Great news, developers and partners: you can now choose a lower payment threshold for the money we owe you. We used to have a minimum threshold of $250 so that your money didn’t get eaten up in international transaction fees, but now that we support Paypal, you can opt for smaller monthly payments with only a small fee. As always, domestic ACH and check payments have no transaction fee.
Some payment options still have a high fee though, so double check what your fees are before you change your payment threshold.
To get started, visit the Payment Info Form (“Payment Info” on your Dashboard), and update your info under “Account Details.”
Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly implied that Paypal is the lowest cost payment option. This version clarifies that there are also zero transaction fee payment options.
We just launched self-service product editing, a new developer feature in the Humble Store. You can now make changes to your heart’s content – no waiting required.
To get started, visit your Dashboard and click the edit icon in the “Actions” column for a product.
You can edit the following fields on the product page:
Price (base pricing only – discounts are set in the Sale Scheduler)
Platforms
Operating Systems
System Requirements
Description
The green toggle next to “Product Page Settings” lets you switch between edit and preview modes. Make sure to click “Save Changes” when you like what you see, and your changes will go live immediately.
We’re excited to announce that we can now use PayPal to pay your developer and partner earnings! Paypal generally has lower transaction fees, which means you get to keep more of your Humble earnings.
New initiative brings developers together with Humble’s over 10m customers; Humble will be evaluating games to publish during GDC and PAX East
San Francisco, CA February 9, 2017 – Humble Bundle announced the launch of a multi-platform publishing and funding initiative. The starting lineup includes seven games across a range of genres and styles, for PC, console, and mobile platforms.
A Hat in Time – The perfect ode to old-school 3D platformers, with a hat-swapping spin
HackyZack – A sticker-collecting, precision-platforming, puzzle-stunt game
Ikenfell – A heartwarming turn-based RPG about a school of magic and its troublesome students
Keyboard Sports – A cheeky adventure with Master QWERTY that uses the entire keyboard
No Truce with the Furies – An isometric role playing game that blends cop show antics with a genre busting “fantastic realism” setting, offering absurd new heights of non-combat gameplay for RPG fans
Scorn – Gripping first-person survival horror set in a nightmarish universe
Staxel – Grow your farm, meet the villagers, and join your friends online in building your world
Publishing Lead John Polson says, “Since Humble’s launch in 2010, we have earned the trust of over 10 million customers across our products. In a time when it’s harder than ever for games to find their audience, publishing feels like the next logical step in the services that we can offer to our developer partners.
"All of our games will be ‘presented by Humble Bundle,’ carrying a seal of quality and curation that fans have come to expect. For each aspect of publishing, developers can choose the services they need, making Humble Bundle a truly modern and adaptable publisher.”
Across Humble Bundle’s bundles, Store, Monthly subscription, and other developer services, they offer multiple ways to help devs create buzz and get to market.
Humble Bundle will be evaluating games to publish during GDC and PAX East. Developers can fill out this form if they have a game to present:
The Humble Partner program has been a huge success for Bundles and Monthly, and today we are expanding the program to the Humble Store as well. Humble Partners encourages online influencers like Twitch streamers, YouTubers, and more to promote charities, games, and books sold by Humble Bundle. Partners receive 5% of Humble Store sales that they generate via their unique URL.
Humble Bundle will be paying the partners out of our pockets, so it won’t change what developers or publishers make on the Humble Store. It also won’t impact sales on the Humble Widgets or Gamepages. You don’t need to take any action to be part of the new program. Just keep making great games, and we’ll keep doing our best to get them to as many people as possible.
If you have any questions about the Humble Partner program or are interested in applying, more details are here.
Thanks to all of you for helping us continue our mission of bringing great games to awesome people and helping awesome charities at the same time.
By popular demand, we just added support for Google Analytics and Tag Manager in both Widget and Gamepages.
Google Analytics helps create an overview of your traffic. Tag Manager allows you to embed advanced analytics for deeper integration with marketing platforms. Here’s how to use both.
Track Traffic with Google Analytics
If you aren’t familiar with Google Analytics, read more here.
