During this past summer sale, I found myself suffering from the symptom that every bundle seemed unappealing, for the reason that I already had some of the games in every bundle, either in my extensive disc collection or on humblebundle. In fact, once I took stock of my purchases, I realized I had only bought individual discounted games.

Once I thought about it some more, I realized that perhaps gog needs to partner up with humblebundle and provide gog keys for humble bundle games. I know that for myself, once I buy a humble bundle, the chance of me buying the same gog games that are in the bundle is zero. At the same time, as the number of games in my humble bundle store grows, I become more and more attached to it, and at this point I have no preference for gog over humblebundle, while I greatly prefer gog over Steam and will often look to re-buy Steam games without DRM.

While it may initially look like a loss for gog to give out its games with humble bundles, there are 2 positives to this approach:
1. It keeps people's gog collections as big as their humblebundle collections, making the appeal of buying things on the humble store vs gog minimal.
2. When the time comes for bundle deals on gog, people's purchases from humble bundle are 'recognized', and people are therefore more likely to go for the bundles on gog.

I think the key thing is to make sure that gog keys from humble bundles aren't given out freely ie. they go to the same person who bought the humble bundle to begin with. They could therefore be attached to specific email addresses via the humble store.

In my opinion the real problems are the bundles themselves. The offer is great technically, but I really don't want to buy a bunch of games i don't want to play. At least humble Bundle is pay what you want, so i can just ignore the stuff i don't care about. Other than that I don't see any reason to have both Humble Bundle and GoG key, both places are DRM-free and on Humble Bundle you even get Linux versions if they exist. When an indy developers is selling their game on their site through the Humble Store I will always buy from there.

In a lot of ways I think Humble Bundle is a more direct competitor to GOG than Steam is. HIB offers DRM-free installers, Steam keys, and in most cases soundtracks. It's hard to imagine GOG keys showing up in Humble Bundles, but since they've done a few games with Groupees and IndieGameStand I suppose anything is possible.

But I'd have to wonder how that would affect GOG's sales. If (indie) games start showing up in humble bundles people would probably feel less enticed to buy them here. In addition, many indie games arrived on GOG after they had been in indie bundles, and I wonder how good their sales were. The main advantage GOG would then have over HIB would be other downloadable bonus content besides soundtracks.

Nevertheless it's an interesting thing to consider.

no thanks
gog has some deals with igs and groupees but its not constant and on games that have been around for a while. gog would be shooting itself in the foot offering keys for all the games it has, on humble store.

I agree, if I can find i there I buy a game in the humble bundle store instead of buying it on GOG, even if it's more expensive.

The reason?

Linux support.

I don't mind if GOG offered Linux versions as well, but I presume one part of their reluctance is because people would probably demand Linux support also for older DOS/Windows games that GOG would have to (technical) support themselves. I presume Humble Bundles simply offer the Linux versions that the original developers made, and if you have problems with the Linux versions, you should turn to the original developers/publishers for support, not Humble Bundle.

Anyway, since I am really after the Windows versions, frankly the Humble Bundle DRM-free installers are a bit of a mess:

- some are zip files containing an installer exe
- some are zip files containing the actual gameplay files, no installation
- some are straight exe installers (I've seen even some GOG installer there in Humble Bundles)
- some installers offer an option to create a desktop shortcut, while some don't (so when I was recently installing a couple dozen HiB games on my computer, I had to check one by one whether the installation created the desktop shortcut or not, and create it manually if it didn't)
- the naming of the installers/zip files is fully incoherent, sometimes you can't even tell the name of the game from the filename
- a couple installers, while asking for the installation directory, still installed it under Program Files regardless

etc. So all in all, I still prefer the GOG DRM-free installers, even though they've had their share of problems too, like the wiping out of all compatibility settings.

Last year GOG had a build-you-own-bundle option -something like pick any 5 games out of this list of 25 and pay like $10 or something. I found that to be an excellent type option - where to get the discount I had to commit to buy a certain # of games, but I didn't have to buy games I would never play.

In the most recent GOG sale everything I bought was single title so it probably worked out to be something like pick my own:
- Waking Mars
- FTL
- King of Dragon Pass
- Tiny and Big

I would've probably purchased a few more if I could've done a mix and match, but it just didn't work out that way.

This is also my main gripe with the Humble Bundles. It's also a bit weird, since apparently they do go to the trouble of designing HB-specific icons for each and every game, but don't enforce any standards for the installation files whatsoever.

The main question for is, can you back up your games you get from Humble Bundle on a disk or any storage you please? and play they without the need of internet? without check ins? without any authentication? without any "keys?" Just put your disk in or storage media and play your game?

Yes you can, that's why DRM-free is one of their headlines. however, sometimes they have special bundles or weekly sales where this rule does not apply, so always check first to make sure the offer is really DRM-free. If it is, you are good to go.

Yes you can! That's the whole point of DRM-free!

Um. You just signed up on GOG to demand that they change their way of business to better support you? I mean, whatever floats your boat, man, but still...

On-Topic: GOG support, pre-purchase (ex, installer configuration) and post-purchase, are much better than Humble Bundle. Humble Bundle seems to be like the DRM-free version of Gamersgate. They take everything, and don't provide a lot of support, it's kind of a tossup. But GOG games are played and tested before they're ever put up, and I know there's support when I need it. Plus, there are more and more interesting extras. So while Humble Bundle is a GOG competitor, they've got a long way to go before they'll get much of my money. I don't really see that GOG needs to spend time and effort doing work that HB should be doing itself.

About the partner up between GOG and HIB, this wish is already in the community wishlist: Collaboration with Humble Indie Bundle

How about GOG making a HB-like sistersite?


Hey, Desura did it.