Humble Bundle Raises $50 million for Charity, $100 million for Developers

I’ve always been a gigantic fan of the Humble Bundle. It has its detractors, everything has its detractors, but frankly they offer quality games at largely unbeatable prices and many of the proceeds go to charity. In my mind, it’s a win-win… which is generally why I’ll report on it every chance I get. I like to raise awareness right before I buy my own bundle while the average price is still cheap. It’s also how I got about 75% of my steam Library.

Anyway.

In a recent ‘thank you’ video released by the Humble Bundle people (which I’ve included below), company co-founder John Graham takes some time to thank the people who have made the website a success, but that’s not really what we care about. Rather, during the 3-minute long video, an interesting statistic is dropped: in the four years that the humble bundle has been around, it’s raised a whopping $50 million dollars for charity. And if you’re one of the types who have been worried about what the Humble Bundle might do for developers, don’t be—collectively developers have earned $100 million over the same period of time.



How’s that for success, huh?

Granted, generally (unless you’re donating a lot of money to get on the leaderboards or screw with the average price bar) people pay significantly less per title than they would have had normally. Also, since developers only get a small cut of the total profits (and are sometimes split between multiple developers) generally they’re getting ripped off one way or another. But John Graham insists that "enjoy the goodwill and buzz that gets driven onto their titles during our promotions" along with "the revenues we are able to bring them."

As far as charities go, Humble Bundle splits it’s charity money between 50 different institutions. In an interview, he claims:

"Charities often are very surprised by the amount of money sent their way by our community. Even the larger charities like the Red Cross are amazed once the payment arrives. It has often been the case that we exceed charity expectations and they've had the good problem of figuring out how to scale up the work they do."

So, if you were one of the people to buy a humble bundle at one point or another—pat yourself on the back! You helped make this happen! And if you have yet to donate to humble bundle, well, there’s always next time!