Buying games and supporting charity organizations

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I give a short overview about the development and the concept behind humblebundle.com. A computer game store that sells special game bundles without a price tag.

Humblebundle.com is a special video game shop. They sell special bundles of video games with a completely different approach compared to normal stores: the bundles come without a clear price tag. Consumers are allowed to pay what they want for the bundle and thus can receive several games for a tiny amount of money. On the other hand, they can also pay a very high amount of money for the same bundle. Sounds strange? Maybe not.

The main idead behind these deals is charity. Humblebundle creates these packages together with the developers of the games. Furthermore, humblebundle chooses charity organizations consumers can support by buying these game bundles. If a consumer buys such a game, she gets ask how she wants to devide her contribution among three main options: charity, developers and humblebundle.

Humble Bundle contribution selection

This concept is brilliant. Every consumer has the option to receive several computer games and help charity organizations at once. Consumers with only a tiny amount of budget for computer games can still buy good games and donate some money to charity organizations. Consumers with a higher budget available can even donate more money, if they really want to help these organizations.
Allowing the consumers decide how much they want to pay is also a good strategy to convince a lot of consumers to buy the product. They feel free about their donations and they don’t feel that humblebundle has persuaded them to pay a certain amount of money. The freedom makes it more likely that consumers spend more money. Furthermore, this strategy allows to receive the maximum amount of money. If there’re only some fixed prices, consumers would tend to take only the cheapest package instead of giving a little bit more money.
Humblebundle has also a good concept to rise a little bit the amount of money the consumers pay: every humblebundle receives some additional games, if the consumer pays more than the avarage.

Over time, humblebundle has increased their offers. At first, humblebundle only offered these special bundles over a period of 2 weeks after they’ve packed a new package with the game developers. The next step was the „Humble Weekly Sale„, a special offer that is changing every week. The Humble Weekly Sale works almost the same as the Humble Bundle, but is different in a little detail. The bonus games received for paying a certain amount of money now require a fixed amount of donation to be obtained.
Finally, some weeks ago, humblebundle launched the „Humble Store„. This store has fixed prices for the games like an ordinary game store and the sortiment of games never expires. In contrast to normal game stores, 10% of the money goes to charity. Consumers now have the option to buy their games in the Humble Store and support charity organizations. Additionally, the store often offers special deals, making it interesting to visit the store on regular basis.

To wrap things up, buying new video games over the humblebundle website adds a good feeling to the shopping, because every consumer gets the feeling that they contribute to charity and thus helping others. Additionally, the „pay what you want“ allows every one to participate in this project, regardless of the available budget. Furthermore, game developers can increase their reputation in the gaming comunity by selling their games over The Humble Store and use it as a good marketing strategy and also increase the awareness for their products.