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Once the change rolls out, Humble Bundle purchasers will only be able to designate either 5 or 15 percent for charity versus the previous ability to fully customize how funds were divvied up.

Alissa McAloon, Publisher

April 23, 2021

3 Min Read

Humble Bundle is readying to roll out a change to how its users are able to divide a bundle's purchase price between publishers, charity, and Humble itself.

The company has announced that the current slider system for dividing up a purchase is going away and will instead be replaced by two static options. In doing so, publishers are set to receive a larger cut of each purchase while the previously uncapped charity contribution will now max out at 15 percent.

Under the new system, the default option awards 85 of a bundle's pay-what-you-want price tag to publishers, 5 percent to charity, and 10 to Humble. The second and only other option Extra To Charity bumps the charity percent up to 15 percent and lowers the publisher and Humble splits to 80 percent and 5 percent respectively.

That's different from the current system in a few key ways. First off, both new options guarantee a higher chunk of each bundle purchase will head to the publishers of the participating games. The current slider system defaults to 65 percent for publishers, 5 percent to charity, and 30 percent for Humble, so much of the shift in default values is coming out of Humble's share.

The current slider-based system offered by Humble Bundle.

However, the current slider system allows purchasers to adjust those percentages as they see fit, even to the point where one of the three recipients is given the entirety of the purchase and the other two receive nothing. Under the new version of Humble Bundles, 15 percent is the absolute most any purchaser can send to the causes Humble Bundles typically support.

The new two-option donation system headed to Humble Bundle in May.

A blog post detailing the coming changes notes that Humble has raised $195 million for charity since launching Humble Bundle over a decade ago, but says that an evolution of the slider system will allow it "to create and expand bundles that power incredible causes around the world."

"About a month ago, we turned on a test that hid sliders for certain customers," reads the post. "This test was part of our bigger plans to make updates to the bundle pages, but without any context, we see how it raised questions and led to confusion for the community. We apologize for that and appreciate everyone who wrote in to ask us about it. The lesson for us was that we should have been more proactive in communicating the test."

Humble now angles the change as a way to bring the Bundles it offers more in line with the other corners of its business like the Humble Store and its Humble Choice subscription, neither of which use the same customizable sliders as Bundles.

"We also want to take the time to provide insight into what’s coming with the bundle pages and how it will be more in line with how our other products support charity," continues the post. "Since we launched bundles over a decade ago sliders have not changed even as Humble evolved by building products like Humble Choice and the Humble Store that all support charity without sliders. "

The update is set to go live in late May.

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