(Quick shortcut for those not interested in reading the long blog entry: Free Steam games from Johan Ho)

Over quite a few years I’ve been buying almost every Humble Bundle, and I’ve collected a big bunch of extra Steam keys because I already own some of the games in the bundles.

The reason why I still buy those bundles even though I only play maybe 10% of the games I get from bundles, is that I can select the percentage of the money I pay that goes to charity. Basically the money for bundles are just “part of the money I’ve allocated each month for charities” so to say. (The monthly charities I donate money to besides this are currently UNICEF and Red Cross). So when buying bundles, I’ll usually select at least 50% to charity, or occasionally more if I already own many of the games in the bundle. This is also why I never wanted to join their Monthly Bundle, because that bundle only gives a set percentage of 5% to charity.

But I guess I still gave up on buying their book and most of the software bundles, otherwise it feels like there are just too much every month, and I realized I’ll never get around to read any of the books or use the software I’m not that interested in. I haven’t even read all the comic book/manga bundles that I’ve occasionally bought for series I’m interested in. For example they had two bundles for Attack on Titan and Fairy Tail that had most of the released volumes and even spin-off mangas a few years ago… Still haven’t finished those either.

In any case, I made a web site to collect all the bundles, and all you need to get a game is to sign in with Facebook and request the game you want!

Once I’ve approved of the request (to make sure it’s not some kind of Facebook bot or unknown person), you should get an e-mail to the game, or you can login to the web site again to see your list of games.

Some of the reasons I added the Facebook login is:

• I didn’t want the game claiming to be completey open to the public, making sure it’s mostly my friends who can get them
• I wanted to test using the Facebook API I guess (instead of making my own login system)
• Plus I thought it would be easier to see if a person is actually my friend on Facebook.
  • However, it turns out that after all the “personal information leaks” issues Facebook has faced the last year, they have gotten a lot more strict about what information developers can get, so I can’t even see if someone is on my friend list unless Facebook approves it… And they didn’t because it’s such a niche web site I guess.
    Oh well, I’ll just leave it for now and hope that not too many Facebook bots try to request games…

Notes:

• I set the limit to a maximum of 1 request per calendar month. So once it is the first day of next month, you can request another game, and you can get a maximum of 12 games per year.
  I thought that it would be easier for people to deal with month numbers than to try to remember “30 days from now I can get another game”.
• Also, even though some of the keys are for expansions, I haven’t currently added a system to get a game + expansions, so you’ll just have to hope that nobody else picks the expansion while you wait for next month.
• Lastly, there is some chance that some of the keys won’t work, because a few years back I read some news about people managing to steal Humble Bundle keys by “guessing” the URL, I think?
  Unfortunately I can’t test each key to see if they still work, and even if you say that a key didn’t work, I can’t check if it’s because it was already “broken” or because you already claimed it… So the general rule is that if you request a game and it doesn’t work, you’ll just have to wait until next month to request another game.

On a side note, I finally started working on the new worship web site using Preact and PouchDB, but since this means I basically have to learn a completely new way to code a web site, I haven’t even gotten the login system to work at all… I decided I’ll just learn how to build the UI to look like it’s supposed to look for now, and try to patch actual functionality into it later. *sigh*