-combat gameplay for RPG fans
Scorn – Gripping first-person survival horror set in a nightmarish universe
Staxel – Grow your farm, meet the villagers, and join your friends online in building your world
Publishing Lead John Polson says, “Since Humble’s launch in 2010, we have earned the trust of over 10 million customers across our products. In a time when it’s harder than ever for games to find their audience, publishing feels like the next logical step in the services that we can offer to our developer partners.
"All of our games will be ‘presented by Humble Bundle,’ carrying a seal of quality and curation that fans have come to expect. For each aspect of publishing, developers can choose the services they need, making Humble Bundle a truly modern and adaptable publisher.”
Across Humble Bundle’s bundles, Store, Monthly subscription, and other developer services, they offer multiple ways to help devs create buzz and get to market.
Humble Bundle will be evaluating games to publish during GDC and PAX East. Developers can fill out this form if they have a game to present:
With over a million sales of great games in a typical month, Humble Bundle is an enticing target for fraudsters out to make a quick buck. The most common approach is to buy as many keys as possible using a stolen credit card, and then resell them elsewhere for a profit. Over the years we have invested heavily in our anti-fraud technology to keep everything running smoothly. Here are some of the steps we take to stop fraud.
Step 1 - Risk Assessment
Our first line of defense is a machine-learning-based anti-abuse startup called Sift Science, which we’ve been training for years across 55,000,000 transactions. Given how many orders we process, Sift Science has a really good idea when someone is up to no good. The model adapts daily as we get more data.
Step 2 - SMS Verification
If the transaction risk is high, we ask the user to verify their phone number through SMS. This helps us confirm that our legit customers are who they say they are. We are able to ban fraudsters by phone numbers, which substantially raises the cost of attacking us. This can be annoying for legitimate customers, but thanks to our machine learning, only a tiny fraction get flagged for verification.
Step 3 - Manual Review
If the transaction still looks risky, we hold onto it for manual review. If you’re a customer that placed the order at a discount, the discount is still honored during this review period. Our customer service team looks at every risky transaction, customer history, and more to determine if the transaction looks legitimate. If they’re on the fence, we generally approve because the only thing worse than fraudsters is blocking legitimate customers from getting their game.
Step 4 - Rate Limits & Captcha
When all else fails, we use rate limits and captchas to minimize the damage. So if someone gets past everything else, they are still contained to a modest amount of thievery. So they might be able to steal two copies of a game, but they’ll need to steal another credit card to steal the third. We were among the first test cases for Google’s latest captcha implementation.
Step 5 - Key Cancellation
We’re diligent about canceling orders and the included digital goods when the rare transaction slips by us. Sometimes we find related transactions during a manual review, or even more rarely, a purchase results in a chargeback. When that happens, we cancel the order, revoke the download page and the Steam, uPlay, or Origin keys associated with that order. We send those keys back to the developer or publisher, and to the platform owner (Valve / Ubisoft / EA). The person holding that key loses access to the game. If they purchased it from a reseller, that means the reseller’s reputation is diminished.
Step 6 - Keep watching and working with our processors
We’re monitoring fraud daily, and we’re always tweaking variables in every step of the process above. The fraudsters are persistent. They poke and poke until they find a hole. When they find it, we find it too and close it up. We have great relationships with our payment processors. We even have shared Slack channels with Paypal and Stripe so that as we see problems, we work together in real time to diagnose, fix, and improve our joint system together.
But does it work?
The short answer is yes. We’ve seen fraud go up and down, but overall, it’s a tiny fraction of all the transactions that we process at Humble Bundle. But don’t take our word for it, we recently asked Scott Klonan, one of the people behind Factorio.
The widget customer support system has helped reduce the administrative cost of selling on our website by at least 90%.
Previously we were dealing with fraud from both our payment provider and PayPal, and it was onerous. Since moving to the Humble Widget it is super easy to manage and deal with any transaction errors and customer issues.
It has also simplified the monthly accounting for the company a great deal, giving our accounts manager more time to focus on other tasks.
So overall we feel it has worked exceptionally well, and it is a very well designed tool.
Thanks, but what does it mean for me?
I’m a customer, what can I do?
