Humble Bundle Weekly Sale - Team 17

Humble Bundle no longer gives everyone steam keys. Instead you must now link your humble bundle account / purchase to your steam account. Basically you will have to give humble bundle access to your steam account and then they redeem the keys for you on your account. Its to prevent selective game gifting and reselling of purchased bundles. But I don't think I like the idea that humble bundle will have that kind of access to my account.

Steam Key Redemption FAQ

http://support.humblebundle.com/customer/portal/articles/1352577-steam-key-redemption-faq

(Edit)

This does not affect previous purchases. All those are still steam keys that can be redeemed. But starting with the Team 17 bundle, it requires this steam connection to redeem your games.

And thus I stop doing Humble Bundles. It feels like Youtube all over again.... Minus Google of course.

I looked into this some more after seeing a noticeable amount of complaints on twitter about it. Turns out, you log in to humble's site, connect it to your steam profile.. it has no access to your personal info, it only has access to add games. Once the games are added, you can go back to humble's site and then unlink your steam account from them. They only need the access long enough to add the games, which is more understandable now. Turns out when they did that Origin bundle, quite a few people were buying the bundles in bulk for the minimum amount and then selling them online for a large profit. It also turns out that its been going on for quite a while. People trading and selling extra steam keys they have from previous humble bundles. It was always in their terms that those games were supposed to be for those individuals only and not for sale or gifting. We could buy gift bundles for people, but I think just about everyone gave away some extra steam keys from bundles at some point.

Even with this explanation I rather not go through the process of adding then removing my Steam Account every time I donate. They should've just made the minimum $10 or above average in order to get Steam Keys.

Thats a good point. A higher minimum would have definitely deterred resellers. If anything, the minimum $1 should probably get bumped up to $5 also. But honestly, if they did that they'd probably loose a lot of sales. Unless there is a game in the bundle I actually want to pay $5 for I'd be more hesitant to give them $5+ for games I might not even want to try or have time to play. But with the humble bundles getting better quality games, they could potentially drop this new steam connection method and just increase their prices instead. Other bundle sites don't have nearly as many good bundles, but all of theme still give out steam keys. All of those sites were obviously inspired by humble bundle and based off the same donation method. If this steam connect redemption sticks, then it could roll out to all the other bundle sites too.

I think its stupid though. I've bought a digital game off amazon before.. when I went to download it they gave me a steam key. No steam connection required. Amazon has some good digital sales sometimes where people could pick up steam keys for $10 and the next day the same game is back up to $40, but I don't see amazon wanting to connect to my steam account. If anything, I think humble bundle is over reaching a bit.

Instead, they could have all the games in their bundle combined into a single steam key and when someone redeems it, it says right on the steam client "Thank you for purchasing a humble bundle, if you bought this from a third party you were most likely ripped off." If its all one steam key, it'd make it impossible for anyone to resell just 1 game out of the bundle or gift games they already own too.