Revitalizing the Gaming Experience: Digiphile's New Approach to Bundles

The concept of game bundles has become increasingly common since the first Humble Bundle was launched in 2010. However, the market has become saturated, leading to a situation where there are more games available than players have time to play. To address this issue, a team of former Humble Bundle staff members has created Digiphile, a platform that aims to revolutionize the way bundles are presented and consumed. The core promise of Digiphile is to release no more than two bundles per month, with each bundle guaranteeing a minimum of 5% of its face value to charity, and providing complete transparency on how the revenue is split between the publisher, charity, and platform. Furthermore, additional charity donations can unlock exclusive digital content, with 100% of the revenue from these donations going to the designated charity. The team's ambition is to create an engaged community that recommends and discusses games, as well as books, with a series of quality-of-life improvements for both buyers and publishers. These improvements include the ability to trade in bundle games that the buyer already owns and effective showcasing of smaller titles alongside headline bundles. The foundation of Digiphile is human curation, with a core team of six staff members supported by external guest curators. The platform aims to solve long-standing industry frustrations with current bundle sites, with the biggest issue being the focus on sales rather than getting players to actually play the games. The existing model prioritizes unit sales but doesn't necessarily encourage players to install and play the games. The co-founders of Digiphile, Alex Hill and Marcus Hess, emphasize the importance of building community features that reward and incentivize players to play the games and participate in discussions. They believe that this approach is more valuable than just focusing on unit sales and want to shift the focus from buying games to playing them. The platform will not use algorithms or automatic recommendations, instead relying on human curation and community engagement. The team plans to bring people together and encourage conversations about games, with the goal of building a community organically through natural discussions. The focus on community and human curation is expected to benefit both the platform and the publishers, as it will create a more engaging and rewarding experience for players. The Digiphile platform will also spotlight new indie games, with the team hoping to bring in the majority of their users through large premium bundles and then keeping them around for indie spotlight promotions. The team describes this approach as something they wanted to do at Humble Bundle but couldn't make a business case for, and it's not expected to be a significant revenue earner. However, they believe it's essential to support smaller developers and provide them with the attention they deserve. At launch, the site will be a straightforward storefront and a subreddit, but future updates will build out the social features, giving people a reason to come back even when they're not spending money. The ultimate goal is to go beyond a pure games focus and become a platform similar to Letterboxd or Goodreads, with a robust community united by recommending and curating, and seeing the recommendations of others.