Oi! Warner Bros.! Eat shit! Seriously, give me a day or two and I’ll prepare a nice, warm, slightly chunky but mostly creamy cup of diarrhea soup for your business executives. Yes, it’s about Shadow of War again. But also about Humble.

Ok, let’s deescalate for a second. With the latest case of Warner Bros. doing Warner Bros., things aren’t as one-sided as previously and like with their other shitshows, they aren’t even the first ones to do it. But guess what: You could be the last company on earth that basically steals money from charities and you’d still be a morally repugnant… wait, let’s stop addressing abstract companies with our criticism.

Diane Nelson, President & CCO of WB Games Inc., according to your Wikipedia page you are a fairly decent human. So how do you manage to constantly fuck things up so bad? Only 3 weeks after the whole charity-DLC fiasco, you’re back at using the prospect of charity to sell games? This time, WB has teamed up with Humble for their “Humble Very Positive Bundle 2”. Like always, it’s a pretty good bundle, with some interesting games like Beat Cop and Oxenfree. You can also get a copy of Shadow of Mordor GOTY if you beat the average (right now around $7). Granted, you probably already own it four times, considering how often they gave that away with PS+, Xbox Live, Humble Monthly and whatever else.

One of the great things about Humble was always that a portion of your purchase went to charity. Originally indie devs used it to sell a couple of games to give people an incentive for donating to charity. From a financial standpoint, it’s a risky thing for devs who aren’t guaranteed to get any of the money if people decide that they’d rather give it all to charity and that’s fine. From the perspective of someone using Humble, the bundles are not to sell games, but to cooperate and making life a little better for everyone as a result. Devs, who get a bit of money for games that aren’t usually selling anymore. Customers, who get an assortment of usually good games they probably would have never experienced otherwise. Charitable organizations, who so far have received $105 million as a result of Humble and are able to help all sorts of people as a result. Sick kids, providing microloans to citizens in 3^rd world countries, reforestation efforts and helping the Amazon Basin, hell, you can even give to charities run by the catholic church if you’re into that sort of thing.

So isn’t it great that Warner, oh, right, I’m addressing people now… Isn’t it great that Diane Nelson and David Haddad from WB Games were so kind to put Shadow of War, an unreleased AAA $60 game into the bundle? I mean, that’s some dedication! Sure, it’s only available if you pay $80 or more, but that’s more than fair. Even at the default split, that’s $12 to charity!

No, it isn’t, because again Warner Bros stumbles over the fucking fine print. As soon as you reach the $80 mark, $60 get set aside and transferred over to WB. It’s nothing but a basic preorder shoved into the bundle. Even better: It’s a preorder you can’t refuse! Say you like those games and you want to actually pay more than $80, like at least a couple of people do each time one of those Humble Bundles come around, but you couldn’t care less about Shadow of War? Well, WB still get their $60. (plus part of the developer share on top, since they also included a game in the lower tier, that was already free or at least super cheap on every single service imaginable).

Warner Bros, sorry, Diane Nelson and David Haddad are basically stealing money away from other developers in this bundle, but most importantly: They’re taking money people intended for charities.

“But that’s not the first time this happened in a Humble Bundle. They had preorders before!”

Yeah, fuck, why didn’t we notice it before? Maybe because we weren’t looking? Because we thought, “Oh, it’s Humble. They’re trustworthy!” It took one of the worst offenders when it comes to monetization to uncover this shit.

Shame on you Humble and shame on you Diane Nelson and David Haddad! Disgraceful!

This is a screenshot from the German version of the Humble Store. Interestingly they still show how the $80 would be split, reinfusing the notion that the full amount gets shared between everyone. Oh, and the fine print notice that this isn’t the case? It’s not even translated, so people who don’t speak English would never know. What the actual fuck Humble?

 

 

But hey, this is still a WRUP, so what is everyone playing over the weekend?

Thomas: Thinking about getting SteamWorld Dig 2, but not sure yet. Probably Yakuza Kiwami or whatever it’s called again.

Greywolfe: i'm wending my way though all the paths in stories.  about half way there.  trying to do a couple a night.  it's going.  larry 6 is over, and i'm going to pick up space quest 5 as a result.  looking forward to that.  talking about games like that, i'm still playing kyrandia 2.  i just need to buckle up and finish it off.  and while i'm playing dream daddy, that's going sloowwwwllyyy.  lol.  i've also decided to play saint's row 4 after last year's run of saint's row 3, and it feels very mixed.  super powers good!  regular sr3 stuff awwwwffffulll.  why dilute your game with all that?

Scroo: Well I finished Bayonetta. I loved it but man I'm bad at that game. I also blasted through Vanquish, and that was fun but pretty short and had a pretty bad ending. I picked up Divinity Orginal Sin II, so I'm pretty excited for that. I'm not sure I'll get to it this weekend or not, but soon because it's something I've been looking forward to for quite some time. And of course as always I'm sure I'll be killing many a rat in Vermintide.

Cody: Looks like it's gonna be a Dice Masters heavy weekend for me irl. So on the computer space I may kick it in some more more Stellaris when I've lost enough games of Paragon :P

AJ: Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap