The keys don't actually expire but humble removes your ability to access the keys in their website. So if you have them in a spreadsheet you are safe for now
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I think they just want to remove accountability for unclaimed keys from themselves as a store and put it on the customer instead. "You snooze you lose, we warned you 3 years ahead" sort of thing.
Doesn't actually means all key expire for real if you already took them into a lets say, notepad or excel.
Just that you shouldn't complain to them if that happens.
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They could assign the game keys to their customers at the time of purchase, it would be easier for everyone. Instead, they prefer to wait until the customer comes to claim a game key before assigning it to the customer. If this isn't a way for the store to save money on all the forgetful people who don't claim their games, I don't know what is. This new 3-year rule confirms this.
And I even wonder if it's not illegal to not assign the merchandise to the customer at the time of purchase, only to later tell the customer that the paid merchandise is no longer available because they took too long to claim it. There must be some sort of trickery, like you're not buying a game key, but you're buying limited access to a game key.
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"You snooze you lose, we warned you 3 years ahead" sort of thing.
That would be cool if they wouldn't hold my 10 months old keys hostage, because they repeatedly fail to restock. What's the guarantee they'll care about them for the next 26 months, and not just rob me off it? Or any key at this point, really. (I miss Teraformers, Soulstice and Fashion Police Squad. Why can't they get more keys from the existing developers of existing games, almost for a year?)
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I wonder how they will deal with unused annual subs after shutting down choice subscription. I remember when HB switched from classic to choice, 2 euros was on HB site balance with expiration date (useless for people who doesn't buy anything except from bundles)
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All of Humble's bundle sales policies are basically based on donations. This is a charity project that aims to create a win-win situation for users, developers, and donation organizations based on the profits. Therefore, legal evidence is needed that IGN has committed fraudulent business or profit-making acts through bundle sales or has made huge profits by refusing to provide keys. And since most people have already purchased bundles and registered the keys to their accounts immediately, the small number of people who have not opened the keys for a long time will only end up in huge legal fees and wasted time if they file a lawsuit.
Legal action is not easy. Even if they file a lawsuit, they will have to prove one by one that Humble deceived consumers and caused financial damage and trouble by not providing keys according to the legal provisions.
Humble also has a history of refusing to provide keys to free games like Meadow and The Ship - Complete Pack. If you start looking at each item one by one, there is a possibility that it will become a big issue that will require you to dig into the entire history of the bundle.
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I was able to reveal two Jingle Jam Yogscast bundle games from the same year under Keys & Entitlements.
This makes me wonder if games from a Choice bundle are more likely to have this 3 year thing enforced since they're not directly accessible from the same page?
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Yeah, I just revealed and activated a ten year old key with no problem. Are we sure this "won't let you see it" is an actual thing and in effect now?
I'm not saying it's a bad idea to spreadsheet your unused keys (and the threat of this should be enough motivation to make you do so) but I'm also not sure we're at the "They took muh keyz!" point yet.
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Yeah, I just revealed and activated a ten year old key with no problem.
Please, read the topic, because you genuinely, clearly don't understand it.
They never said they remove keys that are older than 3 years.
They say that they don't have to RESTOCK keys, that are older than 3 years.
And there are quite a few games that are out of stock, it's Humble's modus operandi for years by this point
but I'm also not sure we're at the "They took muh keyz!" point yet.
They literally say that they haven't given you the key you bought, and from now on they don't even have to. And this happens with bundles as they are still running! Imagine you go to the store, buy a box of eggs, and you get half a box, with a promise that you'll get the second half when they find the time and opportunity to find more. But you still pay for the whole box.
Claiming the keys immediately is the best course of action, but it doesn't work all the time, when even ongoing bundles can lack keys (current monthly is not in danger :D ).
But humble never should have this kind of problem (selling more than what they have), and this just got worse because they just excused themselves, if they fail to solve it within a timeframe.
It's an alarming change, because the proper course of action would have been to limit the keys they can't deliver. Instead they gave themselves a deadline, after which they don't have to care. It's anti consumer, whether we are personally affected or not (and any game can be eventually affected, if they keep up their behaviour)
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https://old.reddit.com/r/humblebundles/comments/1iq35cv/games_and_keys_missing/
If that thread on the currently RUNNING Capcom bundle is true. It points out to really worrying and disgusting pattern of behaviour.
