New Humble Bundle and Bundle-in-a-Box Available

Two new ways to get lots of cheap games and help charity at the same time.

It's been almost two weeks since Batman: Arkham Origins came out. Some of you might be interested in swinging from rooftop to rooftop as the Dark Knight, but you're holding off for some reason: lack of time, have to save money for Christmas gifts, you need cash to pay for that new console you pre-ordered months ago, etc. In any case, you don't need to spend $50 to get your Batman fix quite yet. On Tuesday, the folks over at Humble Bundle announced their newest way to get games and support charity: the Humble WB Games Bundle.

If you haven't bought one of the previous Humble Bundles, here's how the system works. Once the clock starts counting down, you have usually two weeks to purchase a bundle. If you pay the minimum price of $1, then you get some of the games available. For the WB Games Bundle, that includes the Game of the Year edition of Rocksteady Studios' first Batman game, Batman: Arkham Asylum, the action RPG Lord of the Rings: War in the North and two games from the F.E.A.R. paranormal shooter series (F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin and F.E.A.R. 3). If you pay more than the current average bundle price however (a whopping $4.63 when I started writing this post), then additional games will be added to your bundle. In this case, the two additional games you'll receive are the sequel to Arkham AsylumBatman: Arkham City Game of the Year Edition, and Scribblenauts Unlimited, the first of the series to make it to the PC.

If you're curious about what happens with your bundle money, that's entirely up to you as the donor. The default split gives the bulk (65%) to the developers, 20% to charity (We Can Be Heroes for this bundle), and the remaining 15% goes to Humble Bundle themselves to pay for bandwidth, promotion, etc. Each of these has sliders though, so if you want someone to get a bigger or smaller cut, it's entirely up to you.

Looking for new games, but not seeing anything on that WB Games list that grabs your eye? This week also saw the start of the Indie Strategy Bundle over at Bundle in a Box. The same general principle applies here as well: donate the minimum for some of the games, but beat the average ($5.29 at time of writing) and you'll get the full set. There's a few more games in this set than the WB Games bundle, so I'll break them out in their own list for ease of reading:

Unlike the Humble Bundle, there's no sliders for determining who gets what cut with the Indie Strategy Bundle. Kyttaro Games, the folks running Bundle in a Box, will donate 5% of their earnings to The Hellenic Centre for Mental Health and Treatment of Child and Family (FYI: the charity's site is in Greek). In addition, for every 100 bundles sold, $15 will be added to the Indie Dev Grant. Fans of Bundle in a Box will vote for one indie developer (group or individual) who will receive the entire amount. If Bundle in a Box breaks the 10,000 copies sold mark, then a smaller grant will be given out to the community's second pick. As for the money itself, there will be no strings attached for the winners. The grant can be used in any way the developers see fit and are under no obligation to cooperate with Kyttaro Games or Bundle in a Box in the future.

For those curious about any DRM, the Bundle in a Box games are all DRM-free, but a couple of them have Steam keys available. The Humble WB Games Bundle is for Steam versions of the game only (other HB sets usually include DRM-free versions of games, but not this one). There is a bright side to things though: for anyone who already has some of these games on Steam, Humble Bundle has now given buyers the option of gifting codes for individual games. Given that many of us probably bought a few of these games while they were cheap during one of the holiday sales, this means you can still buy the games and support the devs and charity without feeling like your codes are going to waste (or violating the Terms of Service and giving out the codes like you were already doing).

These bundles won't last forever though, so if you're looking for a cheap Batman fix or a mountain of indie strategy games, you should head over to the Humble Bundle and Bundle in a Box sites and get your cheap games. Sure there's more than a week left, but the longer you wait, the higher those average prices you'll need to beat will get.

Michael "Ragar" Branham

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