Humble Bundle have announced their monthly selection of games in Humble Choice is getting a price increase. Seems like this will affect nearly all subscribers across different regions, even if you had the "Classic Plan" that has the lower price, it's appears to also be increasing.
From what I've been sent the pricing is going up to which starts next month:
Currency |
Monthly Rate (Old / New) |
Annual Rate (Old / New) |
GBP |
£8.99 / £11.49 |
£98 / £119.99 |
EUR |
€12.99 / €12.99 |
€109 / € 134.99 |
USD |
$11.99 / $14.99 |
$129 / $154.99 |
CAD |
CA$17.99 / CA$17.99 |
CA$159 / CA$194.99 |
AUD |
AU$16.95 / AU$20.95 |
AU$179 / AU$219.95 |
CNY |
¥79 / ¥95 |
¥850 / ¥998 |
*The figures for some months in some regions didn't change but did rise for annual subs.
There's a lot of complaints about it that I've seen across social media, with many not happy about the increase.
Thinking on it from a point of view as someone who doesn't currently subscribe (but I have done in the past), the pricing still seems reasonable to me. In the UK, that's £11.49 to get 8 games every month which is pretty good. When you think about things like Microsoft's Game Pass, there you don't get to keep anything but here you can build up a whole collection and the games are yours even after you cancel.
Still, any increase is not a great feeling for consumers. Especially with the price of so many other things going up. I'm certainly not blind to that (my own water bill just doubled for example).
But, we also have to think about the business side of it. Even before this price rise, when you look at the split between Humble Bundle and then to the individual developers - it's not exactly a lot (and that's before other cuts like taxes and so on). However, that does also depend on the scale of subscribers, those numbers will add up fast if there's a lot but Humble never give out subscriber numbers.
What are your thoughts?
Honestly it probably saves me a lot of money nowadays as it's broken me out of the habit of buying games so frequently in a weird way. Plus there's almost always at least one game per month from my wishlist.
As a side note, fairly frequently I own a game already and usually I hand the keys out to my buddies but is there any kind of GamingOnLinux giveaway I could pass them onto?
I also have a very large Steam Library, even if I don't buy anything, I am stocked for the rest of my life I guess.

As a side note, fairly frequently I own a game already and usually I hand the keys out to my buddies but is there any kind of GamingOnLinux giveaway I could pass them onto?There were some inofficial giveaways when the Forum and PM functionality were still available.

I stopped paying for Choice a long time ago as it was starting to be less qualitative and a lot of game I already owned were in it. It was nice to build my collection of 50% not played games tho

If this price increase will allow them increasing the value of the games offered, it could be a good thing for me. Otherwise...
Agreed that the selection is fairly uniformly bad to my eyes. Each month has one recognizably good game, one or maybe two games which are known-quantities, and then the rest are to put it nicely, Indie-Me-Too games that are an alternative take on an existing game type.
I've never subscribed to this so I can't really complain, but my point is I've never seen the value in subscribing if I'm mostly getting chaff that I may leave in key-form, unclaimed.