Humble backs away from controversial Humble Bundle slider changes

Humble has walked back its earlier (and controversial) decision to remove sliders from the Humble Bundle payment section, though it notes that future changes to how sliders are still likely down the road.

The company broke the news in a blog post this afternoon, saying that it's very aware of the outcry over the proposed change and that it's sorry for how changes were announced and initially rolled out.

For some background, Humble announced last month that it planned to replace Humble Bundle's customizable sliders with a system that instead offered only two default choices for how each purchase would be divvied up to game publishers participating in the bundle, charity, and Humble itself.

The long-used slider system allows purchasers to fully customize how their purchase is divided between those three parties, even if that split would award 100 percent of a purchase to charity and nothing to Humble and publishers (or vice versa). The proposed change instead offered only two different choices, and ultimately limited charity donations to 15 percent of the total purchase while publishers would get a larger, 85 percent slice by default.

As part of the lead-up to that announcement, Humble had already started an A/B test where the slider customizations were fully removed for some Humble Bundle purchasers. That change has, as of today's blog post, now been rolled back as well as Humble takes "more time to review feedback and consider sliders and the importance of customization for purchases on bundle pages in the long term."

The promised redesign of the Bundle side of Humble's business announced alongside those controversial changes is still on the way, but will now include sliders that work the same as they always have on Humble. However, future changes to the slider system seem inevitable despite this momentary pause.

"Once the new design is live, we will continue to iterate on it, incorporating feedback from the community into its ongoing evolution," explains Humble. "Part of that future development will include exploring different approaches to the sliders and how splits work, along with new ways to incorporate charity into other parts of the user experience."

"If there’s one thing that’s clearer than ever, it’s how important the feedback is from the Humble community ahead of making big changes," continues the post. "We’re just as committed to supporting charity as we were when we launched Humble Bundle. Be on the lookout for some updates soon, and thank you for your candid feedback and continued support."