For information:
It has sold "6,207 Sold"
There is no notification of keys not being immediately available.
And it has 20 days left...
Makes you really wonder.
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This is bullshit, we paid for the keys.
They disable keys without warning that were purchased before the new TOS changes.
Is that even legal?
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Looks like they are begging for a lawsuit...
And no it's not legal unless they specifically mentioned when you bought the bundle that you had a limited time to activate the key.
If you're in the EU you have consumer laws protecting you. Other places, they'll just roll you over with their BS TOS
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I would take that they can at any time go out of business... The activities with recent choice bundles and even some bundles is indicative that they are not planning to honour all purchases. But instead a decent chunk to go unredeemed, thus they are not acquiring sufficient number of keys from publishers to fulfil their promises.
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Dude seriously... i have a lot of unactivated keys from years ago...
*sigh
I guess it is time to clean them out.
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Older then 3 year keys are no longer shown, but previously writen down keys still function?
EZ to answer why:
Humble Bundle wants to save on storage space for the database in which they store the keys. Until now they did store every used key, now they will not.
For unrevealed (unassigned) keys.... they are just jerks. (Typical evil big corpo.)
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Yikes. With college exams in less than 2 weeks I don't have much time to clear my keys.
It's frustrating how much they can get away with things like this :/
Edit: Thank you for the heads up by the way!
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While i tend to feel that that this sort of thing is highly problematic, there is another side of the story to be considered outside of the usual take; Bundle keys are generated by publishers and developers, not the bundlesite.
While it would be nice to expect that bundlesites obtained more keys than were sold, thats probably not the case much of the time. Id speculate that they're probably requesting a percentage of expected sales, paying developers, and then refreshing that stock later on as it gets low. If those developers or publishers no longer operate on Steam for one reason or another, they cannot generate new or replacement keys for distribution. But even if those sites did obtain more keys than sales, things go wrong all the time that are outside of a bundlesite's control.
We've seen all kinds of issues with keys over the years from sites selling keys and not paying developers leading to mass revocations. We've seen revocations when developers switch publishers to prevent malicious or under the table key dealing by an old publisher. We've seen numbers of hacked keylists, as well as intentional expiry dates, and both malicious and accidentally revoked keys too. If any of these should happen to keys that a bundlesite had leased or purchased, you could expect that the site could have a hard time replacing them. This is one of the reasons why most bundlesites say that they will only guarantee a key within a certain span of time.
Pretty much anything could happen at any time when dealing with an online store or service. Accounts could get hacked, databases could become corrupted, websites could get blocked or otherwise taken offline. Any of those could result in the loss of access to anything that was purchased and not claimed. All of those things might make for the argument that revealing keys is in your best interest, but the reality is that there are few guarantees either way. If you reveal a key now and its revoked by the publisher later, you're likely still without the key if the bundlesite is unable or unwilling to replace it. Time is the enemy of all online services.
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Don't sell more bundles than keys you get/order simple
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There is nothing right in not getting full amount of keys once you have sold the bundle. I expect a honest platform to have key reserved for me to reveal whenever I care to do it. Be it instant I buy it, or 10 years later.
And lately HB have failed the instant I buy it part too.
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+1. i don't see a problem if HB requests the amount of keys according to the bundles sold, and lock the said keys to the person who purchased. whether they work or not is another thing, but not having a key for a paying customer is a wrong thing in the first place. it's as if you are paying for nothing.
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There are hundreds of examples of businesses and services that do not work like that in the real world, including internet providers, banks, power plants, roadways, and other infrastructure you would consider to be critical to every day life. If everyone decides to make a 'withdrawl' or use the service at the same time, entire service industries crumble.
From website overloading, toilet paper shortages, water shortages, power brownouts, congested roads, even the simple logistics of storing enough money in one location like a bank. Hundreds of industries run on load balancing principles--that not everyone is going to hammer the service/business at the same time.
