‘Overly ambitious’ expansion leads Humble Bundle to cut a fifth of staff

Digital retailer Humble Bundle has been forced to let 12 of its staff members go, after the firm’s CEO admitted it had attempted to grow too quickly.

Polygon, citing an anonymous source, reported that the job losses took place across the entire company last week, and accounted for around 20 per cent of the workforce.

Co-founder John Graham confirmed the cuts and expanded on the move in an email to Polygon, explaining:

"Despite strong revenue, and our community surpassing $65 million raised for charity to date, our past hiring was too ambitious and we had to make a hard call last week."

Humble Bundle started as a charity-focused platform for selling periodic ‘pay what you want’ bundles of games, with a user-defined cut going to a number of charities and Humble itself.

This was expanded upon in recent years, with a more traditional storefront selling singular titles and bundles expanding outside of games to game-related content and media. This was followed by a $12-a-month subscription service.

Despite the efforts to diversify its offering, Humble has seen interest shrink. The first Humble Bundles in 2011 saw sales of over 300,000, contrasted with just 137,000 for this month’s Indie Bundle 15.

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