We have a guest post for our blog today. Jeff Vogel has been an indie game developer since I was in high school downloading shareware games on BBSes. So when Jeff told me how important selling directly to fans was to his business, I listened and then I asked him if I could share it. He was kind enough to oblige. Here’s why it’s important to sell directly to your fans, by Jeff Vogel.
It is not news that trying to make money selling indie games is very difficult right now. It will always be that way. Making a living as an artist is always hard.
This article isn’t about how to sell your first game, though. Other people will bombard you with their ideas about that. I am more interested in how you will sell your second game. And your fifth game. And your tenth. I have been in this business for over twenty years, and I am obsessed with figuring out how to live a long, sustainable career in this business.
Ever since they started, I have been very vocal in my genuine support for Humble. They have done so much to help indie developers sell their products. In particular, I want to talk about the Humble Widget (which we have used ourselves for years), their tool for enabling you to easily accept orders on your own web site.
When you sell your game, you need to have a URL and web page for it. The URL for your Steam page is good, but it’s not enough. You need to have your own home online, that you control. Then, when potential customers stumble upon it, you want to be able to take their money, there, right that moment. Don’t give them the chance to change their minds.
Why would you want to sell games on your own site? Don’t we have Steam for that?
Well, yes and no. In my view, Steam is the greatest single force helping indie games today. They’re great.
But technology moves fast, and the games business changes quickly. Will Steam still exist in 10 or 20 years? Will it still be the dominant force in the market? Will they still want to sell your games? In technology, never be complacent. Nobody knows what the tech world will look like in 10 years.
Also, not everyone likes Steam. Some customers, for some reason, don’t want a Steam account. You still want to be able to take their money.
We at Spiderweb Software always want to have our own site and store, that we control. This is an enormously valuable resource. It helps us make sure that, whatever turns the games business takes, we still have a way to sell our games. We make sure that one shock (like, say, losing access to Steam) doesn’t just bankrupt us overnight. The Humble Widget gives us that insurance.
That’s not the only advantage to having your own site and store. If you want to be in business a long time, you should build a fan base and a community. Make a mailing list. Run your own forums. Make your site a place people can want to go to.
Nobody else will help you make a mailing list of fans. You’ll have to build that yourself. You do this by having your own site and store, that you control. Humble can help you to build that.
Also, make no mistake, building and maintaining an online store is hard. It’s a pain to build a shop, deal with credit card companies, and fight off the flood of hackers who invariably attack you, armed with stolen credit card numbers. We spent years doing it. It’s really not fun.
The Humble Widget makes this gross process easy. Easy to configure. Easy to place on your site. Equipped with fraud protection. It includes the ability to distribute Steam keys, which is an absolute necessity right now. On top of all that, the cost is very reasonable.
If you want a career in this business, you need two things: A way to sell your product that works well and doesn’t drive you mad. And a fan base, who are loyal to you and will support you as the years go on. Don’t trust anyone else to have total control over your business.
Most of Humble Bundle’s customers are located outside of our home country, the United States. To make things easier for our international customers, we’ve been quietly implementing new payment methods. We’re proud to announce that the Humble Store now supports Alipay, SOFORT, and iDEAL, which are the most popular online payment methods in China, Germany, and the Netherlands respectively.
When we added Alipay, it quickly became Humble Bundle’s leading payment method in China. We are looking forward to the same adoption of iDeal and SOFORT.
We’re excited to announce the Humble Partner beta program! This program allows a small number of Twitch streamers to promote certain bundles with a special link which transparently inserts themselves into the bundle. Like all bundles, the amount of money that they earn is a customizable slider which can be set to whatever the customer feels is fair.
We are running this program for a limited time with just a few partners to iron out all of the kinks. If everything goes well, we hope to roll this out on a larger scale soon.
It’s transparent
Nothing is hidden. If you are supporting a partner, you’ll see it plainly at the top of the bundle page and the URL includes the partner’s name.
It’s humble
Our partners will receive the same treatment as game developers and charities. As with all of our bundles partners will get a default share of the purchase, but that’s just a default, customers can choose exactly where their money goes.
It supports great games and charities
Of course the best thing about Humble partners is that it supports the same great games and charities you’ve grown to love at Humble Bundle. The best games at the best prices supporting your favorite charity, and now, optionally, your favorite YouTube, Twitch, or online personality.
