September Humble Bundle

The September Humble Monthly prepurchase games have been announced and they've added a new twist in this month. I'm not really sure why exactly, but they're giving you the choice between three games or a single game that was in a previous Humble Monthly. I'm guessing maybe the distributors for Rise of the Tomb Raider wanted to be featured again but Humble really didn't want to give away the same game to someone who's been a subscriber of their system forever. At any rate, you can get that single game ($70) or you can get Sniper Elite 4 ($67, but currently on sale on Steam for $10), Tales of Berseria ($65), and Staxel ($22). I've decided I intend to stream Humble Monthly games on the weekend going forward to shake things up from always playing Blood Bowl and decided to go with the three game option primarily because my sister keeps trying to get me to play a Tales game.

The three games are a sniper shooter game, a jRPG, and a farming simulator. A good variety that probably hits a lot of games with at least one of the games and seems like it should really hit me with two of them. I remain bad at aiming but jRPGs are ostensibly my favourite game genre and I really like Stardew Valley. I say ostensibly because I was thinking about it earlier and haven't actually played a new jRPG since probably Final Fantasy XIII in 2009 and I didn't even finish that one. So, well, I have high hopes but maybe my mental image of the genres I like doesn't line up with who I am today? Hard to say.

I'm going to stream Tales of Berseria tomorrow and see how it goes!

August Humble Monthly Bundle

Humble Monthly is a subscription service run by the Humble Bundle people where they sell you a fixed bunch of games for a low price. The bundles tend to be 'worth' about $200 and it costs $12 per month but they are using a non-discounted MSRP to determine that value and you don't get to pick the games you get so chances are you're going to get some games you're simply not interested in due to genres or whatnot.

The trick they use to get people to sign up is they announce some of the key games for the next month shortly into the current month. Typically this will be three games, but when they get a particularly big game they have it as the only headliner. Civilization VI and Destiny 2 are examples of those sorts of games from previous months.

My brother got me a year long subscription for Christmas last year and it's been pretty sweet thus far. I spend too much time playing a lot of individual games (like Blood Bowl in recent times) to play all of them but I have played some of them, that I never would have played on my own, which were great. Quantum Break was a movie/FPS hybrid that I would have never considered getting on my own but it was very cool.

I have recently signed up to be a Humble Partner. Basically this means I advertise for them and if people buy things through my link I get a cut. I did a little bit of this for the game Cultist Simulator which I was given a copy of to stream and generate hype for them prior to release, but I could and should do more.

I think what I should start doing is streaming the preview games for the Humble Monthly with my chat bot periodically spamming the link. Humble really wants their partners to sell the Monthly bundle in that I actually get most of the payment for someone who signs up for the first time. It will also give me a little structure for playing different games, which is always a good thing for me.

The advance games for August were just announced and they are A Hat in Time, The Escapists 2, and Conan Exiles. A cute platformer, a cool looking prison break simulator, and some sort of open world crafting game. The first two were both on my wishlist from browsing through various Steam sales, the third I'd marked uninterested. But it's one of the top sellers of the year, and has a $50 base price, so I'm going to give it a try. Letting people know they can get it (and some other stuff) for $12 could be a useful thing!