Humble Games on its ongoing indie publishing quest
Danielle Partis
News Editor
Thursday 16th June 2022
In 2020, when the rest of the world was gearing down, Humble Games was gearing up.
The publishing arm of games retailer Humble Bundle launched in May 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold of the games industry, and the rest of the world.
Two years later, the outfit is thriving, with over 30 independent titles published since launch and another 12 in the works for 2022 -- and that's just the partnerships that have been announced.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Humble Games' VP of global publishing Mark Nash acknowledges that the pandemic period was dynamic for lots of good and terrible reasons, but says that Humble didn't feel the impact of it as much at the time.
"We were already a company that had embraced things like remote work and working from home, we have partners in Europe, Australia, South America, so we're already kind of used to working with distributed partners," Nash says. "Internally, we were transitioning from being mostly based in San Francisco to a team that's now spread across the US and other countries as well."
At the time, an internal discussion was ongoing on how Humble could organically grow its own publishing arm rather than just licensing other titles. Nash explains that the initial idea behind Humble was to financially support indies towards the end of the development cycle, with the studios benefitting from the firm's social outreach as they were getting ready to self-publish.
"It was a win-win for everyone, subscription service customers got great games that maybe weren't on their radars, Humble was getting content while supporting the core games and helping the developers get the money they need to finish a game, or have a good surge
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