If anyone wants data on whether Humble Bundle is more or less successful, a list of their sales and the amount raised is available here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_bundle#List_of_games_off...

Yeah, it's feeling less and less "humble" these days (imho, of course).

To me, the 'humble' has always been the

1) pay what you want

2) donate part (as much of you want of that) to charities

As long as they keep these I think a bit of diversity and exploration helps grow the space. Maybe some other organizations could get involved as well.

Humble also made sense because it was supporting indie games makers. Now, not so much.

I guess they're branching out, but it still falls under the umbrella of "creative digital content" - whether it be games, comedy specials, music, etc.

Are the game bundles not relevant to you anymore due to expansion?

As someone who bought all the first several "Indie" bundles, the most recent games bundles have been completely irrelevant to me. They're just collections of slightly out of date AAA titles from a major studio at a flexible price. The most recent "Origin" bundle was just an insult to their ahem indie roots.

I used to feel similarly, until I heard that the Origin bundle raised $8.6 million for charity[0]. It's hard for me to see that as a bad thing, even if it does take their focus away from promoting indie games (which is debatable).

[0] http://www.joystiq.com/2013/08/23/origin-bundle-is-the-bigge...

I'm not going to complain about $8 million dollars going to charity, but even the slate of charities was conspicuously different. Nearly all other bundles include Child's Play and the EFF as the charities. For this Bundle, Electronic Arts must have insisted that they change to several much larger, mainstream charities instead.

That, combined with their clear intention of using this to promote Origin, left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

They had Watsi.org as a charity

The end game for the Origin bundle seems to have been "get a bunch of people to install Origin", which I suspect they were very successful at.

EA didn't get any money directly from the bundle sales.

At thirty bundles to date over a roughly three-year history, they've been averaging about one a month.