All of these things are built on maintaining a predictable and steady rate of flow with some room for surges built in, and all of them start to break down when an unexpected event leads to a disruption or an increased usage of them at the same time. When both happen at the same time the results are often catastrophic failures of such services.
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So you would be entirely fine with hotel telling you that: "Sorry, we overbooked" "We might have room available later for your payment come back and check regularly" I mean you might get to stay in the hotel eventually and get what you paid for.
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You did not understand the point of either post i made if you are assuming that i am not in agreement that overselling is problematic. But as i made note of in my first message, even if humble had one key for every purchase made, that still does not account for randomly guessed keys / hacked key lists, publisher revocations, and defunct studios or lack of management for those developer accounts / wholesale connections.
I am simply pointing out how many of these businesses and services tend to actually operate in the real world. Some people seem to be under false assumptions that these problems are always on the distributor, when in fact a number of problems anywhere in the supply chain can cause the endpoint to have problems. Ive worked in multiple places where the demand for products and services has exceeded the capability of providing them, whether thats due to staff not being able to handle a surge, systems going down, a lack of planning to accommodate for multiple failures at once, or panic-induced demand resulting in not enough supply for the people who really need that service or product, versus the ones who are afraid of missing out.
I know that many industries are built on leasing products that are only paid for when inventory is requested and moved. I know this to be both a logistics issue, as well as a cost-savings issue. Over-selling services is deeply ingrained into modern business in the services industry. Similarly I know that Steam keys are generated by valve at the request of developers and publishers, and that this generation is dramatically more limited than it used to be, and that it gets more difficult to guarantee generation as years pass. Even preordered keys are not always properly fulfilled on time due to limitations in the supply chain.
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The simple solution is for bundle sites (Humble) to assign a key to a purchase immediately. If they're getting low, they list the amount they have left and end sales of the bundle when keys have run out. And if they get restocked, they start selling the bundle again. Assigning keys to purchases is the primary thing that should already be happening. It shouldn't be dependent on a person revealing a key (although a person should be revealing their keys when they purchase something regardless).
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I agree it would be ideal for the consumer if this were the case, but its not without its problems. Even if a key is assigned to you on purchase, theres no guarantee that it works 10 years down the road due to any of the aforementioned possibilities. And if the developer is no longer around to rectify the issue by regenerating it, you're still out the product. Only that key you purchased and never used now becomes a liability to the place that sold it. Not only did they likely not make much on its sale in the first place, but now they have to deal with the potential of a number of things completely outside their control costing them that sale due to having to refund it. And doing so would cost them far more than any profit they made on it.
Despite how it might seem, keys, and more broadly sales of these games do have an expiry in a number of ways. They become invalid if Steam ceases to be a functioning platform. They essentially become invalid if the servers for that game go offline and it becomes no longer playable as intended. They become pseudo-invalid when Steam no longer supports the OS platform that the game was developed for, or when hardware support has ended. The further on in time you go the more likely you are to run into issues with any purchase. Even ones that were technically fulfilled.
I think it sucks to have time frames in place for redemptions, but i can more than understand why that might be the case and have outlined a number of them that are entirely beyond the seller's control. At some point the burden of responsibility for that key needs to transfer to the purchaser to relieve the seller of an infinitely growing debt of obligation and risk that may be outside of their control. As long as the developer and publisher agreements are fresh and still being supported, getting replacement keys is usually a non-issue or a minor inconvenience. But it comes down to being a matter of time, regardless of whether we're dealing with overselling, or 1:1 fulfillment.
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Me personally, I've long expected Valve and the devs/pubs dealing with Valve to give keys an expiration date. And I don't really understand why people sit on keys. Especially people here on SG where the solution for having extra keys is super obvious. Make giveaways. But such is life, lol.
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Why would you get a duplicate key? The key sitting behind the revealed thing is already in existence.
Back when I used DIG I had many unrevealed games, 4 years later I decided to trade again and most of those keys were duplicate if they had trading cards. It's on the developer and that specific game if the key is going to be resold/duped in most cases.
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I have seen things like that happen so I assumed it was not a safe practice but since leaving them unrevealed doesn't guarantee anything, I guess I'll have to since I don't want to add another 100 games to my library without knowing if I want to play them or not.
