While clicking on Humble today to consider their book bundle, I saw an offer for Sanctum 2 free (so grab it while you can!). After clicking it, I looked at gog's holiday bundle specials and saw one for heroes of might and magic 1-5. Those things made me think I'd recently gotten Homm 3 free recently. Yet I couldn't find the free game on gog, steam, humble.... where did it go?

Finally I remembered it was Civ 3, not Homm 3, but that wasn't in my humble games either. Long story short, I discovered that simply clicking to get a free game on humble doesn't actually give you the free game. You still have to REDEEM that game very quickly, which I didn't know. As a result, I see I didn't get Civ 3, or GRID back in 2016, and would have missed out on Killer is Dead and the Sanctum 2 games by not redeeming them in time.

So I just wanted to grumble about Humble and their unclear game gifts. It's no big loss as I've already played Civ 3 and prolly never would have played GRID, but it's sad nonetheless. At least I didn't miss out on games I really wanted.

So if any of you didn't know that, be sure to redeem any free humble games right away.

Yeah, I seem to recall I missed out on GRID the same way. You live and you learn.

I'm confused. Why would you get the game without redeeming it right away?

Edit: Oh, wait, I get it, you assumed you were getting the DRM-free build and didn't realize it sent you a Steam key.

Perhaps I was spoiled by gog, or perhaps just used to Humble having their own page to dl things from. I assumed when I clicked on the free game banner and hit checkout, that that was more than enough clicking to get the game. I didn't realize it not only gave me a key on another site as you mentioned, but further that that key expired in a week or so. The very rare times I've gotten keys that expired I've had months or even a year or two to redeem them.

If humble mentioned anywhere that I only had a week or two to activate the free game on another site, I must have completely missed it. Plus, I'm sure I'm not the only gamer who buys/gets games and doesn't get around to playing them until years later, so I normally wouldn't even know the game wasn't there until far too late.

Some of the games have time limits to redeem. The recent one (Sanctum 2) does not. I checked this. I still have my GRID from earlier that I did not redeem yet.

It's to stop key hoarders/resellers. As always, whenever there's a nice deal for some people, others will try to abuse it, and publishers don't like it when thousands of games they gave away for free turn up for sale on grey market sites.

So Humble, possibly under pressure from publishers, keeps trying to find ways to make it harder to bulk-claim keys. There were a few giveaways recently that would check your Steam account beforehand and not let you claim one if you already had the game- and, of course, there was that infamous period where it wouldn't show you keys at all, you had to like your Humble and Steam accounts and the games would redeem automatically when you clicked a button. People didn't like that.