PARTNER WITH US
We are currently testing things out with a small group of pre-selected Humble partners. If you are interested in becoming a partner please apply below. We humbly ask for your patience though as we are just starting off and it may take us a little bit to get back to you as we iron things out.
With over a million sales of great games in a typical month, Humble Bundle is an enticing target for fraudsters out to make a quick buck. The most common approach is to buy as many keys as possible using a stolen credit card, and then resell them elsewhere for a profit. Over the years we have invested heavily in our anti-fraud technology to keep everything running smoothly. Here are some of the steps we take to stop fraud.
Step 1 - Risk Assessment
Our first line of defense is a machine-learning-based anti-abuse startup called Sift Science, which we’ve been training for years across 55,000,000 transactions. Given how many orders we process, Sift Science has a really good idea when someone is up to no good. The model adapts daily as we get more data.
Step 2 - SMS Verification
If the transaction risk is high, we ask the user to verify their phone number through SMS. This helps us confirm that our legit customers are who they say they are. We are able to ban fraudsters by phone numbers, which substantially raises the cost of attacking us. This can be annoying for legitimate customers, but thanks to our machine learning, only a tiny fraction get flagged for verification.
Step 3 - Manual Review
If the transaction still looks risky, we hold onto it for manual review. If you’re a customer that placed the order at a discount, the discount is still honored during this review period. Our customer service team looks at every risky transaction, customer history, and more to determine if the transaction looks legitimate. If they’re on the fence, we generally approve because the only thing worse than fraudsters is blocking legitimate customers from getting their game.
Step 4 - Rate Limits & Captcha
When all else fails, we use rate limits and captchas to minimize the damage. So if someone gets past everything else, they are still contained to a modest amount of thievery. So they might be able to steal two copies of a game, but they’ll need to steal another credit card to steal the third. We were among the first test cases for Google’s latest captcha implementation.
Step 5 - Key Cancellation
We’re diligent about canceling orders and the included digital goods when the rare transaction slips by us. Sometimes we find related transactions during a manual review, or even more rarely, a purchase results in a chargeback. When that happens, we cancel the order, revoke the download page and the Steam, uPlay, or Origin keys associated with that order. We send those keys back to the developer or publisher, and to the platform owner (Valve / Ubisoft / EA). The person holding that key loses access to the game. If they purchased it from a reseller, that means the reseller’s reputation is diminished.
Step 6 - Keep watching and working with our processors
We’re monitoring fraud daily, and we’re always tweaking variables in every step of the process above. The fraudsters are persistent. They poke and poke until they find a hole. When they find it, we find it too and close it up. We have great relationships with our payment processors. We even have shared Slack channels with Paypal and Stripe so that as we see problems, we work together in real time to diagnose, fix, and improve our joint system together.
But does it work?
The short answer is yes. We’ve seen fraud go up and down, but overall, it’s a tiny fraction of all the transactions that we process at Humble Bundle. But don’t take our word for it, we recently asked Scott Klonan, one of the people behind Factorio.
The widget customer support system has helped reduce the administrative cost of selling on our website by at least 90%.
Previously we were dealing with fraud from both our payment provider and PayPal, and it was onerous. Since moving to the Humble Widget it is super easy to manage and deal with any transaction errors and customer issues.
It has also simplified the monthly accounting for the company a great deal, giving our accounts manager more time to focus on other tasks.
So overall we feel it has worked exceptionally well, and it is a very well designed tool.
Thanks, but what does it mean for me?
I’m a customer, what can I do?
Purchase from stores that have a known relationship with the developer or publisher, like the Humble Store. If you get caught in one of these fraud checks, we apologize. It’s an unfortunate necessity to protect our developers’ products. We ask for your patience while we work it out and forgiveness if we make a mistake. This most commonly happens to customers who are new or spending a lot in a short period of time.
I’m a developer, what can I do?
Let us take care of this for you using our infrastructure. We have worked very hard over the years to solve these problems and you can benefit from our work by using the Humble Widget and Humble Gamepage to power your direct sales.
We provide the anti-fraud technology, content and/or Steam key distribution, and transaction customer support for everything you sell through Humble. Humble Gamepages and Widgets are free to build and only cost 5% of each transaction. Learn more.