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The only time this happened, it was by a big-name developer and a very famous game and it wasn't an unactivated nor hidden key.
It was an activated key on my own account.
Luckily it affected many others, so we -separately- messaged the old email receipt to them and it was sorted a couple of weeks later.
I particularly remember the Steam Support member be an absolute condescending douche when I tried to figure out why I got a THIS GAME HAS BEEN REVOKED but later a different support member apologized for the previous one's reply.
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"Some developers or publishers do bad things...
Like resell unused keys. Or give them to giveaways."
The developer can't see if your key is unrevealed on Humble or revealed in notepad. Humble ordered a list of keys from the developer. Humble has less shady developers were a site like DIG has more. The key being unrevealed did nothing in my instances.
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No problems so far and it's been years.
I'm very careful: As soon as I gift a key to a friend or set up a GA here, I strike-through the key and keep it. Once the friend or GA recipient confirms they activated it, I remove the key from my sheet.
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That's good to know, thank you. I'd head stories about unused revealed keys being resold by publishers but I guess it's not standard practice and it's better than losing them for sure or to activate games I don't want to play just to not leave them to A**hole Bundle.
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Great, now this:
"Your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now. For more details visit our help page."
And just noticed I have 300 gift links. This is going to be hell.
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You gotta love Humble. Basically they have been running into too many "out of stock" support tickets so instead of giving people what they paid for at their own expense, they ninja-add a line in their already BS TOS that they think will help give themselves a pass.
To be legal, this should have been:
Time to go activate games I guess. And to cancel my monthly sub that's been inactive for months anyway.
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Edit 2: Ran into my first missing key in Humble Jumbo Bundle 11 for Domina. It states "This content has been removed. We apologize for any inconvenience."
That has nothing to do with the actual situation (ToS change). Back in the days of COVID the developer made some bad choices in PR and Humble decided that his behavior was unacceptable and that his content should be removed from the bundle, it didn't matter it you had revealed your key or not. The developer never asked for this or revoked the Humble keys, the keys Humble hide from their customers were perfectly working codes.
I don't remember right now but there are a couple more examples of Humble silently removing things from bundles in the past, including a DRM-free download for the source code of a game.
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I always reveal my keys and store them away. There is already reputation/feedback system for all the users and many other sites only provide keys so I kept it default. It appears the keys will also work past 3 years just no support directly from Humble after 3 years.
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Humble Bundle updated their terms of service on Dec 24, 2024 to state the following:
In some cases due to various reasons, a key may not be available to replenish and in such cases, Humble Bundle may offer the same game on a different platform (“Alternate Keys”) if this is a possibility. In cases where Alternate Keys are not available to replenish, Humble Bundle is not obligated to provide them. Keys, including Alternate Keys, for all games, whether bought in a Bundle, Humble Choice subscription, or individually, must be redeemed within 3 years from the purchase date. Humble Bundle shall not be obligated to provide any keys, including Alternate Keys, to games that are unredeemed within aforementioned timeframe and thus become expired.
People have been reporting that keys over three years old now gives a "no longer available" message, even for keys already revealed. Keys over three years old still work if you've saved them luckily. Always reveal and write down your keys as soon as you buy a bundle or from the store. Unfortunately humble sells bundles now when the keys are already out of stock so we can't do much about that. It does make me question the financial stability of the subsidiary. I wonder if IGN will be shutting them down soon.
Edit: This currently may only affect certain bundles. I've gone through some of my older unrevealed keys and they still work for now. Still, it's better to make a backup of everything in case they do decide to invoke this TOS on everything.
Edit 2: Ran into my first missing key in Humble Jumbo Bundle 11 for Domina. It states "This content has been removed. We apologize for any inconvenience."
Edit 3: I can confirm Per Aspera in the Humble Choice February 2022 says
"Oops! This game key is no longer available.
It has been over 3 years since purchase, exceeding our terms of service."
Edit 4: See this thread for additional games that have been removed:
https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/I8vLk/do-we-have-victims-of-keys-no-longer-available-case-from-humble-bundle-here-not-stock
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