Humble Bundle Goes Head To Head Against Steam With The New Humble Store

Slowly but surely, Humble Bundle is expanding its offering to cover all your indie gaming needs. After the indie bundles and the smaller weekly bundles, the startup just opened the Humble Store. As the name suggests, the new store allows you to purchase individual games just like you would on Steam or gog.com – but there’s a twist.

There are only nine games currently available on the store. Every 24 hours, you will get a brand new set of games from the company’s catalog. All of these games are on sale with a fixed price that is between 50 and 75 percent off.

Humble Bundle has always been about indie games. Even though the company released a couple of bundles with major publishers like EA, small developers and publishers are still on center stage. The first titles on the Humble Store include Don’t Starve, Prison Architect and Rogue Legacy.

Before today, Humble Bundle had already partnered with hundreds of developers through the Humble Widget. The company provided a tiny embeddable all-in-one store for the official game website. Then, Humble Bundle handles payment processing and downloads, in exchange for a 5 percent fee.

So the Humble Store provides a central location to see some of the games already available through the Humble Widget. Yet, developers will only get 75 percent of the revenue through the new channel, while charities, such as the American Red Cross, Child’s Play Charity, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, World Land Trust and Charity Water, will receive 10 percent of the proceedings – Humble Bundle keeps 15 percent.

While the Humble Store keeps the flash sale aspect of the Humble Bundles, Humble Bundle has never been so close to competing directly with Steam. As always with Humble Bundle games, in addition to DRM-free downloads, you often get a Steam key. From the outside, Valve and Humble Bundle are still partners, but it looks a lot like asymmetric competition after today’s update. If the Humble Store becomes more popular, the relationship between the two companies could change at the same time.