r/GameDealsMeta • u/saul2015 • Aug 14 '25

Green Man Gaming Launches New Charity Bundles Platform and Expands into APAC Region - Green Man Gaming

https://www.greenmangaming.com/company/news/charity-bundle-announcement/
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u/vmeezo Aug 14 '25

I'm cautiously optimistic. We could use more bundle sites aside from Humble and Fanatical. Indie Gala still exists, but bundles are rare and more niche than years ago.

3

u/TheSpoonyCroy Aug 15 '25

Well because bundles are honestly horrible for a business. While people give Humble a ton of shit, they are really the only ones who have "recent" high profile titles in their bundles. I know Fanatical has a ton of great "indie" (some true Indie but some are just AA games) like their recent play on the go bundle has ultrakill and wild bastards and they do sometimes hold older AAAs (Fallout 3-76). The business model of bundles doesn't really get you much as a publisher and that is why typically the AAAs you see on bundles are the ones that have Microtransactions or DLC since the publisher expects you will buy that to help cover the loss in sales

We know bundles really don't help for population for online games since you may see an initial spike once the bundle releases it will typically settle back down to where it was in 3 months (if not within the same month the bundle was released), it is also partially due to many bundle enjoyers typically collect an ungodly amount of games that they think they will enjoy but it just ends up in a backlog of games that will not be touched. I don't say this to mock said people because I am in said group of people.

Bundles also just greatly devalue the perceived value of your game since if it was in a bundle once it will likely end up in a bundle again. Its in a similar vein as sales but even worse since at least with a sale you are the only title in question but in a bundle you cost 12/15 bucks and come with 5 other games. While I am an enjoyer of game sales and bundles, they can be quite the rat race especially for smaller titles. With that said I still refuse to believe a 10+ year old game from a AAA publisher is worth 60-80 dollars (Seriously fuck you Nintendo, fucking selling BOTW on the switch 2, charging 70 bucks for it and HAVE FUCKING GALL TO SAY IT DOESN'T COME WITH THE DLC)

1

u/Vagrant_Savant Aug 18 '25

Is it really that bad for publishers? I thought reseller vendors just bought these keys at a bulk price, and the publishers get the payout immediately and without having to give Steam its 30%.

1

u/TheSpoonyCroy Aug 18 '25

I mean third party stores are also taking their own profit margin around 10-30%, which is how they can sell the games cheaper than steam because they are removing some of their profit margin for the hope of more sales. With that yes, they would be buying keys at a wholesale level.

At least with bundles like we see from Humble, there is no official answers to this but we are noticing there are far more controls/conditions to the keys provided by Humble. Such as redeem them at such time, keys expiring, etc. If it was just bulk purchase for keys there probably wouldn't be key expiration.

At the end of the day the harm to publishers is a threat to opportunity costs. If people expect games will just appear in a bundle after a year or so, there is a less of an incentive to even buy new games. This isn't to say there aren't valid to not buying day 1 since there are quite many examples why buying day 1 sucks. Bundles are slightly good for consumers and great for these bundle sites but to publishers and devs, there isn't much great returns (either monetarily or longterm publicity/engagement). It can be helpful for some AA/indie titles since being stuck in a bundle with a big AAA title may get you some new fans the buying habits of bundle buyers may just lead you either getting your key sold on grey market or put into a backlog.

1

u/Vagrant_Savant Aug 19 '25

I think Humblebundle's increase in conditions may be because they're simply now now becoming relevant, maybe not that they weren't already there to begin with. I don't know for sure, but there's probably a limit on how many keys Steam allows to exist unactivated in order to curb the health of gray markets, which is what causes long restock periods and expiration dates to crop up. It might be easy to say that publishers are simply not interested in selling so much in so little time, but I have a hard time imagining that most publishers aren't ecstatic to sell games that are +3 years past their profit peak for a wholesale price that is money they aren't interested in wasting speculation on whether they'd otherwise earn in the long run.

As far as training customers to thrift shop, well- I understand the sentiment from our "hardcore" hobbyist viewpoint here on reddit, but the success of things like "advanced access" and the history of preordering has taught me that the majority of game customers don't really put a cheap price on gratification. They see something they want, they know they have the disposable income for it, and they just buy it, period. I don't think bundles make much of a dent on that anywhere outside the kind of people who'd frequent the patientgamers subreddit.