After announcing that it would be removing the option to determine how much money paid goes to charity, Humble Bundle will be adding back these sliders, no longer capping the maximum donation percentage per purchase.
Though Humble Bundle is a digital storefront much like Steam or the Epic Games Store, its charitable donations set it apart from the others. Humble's business model grew from offering Humble Bundles, collections of games that players were allowed to determine the price of when they paid. As the site grew, Humble's Bundles began to include other items such as comic books and software, eventually becoming the massive storefront that it is today. But charity is still at the company's core, hosting a new charity on the site each month.
But recently, fans began to question how important charities still are to Humble after it made the decision to remove the charity sliders last month. These sliders allowed users to determine where their money goes, such as what percentage goes to the charity while the rest is given to the publishers and developers as usual. This new policy would cap the maximum percentage of profit on a purchase given to charities at 15%, while the minimum would be kept at 5%, the default. But after heated criticism in response to Humble's decision, the company is rolling back this change.
According to the statement, Humble Bundle will immediately add the sliders back into the site and explore other options for the website's design. Additionally, Humble says it will incorporate the community's feedback and opinions into the vision of the site going forward. To alleviate the negative feedback from users, Humble will be more transparent in regards to future updates, it says in the blog post, and fans are happy to see this quick response.
This means if purchasing games that currently live on the store such as No Man's Sky, consumers will still be able to control the percentage of their orders permanently. Finally, Humble Bundle assures that supporting charities is still a priority for the company, but also hints that "big changes" are coming to the site. Aside from the sliders, Humble had also announced formatting changes that would allow for a cleaner visual layout when purchasing Bundles.
Since the site first launched over a decade ago, Humble Bundle has helped raise over $195 million for various charities such as the American Red Cross, Action Against Hunger, and WaterAid by selling a slew of indie games as well as some bigger names such as The Witcher 3 and Borderlands.