If you’ve been following our Deals Hunters’ blogs in recent months, you’ll likely have heard of Humble Bundle.
If not, and you’re a PC gamer, now’s a great time to acquaint yourself with the charitable gaming company as you can get about £28-worth of games for £1ish or over £100-worth of games including Assassin’s Creed Rogue, The Crew and Far Cry 3 for £10ish until 7pm on Tue 7 Jun – while also helping a great cause. There are other options available, but I’ve highlighted these two as I think they offer the best value.
Through the support of its community, Humble Bundle’s raised over $70 million (£49m) for a wide range of international charities including Unicef, Diabetes UK, Parkinson’s UK, Amnesty International and GamesAid.
One of the main ways the US-based company raises money for charity is through sales of Humble Bundles, collections of digital games typically offered for a couple of weeks. The games available in these bundles vary, from classic titles to more modern releases, and from small budget games made by independent developers to blockbuster titles from major industry players such as Electronic Arts and Ubisoft.
Why do companies offer their games for inclusion in Humble Bundles? Simply put, they see it as a great way of growing their audience while also meeting charitable commitments (or more cynically we reckon, it’s good PR).
You choose how much you pay (and where it goes)
It lets you ‘pay what you want’ for content, within limits, and choose where your money goes. In practice though, what you pay dictates what you get – but it’s really cheap. £1ish is the minimum you can pay, but if you can afford to pay more, you’ll be doing more to help a good cause while increasing the number of games you get.
When you pay, you choose how your payment is split between Humble Bundle, the game publisher, which in this case is Ubisoft, and charities, in this case Extra Life/Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, Stack-Up and Girls Who Code.
While your natural inclination might be to give your entire payment to charity, we think you’d also be wise to consider supporting Humble Bundle itself, as the cash will help enable it to continue the good work it’s doing organising these promotions. Likewise, game publishers big and small are more likely to partake in similar promotions in the future if there’s a financial incentive to do so.
What you can get right now
A current Humble Bundle promotion, the Humble Ubisoft Bundle, features a collection of PC games playable on Steam and Uplay for Windows (they’re not available on Mac).
The most important thing to understand is the number of games you get depends on what you’re willing to fork out. You’ll be charged in US dollars and can pay by debit/credit card or PayPal.
There are four tiers…
– TIER 1: Basic minimum cost $1 (about 70p) – though you can give more. Games include Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, Grow Home and Rayman Origins. These games normally have a combined cost of £27.97.
– TIER 2: If you pay more than the average – currently $6.85 (about £4.70). Then it unlocks five more games: Far Cry 3, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. The average price is updated in real time and when you go to make your payment, you’ll be told what it is. These games normally have a combined cost of £36.21.
– TIER 3: Pay a fixed $15 (about £10.20) or more. This will add two more titles to your collection: Assassin’s Creed Rogue and The Crew. These games normally have a combined cost of £39.94 – taking the total value of all 10 game downloads you now have to £104.12.
– TIER 4: Pay a fixed $75 (about £51) or more. This will add Tom Clancy’s The Division to your collection, along with an exclusive T-shirt. The Division normally costs up to £39.99, so you’re paying about the same amount as the full-price game costs (although you’re getting a T-shirt too), but remember, you can give your payment to charity. This takes the total value of all 11 game downloads you now have to £144.11.
Since its release on Tue 24 May, the Humble Ubisoft Bundle has been bought over 62,300 times.
You’ll need to install the correct software
The games come in the form of digital codes and you need to install two bits of software before you can download and play them. Call of Juarez: Gunslinger and Grow Home are only redeemable through Steam, a massively popular platform for playing games (there are over 125 million active accounts). The other games are only redeemable through Uplay, Ubisoft’s own online store and game playing platform.
How do I do it?
1. Before purchasing, check the system requirements your PC needs to run the games.
2. Ensure you have the correct software required to download and play the games. Create a Steam account and install Steam. Download Uplay and create an account.
3. Create a Humble Bundle account and make your purchase, choosing the amount you want to pay and how it’s split between Ubisoft, Humble Bundle and three charities: Extra Life/Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, Stack-Up and Girls Who Code.
5. Within a few minutes you’ll receive a purchase confirmation email directing you to your digital game codes, which will be accessible from within your Humble Bundle account.
6. Either redeem your code on Steam via the ‘+ Add a Game’ section or redeem your code on Uplay via the ‘Activate Product’ section.
Anything else I need to know?
– Grow Home is suitable for persons of all ages, Rayman Origins for persons aged seven years and above, and The Crew for those 12 years and older. The other games are for 16-18-year-olds, so if you’re buying for kids, check the age ratings first by searching on European game classification body PEGI’s website.
– Most cards carry the usual 3%-ish foreign transaction charge (see our how much does your card charge? tool to make sure you use the card that charges you the least) but a $1 purchase is likely to cost no more than £1, which is what we were charged. Though some debit cards may add £1.50 per transaction.
– Signing up to Humble Bundle, Steam and Uplay was straightforward and once you’ve completed the initial set-up, making future Humble Bundle purchases takes just a few minutes. Some of the games have small file sizes and download quickly, while others are much larger and so might take hours to download depending on your internet connection speed.
– We used normal Steam and Uplay prices to value these games. While these aren’t always the cheapest places to buy PC games, the ‘pay what you want’ nature of this promotion means it’s great value whatever way you look at it.
Will you buy this Humble Bundle, or have you bought one before? We’d love to hear your stories in the comments below, on Twitter @MSE_Deals or on Facebook.
