cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/19627558
The entire team from publisher Humble Games has reportedly been laid off, according to now former employees posts on Twitter and LinkedIn. 36 developers are reportedly impacted by the cuts.
Remember when Humble Bundle was actually a charity and not just a charity-themed storefront owned by IGN?
Well, technically owned by IGN, a subsidiary of Ziff-Davis, formerly J2 Global, formerly Ziff-Davis.
I’m sure firing what was left of the employees with any commitment to the concept of HB and folding the brand under the rest of your e-commerce verticle will have no further adverse effects on the quality or usability of HB as a service.
Remember when Humble Bundle was actually a charity and not just a charity-themed storefront owned by IGN?
Do charities normally get buy-out offers from for-profit businesses?
I’m sure firing what was left of the employees with any commitment to the concept of HB and folding the brand under the rest of your e-commerce verticle will have no further adverse effects on the quality or usability of HB as a service.
Vulture capitalism at its finest. Yeah, eventually you’ve picked the carcass clean. But you just turn those profits over into another buyout and begin the feast anew.
Do charities normally get buy-out offers from for-profit businesses?
Fair point, although actually… 🤔 I mean non-profits do get bought out (and/or abused) for their good optics. See "Open"AI.
It’s just sad, looking up the company on Wikipedia (to get the buyout history right) reminded me of the very first humble indie bundles (which I participated in) and what a nice feeling it was to directly support indie studios and a good charitable cause. We could get into “consumer-activism” and what a joke/paradox that is, and maybe we should because look at what Humble Bundle is today but I still think it started out as something good.
About a century ago, there was a reaction to the industrial revolution via the Arts and Crafts Movement that inspired a lot of the modern artistic styles. That kind of anti-industrialism and peer collaboration echoed through the original indie gaming scene and still kinda exists today. Its a much more pleasant vision of consumerism than the soulless corporate shit we’re deluged with advertisements by.
I don’t begrudge anyone who feels sad about Humble Bundle’s collapse. But I just feel like we’re being inundated by video games, particularly post-COVID. The market is so over-saturated and I don’t really feel like I’m being charitable when my email is full to bursting with these promotions. I just don’t think the thing we’re lacking right now is more cheap video games.
While it is being enshittified, I think humble will always be a great way to get cheap games. Ignoring the fact that IGN profits from it, it gives money to devs and charities, unlike the grey market (cdkeys/G2A)
Shit I better start giving out the huge amount of bundled keys I never used
Just reveal the codes, they can’t be taken back then. Some are worth a lot now by the way, if you have stuff from older bundles.
Do you know any particular ones worth looking for? I remember swearing I had a code for Pico 8 and it was such a pain to wade through to find it. Might be worth the slog again to see if I had some valuable keys, been buying these things for awhile.
difficult economic times
code for the parent company investors were not able to scrape their cut off the top without cutting pay role - companies like that have one single product - not games or software or widgets - but the quarterly profit cell within accounting’s excel spreadsheet
they are owned by J2 Global. Check out their holdings on Wikipedia. it’s a random hodge podge of tech companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J2_Global
Correct - this was always going to be the case the moment IGN bought humble bundle. Any delay in getting to this point was a conscious decision about how fast to boil the frog - but IGN didn’t buy Humble Bundle because they believed in the mission of helping charities and indie game developers, they bought it because they believed they could make more money than they spent on it.
“We have looked at these difficult economic times and decided to make them more difficult for our employees by firing them all.” Nice. Always a great move. Also, I don’t see how they can say with a straight face that none of their ongoing projects or releases are going to be impacted by laying off the entire team. Even if they are just a publisher firing everyone and “restructuring” the company is going to have some kind of impact.
What? You can’t “lay off” your entire team. That’s not what that word means.
Maybe not in some countries. It’s certainly a way that term gets used in the US. See also, reduction in force (RIF), downsize, reorg, shifting priorities, etc. The way labor laws are written, companies are encouraged to do this, because it circumvents protections against firing someone on leave, pregnant, or in a minority. When an individual is let go, there’s risk of litigation or claims that it’s because of some protected status: and correct or not, we’re a very litigious country with a lot of lawyers looking for a payday. So more and more, companies have normalized layoffs even when they’re doing very well, because its a way to “clean out” the company of less productive employees with much less risk of getting sued: and they can always rehire or shift exceptional employees they want to keep.
Does IGN own them as well, or are they just over the site/store?
