I hate how expensive video games are. Trust me, I dish out the cash for my favorites, but sometimes I just can’t justify the $60 price tag for brand new games. I appreciate everything that goes into them to make them cost that much, but it breaks my broke college-kid heart to have to pass on some games I lust over.
So, of course, when I found out about Humble Bundle, it was love.
Humble Bundle is a website from which you can purchase games, but it has a twist. Through bundles that change weekly, you can get a selection of games for any price you want to pay, and then a portion of your payment can go to charity. The site also has a store, where you purchase individual games for a discounted price and 10 percent of the money goes to charity.
I had been hearing about this site for a while but didn’t make my first purchase until PewDiePie — a YouTube gamer who has the most subscribers on the site — hosted the weekly sale. As a celebration for hitting 25 million subscribers on his YouTube channel (seriously, that is a HUGE number), he did a charity for Save the Children, an organization that provides education and health care for children, among other things.
I decided to try it out. For my $10 donation, I got Surgeon Simulator 2013, Guacamelee! Gold Edition, QWOP for Android, SpeedRunners, Garry’s Mod and Probably Archery, all of which are some of PewDiePie’s favorites.
I was impressed how compatible a lot of the games are for Mac. Besides QWOP, all of these work on my computer (aside from SpeedRunners, which is an early-access game).
The bundle service allows you to get the three base games for any donation, the next two for a minimum price (this time it was $6), and so on. It then allows you to donate any amount you want and tells you the average sales beforehand.
My favorite part was being able to choose exactly where my money goes — either all to the charity, to the game developers or to Humble Bundle, or any combination of them. I gave all of mine to the charity.
It was extremely easy to download these games after my purchase, and they are easy to access through Steam if you’d rather do that.
Looking through the Humble store, I was very impressed with the games offered. I noticed two picks I had recently wrote about in my column (Don’t Starve and Papers, Please) and also saw Goat Simulator — a new game that unfortunately doesn’t work on Macs.
Though I’m sure I’ll still be doling out the big bucks for some new, big-name games, I’m definitely hooked on Humble Bundle and know I’ll be making some more purchases on the site in the future.
Sophie Kruse is a sophomore studying journalism and is a writer for The Post. Have you ever used Humble Bundle? Email her at sk139011@ohiou.edu.
