For those of you who may not know Humble Bundle has been featuring new deals every day for the last two weeks. Today's deal is the Total War bundle, which upon first glance made me a tiny bit interested. Then I noticed that if you pay less than $7 you get an art pack for Napoleon: Total War... Between $7 and $25 you get the game, Napoleon: Total War. Between $25 and $45 you get the Master Collection (which includes the last few Total War games, except not Rome 2). And finally, pay above $45 to get the same package but with tons of DLC.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. The Humble Bundle has always been all about the "Pay what you want!" mindset but I feel like this is more like "Pay what you want (as long as it is more than $45)!"

Am I being crazy? Have ridiculous bundles (Humble Origin Bundle) and Steam sales made me unappreciative of this amazing offer?

Maybe Humble Bundle got a bum deal from the Total War duders and were unable to change it around due to previous agreements. But you're right, this doesn't look very humble-esque, nor appealing (to me that is, then.).

I think the Humble Bundle is more about offering games, usually for crazy cheap, with the point being that you can choose to give a percent of the of the money to a charity. "Pay what you want" is traditionally the way their offerings are structured, but I feel like the charitable focus gets lost in these kind of criticisms.

If someone chooses to get that $45 pack, they can get the game, the DLC, and donate all of that cash to those two great organizations, if they want to. The amazing offer as you say, isn't that the game is crazy cheap, it's that you can get the game, and actually help others in the process.

I feel that videogame sales that we are used to gave people crazy expectations. I feel it's weird to complain that a sale is not cheap enough. If you're waiting for the price to go down and it's not down enough, wait a little more? Or am I missing something?

@fear_the_booboo: I see what your saying, I think that we have all just become used to the dirt cheap options on HB. So these higher rates are just catching people off guard

As far as i know its been a little while since Humble Bundle had the old "pay what you want" scheme, certainly the last few i've seen have all had much larger price tags attached. Though, i hardly see it as a big deal, at the end of the day it is still a sale and 25 dollars for basically all the total war games except Rome II seems like a steal.

If most of it goes to charity, then i'd say it is. Now if you can't put all 45 dollars to whatever charity you chose, and it half has to go to the developers then i would say no.

@joshwent: Yeah, the Humble Bundles charity focus sort of got lost by people who treated it more like a store then anything, which I can't entirely fault people for doing, if you put a bunch of games up for a low price or a pay what you want price then there will be a lot of people who will treat it as though it is more like a Steam sale then a charity drive.
That being said, humble bundle has gotten much bigger since it's humble (sorry) beginnings to the point where it does even have a store page so I could see why some people could view it more like a store then they would still a charity organization and being put off by a 7 dollar art pack even if the intent isn't "Buy this 7 dollar art pack" but "give 7 dollars to charity and you can get something for it!"

I'd argue the 'Humble' bundles have never really been all that humble at any point. The vast majority of the games offered (at least the ones which are genuinely PWYW) are well past the point where they are making significant traditional sales, so it isn't costing the developers anything to throw them into a PWYW deal. And it's the charity side of it which always pushes the media into giving so much coverage to otherwise dead products, so it's the charities which are doing most of the heavy lifting here anyway. The developers involved typically make far more profit from a 'Humble' bundle weekend than they would have made otherwise.

I think it's more accurate to think of the 'Humble' deals as akin to somebody rattling a tin for charity & then taking a cut of anything they collect. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because the charity still ends up making more than they would have if nobody had rattled the tin at all, but I wouldn't exactly describe it as 'humble' either. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement for both parties. It's a great novelty business model and everybody is winning at the moment, but this idea that it's somehow a 'humble' act of generosity on the part of the developers involved is nonsense.

The more recent 'Pay What You Want As Long As It's $20' sales kinda just make a mockery of the whole thing anyway. It's just a regular ass game sale at that point, except it's using charity for marketing because -until the novelty wears off- the coverage charity brings is cheaper and far more effective than paying for advertising. They need to be carfeful though because there's only so many times people will look at blatantly false advertising like "Pay what you want. Support charity. Get a Napoleonic bundle of games." before they decide to stop wasting their time even going to check what the latest 'deal' is. They're in danger of killing the golden goose with nonsense like this.

uh i think the humble part is where you can choose to give most of the cost straight to charity...or did evryone forget that humble bundles dont exist merely to bloat your steam library for cheap. there is more to it....

I don't think you can really compare the daily/weekly bundles with the special bundles that they do every few months. Things like the Humble Indie Bundles happen less frequently and usually do not have minimums to unlock things aside from the beat the average price.

I agree with most of the posters above. Of course a big part of this whole thing is the charity. Donating $25 to charity and getting a shitload of games is a sweet deal for everyone involved.

Though I do still think it's strange to see all those price tiers, no matter if you look at it as charity or a store, and maybe that's the bottom line here, Humble Bundles are don't really fall into either category. What a sweet bastard.

Every 'bundle' in this 2 weeks of bundles thing (with the exception of the Deep Silver bundle) have been terrible, they're sales being labeled as bundles as every game has a fixed price. I don't have a problem with it pe'say because of charidee but I think calling them 'humble bundles' is highly misleading for the most part. The was a particular instance where the bundle was 1 game or pay x amount for 1 game + 3 gift copies and it was cheaper to buy the game on it's own in the store then it was in the bundle. They seem to have riled up some people over it.

But yeah you can't compare these bundles to traditional bundles, it has literally been a case of 'pay as much as you want for some art' then 'pay at least $6 for the game of which this art belongs to' and 'pay over $14 for this early access game/newish game' kind of deal it's not like other bundles with the price barriers. 2 days ago the bundle was a bunch of Eve stuff that didn't include any subscription period for eve stuff and as far as I can tell wasn't actually discounted. But again it's a way to give to charidee and getting something in return, however I can see this 14 days of humble bundles doing some short terms damage to the brand until the next OMFG THATS AAMZING bundle crops up.

Charity.

Lets not fool our self's. Charity is not the main reason why people I buy these bundles. They I buy games and charity thing might just tip the scales. If the main motivator is charity, they I would give it straight to the cause.

Like previously stated, they should have just renamed and moved this to something like "Humble Daily" to avoid associations with the actual bundles and it would have been OK.