Humble Monthly Delivers You Mystery Bundles
Pay to limit your options.
Humble, makers of occasionally fine videogame bundles, have just launched Humble Monthly. It's a subscription service where you pay $12 (around £7.92) per month to have an assorted collection of games delivered to your inbox. The hooks are: Humble curate the games; it'll include games that haven't featured in bundles before; and you don't know what you're going to get.
That last point is of particular interest to me. I am overwhelmed with choice on a daily basis, whether it's what game to play or what Netflix show to watch. I like it when things limit my options or make some of the decisions for me. We try to do something similar here at RPS with our Game of the Month. The idea of paying money to, essentially, limit your choice - and add a little mystery, to boot - is more appealing than common sense would suggest.
Of course, this isn't an original idea. IndieBox already do something similar with physical deliveries, and the magazines I'd read as a kid were full of adverts for mail order CD and book subscription services that worked essentially the same way. It's also a significant change from the way normal Humble bundles operate, in which you set your own price and select the split between Humble, the developer of the game, and the charities of your choice. For the monthly subscription, a fixed 5% rate of monthly proceeds goes to charity, while there's no information on what the split is between the developer and Humble.
The Humble Monthly page also doesn't say anywhere how many games you're going to get each month, which means that it's ultimately difficult to judge whether you're getting value for money and what the odds are of getting a game you like. If you sign up right now, you get instant access to Legend of Grimrock 2 - which all on its own is a bargain at $12 - and you get the first batch of games on November 6th.
You get to keep the games if you unsubscribe at a later date, of course, so perhaps it's worth a flutter for the first month anyway. Tell me.
