suggested reading for the for-profit traders

So now publishers are increasingly reluctant of letting their games be bundled because they're afraid they'll lose game sales in the long run.

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I remember when one dev revoke (or disable?) steam keys for his game to avoid reselling (game was from fanatical bundle). Can't find name of the game :O

I always said that too much bundles are ruining the actual value of those games, if not only for the public perception. Today, most people will just think "i'm gonna wait for it to get bundled", cheapening games and harming developers on the long run. Besides, people are getting spoiled, getting a triple A like Destiny 2 for $12 some years ago would have been "an incredible offer", now the most common reaction is "meh".
It's time for Humble Bundle and every other store to step back and find a balance between offering good bundles and getting the prices right.

interesting read, I haven't bought a game for full price in a long time, as they get really cheap if you wait long enough

I like the idea of tined keys

We are going to die

personal opinion based on facts as I know them

yep , biased personal opinions and the guy who wrote all this is a reseller/profit trader himself . and he uses this site as well maybe he will notice

Well, I can't understand, why they can't make expire date for keys. It would allow people to share bundles, but since, lets say, after month keys would be worthless it would be really risky to buy bundles for reselling.

Well, I wouldn't be mad about single key bundles if they would consider what I already own (like Purchase Together Bundles on Steam) and adjust the price. I wouldn't have to take care of duplicates anymore and the bundle sellers would still get money from me. But without this condition I'd definitely buy fewer bundles.

I think people don't understand the game market and are idealizing the past.
For games, most of the money is made shortly after release. That's true now, and it was true in the past.

In the past, when stores had to stock physical copies, eventually leftover boxes would end up heavily discounted. Wait even longer, and the game simply wouldn't be available.
Today, games have a longer tail than they used to - after the initial release, a few months later during the first discount there will be a bump. A few months later during the heavy discount there will be another big spike, and when the game first gets bundled there will be another bump. As can be seen by e.g. GTA V as long as a game is selling well, there won't be much of a discount, but when sales start to slow the publisher will join in on the summer/winter/whatever sale. A lot of developers are glad when a game gets bundled because there's a big spike in income.

Remember, there are plenty of people who aren't willing to spend a lot of money on certain genres but are willing to pay a much smaller amount. Sales are a way of getting those clients in as well.

DLC, on the other hand, relates to a concept called "menu pricing", which is basically figuring out how to sell the same product at different price points because different people are willing to pay different prices for the same thing. The easiest example is regular edition DVDs vs special edition DVDs. The special edition has just a few extras, like director commentary or deleted scenes, but it's really the same movie, sold for more money. Microsoft Office is sold in several versions, ranging from Student to Professional Plus. Windows has Home, Pro, Enterprise, etc.

Likewise, games have the basic version and the version with DLC.
Some people were willing to pay $40 for Crusader Kings II when it first came out, and are happy to sink in hundreds of dollars to get all the DLC as it's released. Other people weren't willing to pay more than $10 and had to wait until it got a 75% discount so they could enjoy the vanilla version. Plenty of people are somewhere in between.

Likewise, some people paid $30 for PUBG upon release, others waited 6 months for it to go on discount to $20. Personally, it doesn't interest me, but if the price ever drops to $5, I might give it a try. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of games that I only picked up because the price is very low. There is no way I would have paid full price for most of the games in my backlog, but when the price was very low I was willing to pick it up to give the game a try. Without significant discounts and bundles, people wouldn't have backlogs of 100+ games - hell, they probably wouldn't have libraries of 100+ games

One of the things all this people shouting about the bundle apocalypse seem to fail to realise/remember is that the abundance of bundles and cheap games converted a lot of former pirates into buying customers.
In my case the thought of actually paying for a game didn't even used to cross my mind a decade ago, it was the wild anarchic era of the internet when everything from software to music and movies was provided by a torrent or most likely a "files sharing" site and nobody even considered the possibility of buying stuff legaly because of how expensive and conversome it was, then sales, bundles, legal streaming sites and the like started to pop up like mushrooms and expand their reach to the international audience and people started to pay for convinience. The first time I payed for games in this decade was for the Humble Indie Bundle V, some months later I had mostly abandoned piracy (for games) and was rapidly amassing a large backlog in my steam account, I'm sure I'm not the only one that had a 180 because of bundles.

