Humble Bundle Is Force to Give Out SteamKeys By Steam.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/139423-Humble-Bundle-OAuth-Support-Removed-Must-go-Back-to-Steam-Keys

If you've been living under a rock for the past five years, the Humble Bundle is essentially a "pay what you like" bundle of (often indie) video games that raise money for charity. Originally, when buying the bundles, players were simply given Steam keys that they had to manually redeem, however, about a year ago the Humble Bundle launched something called "OAuth", that would allow users to directly redeem games to their Steam Account. Now, the Humble Bundle team has announced that Steam is dropping support for OAuth, which means we're back to CD-keys.

Oh damn, It was a pretty nice feature. :(

Why would they do this?

TBH I preferred having Steam keys. I was a bit reluctant to link my Steam account the first time I tried it and I can do what I want with Steam keys too.

Probably secruity reasons, or support reasons.

I've had some troubles redeeming my Humble Store purchases using the OAuth. But Valve and Steam are big enough to support OAuth if there were problems. All they did is unload the problems to the smaller guys.

Kinda blows, though. Humble Store was 2nd when it came to my go to place to buy Steam games outside of Steam (behind GMG).

Security probably , but probably also because less sales on steam means less donuts for Gabe.

I highly doubt this will have any effect on sales.

How did you come to that? if people buy a bundle instead of direct from steam its a lost sale.

Not to mention that its developers who agree with humble not steam and the profits all go towards charity unless you yourself change how its shared.

And how will this change effect sales on Humble at all? Do people really care that much about one-click redemption? I was unaware having to use CD keys was such a deal breaker for some people.

I think we are talking about two different things.

You are if i am not mistaken talking about the sales on humble correct? i was referring to the sales on Steam of the same games.

Well I actually much rather the keys, then I can give them to other people.

And you are yet to explain how this change will effect sales for steam.

Are you serious?

1 game sold on humble = 1 sale

0 game sold on steam = 0 sales = no % of the sale to steam.

and this change will not divert any customers from Humble to Steam. So what you're saying is completely irrelevant.

Why do you think that this will change anything? All they're doing is making it so rather than having Humble automatically add purchases to the steam account you linked to your Humble account, you have to instead copy and paste the CD Key into the "activate a product on steam" window on Steam. A process that is arguably simpler as it doesn't require linking your account and can be more easily gifted to friends.

It was a convenient and much appreciated feature but steam keys are perfectly fine to me. Like others said, I'm not too comfortable linking my steam account to 3rd party websites.

You were able to gift games through OAuth links to other people.

Oh I didn't know you could do that for bundles.

Yeah, they aren't dropping Steam games from the bundles. This is just a slight alteration to how you have to redeem your HumbleBundle purchased Steam games (they're going back to the old way they used before they started oAuth a year ago).

Personally, I actually prefer having a key I can manually activate. The oAuth method wasn't really -that- convenient even though you didn't have to deal with a key. The number of steps/hoops I had to go through to redeem a game using oAuth (several clicks off of the email, then I have to manually log into the Steam page, then go back to the HumbleBundle page to redeem) was about the same (if not more) than just copy/pasting a key into the Steam client. I also tend to gift a lot of keys when I get bundles so having an actual key is easier.

-Byshop

I didn´t say that it would change anything.

But ask yourself why would Valve and Steam make it easier and pay out of pocket for sales on another site. Without also getting something back. Valve is afterall a business.

So what could also have happened is that humble and other sites simply refused to pay for the service anymore.