Purchase from stores that have a known relationship with the developer or publisher, like the Humble Store. If you get caught in one of these fraud checks, we apologize. It’s an unfortunate necessity to protect our developers’ products. We ask for your patience while we work it out and forgiveness if we make a mistake. This most commonly happens to customers who are new or spending a lot in a short period of time.
I’m a developer, what can I do?
Let us take care of this for you using our infrastructure. We have worked very hard over the years to solve these problems and you can benefit from our work by using the Humble Widget and Humble Gamepage to power your direct sales.
We provide the anti-fraud technology, content and/or Steam key distribution, and transaction customer support for everything you sell through Humble. Humble Gamepages and Widgets are free to build and only cost 5% of each transaction. Learn more.
At Humble Bundle, we love to get more people playing more games. It’s one of the reasons we continue to prioritize DRM-free and cross-platform builds and one of the reasons we partner with charities like Child’s Play, SpecialEffect, and AbleGamers. We love games, and we love when lots of people can play them. We also love working with developers and helping them reach wider audiences to bring more success to their games.
This blog will be all about working with developers to get more games to more people. That may cover technology, business, or just fun stories, but we’re going to start with technology.
Our first topic will be developing games for asm.js. Recently, we partnered with Mozilla to release the Humble Mozilla Bundle powered by asm.js. The technology behind asm.js allowed us to port nine fantastic indie games into the browser, including hits like Super Hexagon and FTL. Customers can play these games directly in their browser without plugins, extensions, or huge downloads. It’s super fast, the performance is awesome, and the bundle was a big hit for the developers, Mozilla, and gamers alike. Check out what PC World, IGN, and Polygon had to say about the Mozilla Bundle.
We’re really excited by the potential of browser-based gaming for the game industry. Being able to click and play directly in the browser removes hassle and presents opportunities for developers to better engage potential players on Humble Bundle’s platform – whether it’s in a bundle, an embedded widget, or the Humble Store.
We’re putting a lot of energy into enhancing the asm.js platform on Humble Bundle. We are building features that we think both players and developers will enjoy. We can already run games at near-native performance in the browser with some cool features like cloud saves, full-screen, audio controls, and dynamic resizing, and we’re just getting started.
Stay tuned for more posts dedicated to helping you get your games running in asm.js and more.
The Humble Partner program has been a huge success for Bundles and Monthly, and today we are expanding the program to the Humble Store as well. Humble Partners encourages online influencers like Twitch streamers, YouTubers, and more to promote charities, games, and books sold by Humble Bundle. Partners receive 5% of Humble Store sales that they generate via their unique URL.
Humble Bundle will be paying the partners out of our pockets, so it won’t change what developers or publishers make on the Humble Store. It also won’t impact sales on the Humble Widgets or Gamepages. You don’t need to take any action to be part of the new program. Just keep making great games, and we’ll keep doing our best to get them to as many people as possible.
If you have any questions about the Humble Partner program or are interested in applying, more details are here.
Thanks to all of you for helping us continue our mission of bringing great games to awesome people and helping awesome charities at the same time.
Great news, developers and partners: you can now choose a lower payment threshold for the money we owe you. We used to have a minimum threshold of $250 so that your money didn’t get eaten up in international transaction fees, but now that we support Paypal, you can opt for smaller monthly payments with only a small fee. As always, domestic ACH and check payments have no transaction fee.
Some payment options still have a high fee though, so double check what your fees are before you change your payment threshold.
To get started, visit the Payment Info Form (“Payment Info” on your Dashboard), and update your info under “Account Details.”
Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly implied that Paypal is the lowest cost payment option. This version clarifies that there are also zero transaction fee payment options.
We just launched self-service product editing, a new developer feature in the Humble Store. You can now make changes to your heart’s content – no waiting required.
To get started, visit your Dashboard and click the edit icon in the “Actions” column for a product.
You can edit the following fields on the product page:
Price (base pricing only – discounts are set in the Sale Scheduler)
Platforms
Operating Systems
System Requirements
Description
The green toggle next to “Product Page Settings” lets you switch between edit and preview modes. Make sure to click “Save Changes” when you like what you see, and your changes will go live immediately.
We’re excited to announce that we can now use PayPal to pay your developer and partner earnings! Paypal generally has lower transaction fees, which means you get to keep more of your Humble earnings.