Market is over-saturated, even if majority of devs would agree to not bundling and things like Humble Monthly would get canceled due to that (this is actually possible, although they'd just fill it with more average Indie games instead and perhaps lower the price), all of crap developers would still bundle on massive scale via bunchkeys, gogobundle, otaku and other indie galas. I don't see how bundles are any different from normal sales. Sure, it's cheaper, but I don't see how much cheaper it is compared to average -90% discount, considering the fact that a lot of people would never buy the game if it wasn't bundled before - I'd probably never spend 580 hours in CK2 and spend another $50 on DLCs if I didn't get in some bundle before and actually wanted to try it out. Paradox has awfully good marketing strategy here, it almost feels like drug dealers - first "share" is for free!

To me, this situation is caused by getting more games on the market (post-Steam greenlight times), therefore more competition, more bundles and less interest spent on single games compared to before. Of course it's only my opinion and people might have different view on this, but I don't see any difference, except of the fact that we have more indie and less AAAs, but this is a result of all of the above, and not just the fact that AAA publishers don't want to get bundled - this was happening all the time, HB and other services just have more games to choose from today compared to before, so according to basics of economy, prices of everything are going down, and since game production costs are only going higher, it's not weird to me that AAA publishers are against bundling - it's obvious.

On top of that, G2A and other marketplaces do not help, and this is probably the biggest real reason why publishers are afraid of bundling, since they can't easily revoke unused keys after bundle without making massive amount of players negative towards them, while still keeping value of their own product. Bundling once means bundled forever, and people are unlikely to pay for the product more than what they could pay in that bundle - they'll just wait instead, or never buy in the first place, if such bundle won't happen soon enough.

The perfect solution seems bundling older AAA games with 5+ years since release, the ones that are already end of life. The problem with this? The competition I pointed out above - people won't just go and agree on this, they'll try to compete, and there will always be a group of publishers that will want to make extra buck and hurt everybody in the process. Yes, just because you do not put your own game in the bundle doesn't mean anything - if people get spoiled by good bundles from everybody else, they won't give a damn about your game anymore and just go play something else. So it's endless loop without solution, you either go in together and sink together, or you go sink anyway, except you don't make even those peanuts in the first place. And all of that is caused by over-saturation, not bundle sites existing.

The only real solution I see is enforcing disabling of unused keys in fixed timeframe like 1 month from bundle ending, on all titles, either by all publishers or Steam itself. This will make crapload of people angry, trading for games will die almost instantly, but finally the game will be worth what it's worth today, and not what it was worth back then. Problem with this is that Valve doesn't want to do this as it'll be a nail to their coffin - other platforms like GOG will immediately notice this and counter-attack, and it's not their problem that people are selling unused keys on third-party marketplaces, since they make a buck anyway. In the end - endless loop, waiting for something to break through with a clever idea.

I just returned A Hat in Time because it was in the Humble Bundle which I was subscribed to. The demand for video games has been reduced, and games journalism is a sad joke, so new game hype is all but gone. Why on earth would you put your game in a much cheaper bundle after having it on sale for a week? The point of bundles is to advertise to a new audience and drum up sales, not just give it away cheaper for us patient folk.

It was a nice read. Thanks for sharing!

What this boils down to: profits are shit because the market is saturated and getting exposure is increasingly difficult, so now it's time to fuck over the consumer for a potential profit.

More and more devs and publishers want in on all those resales of their games, and to justify this, they're using a reinvented version of the piracy argument: before, it used to be "every download is a lost purchase"; now, it's "every resale is a lost purchase". Your ownership be damned.

I'm all for supporting devs, but this strategy is ridiculous and destined to fail. Imagine if we were talking about physical goods instead. What if Sony would try to prevent customers from reselling their Playstations, and made a big fuss about how bad people who do this are, and how much they're hurting the company and the industry; you'd think Sony were insane. But when it's videogames, we're willing to compromise so much, to the point of even entertaining the idea of having built-in obsolescence in digital goods.

If Humble Bundle, or anyone else, would ever implement something like that, I question if it would be more profitable for anyone involved, including the devs and publishers. I, for one, would never a buy a game from them ever again, on principle alone, but I'm just one person. Maybe everyone else would be ok with it. Who knows.

so guys from Wolfire own Humble Bundle? I had no idea they started it all.

The solution would be to make some keys to expire, but it depends on Valve to allow this and they don't want to help bundle sites, they want people to buy on Steam. They are perfectly fine with the death of bundles.

Humble bundle claims their free keys have an expiration date but it's not for real, Steam keys don't expire, they just disappear from your HB account.

bumperito cause no new bundle again xD