Robert Bowling Joins Humble Bundle, Leads New Group To Help ‘Games Be Created’

Robert Bowling has announced that he has joined charity-focused game seller Humble Bundle as vice president and creative director. Bowling, who spent six years as creative strategist for Call of Duty at Infinity ward, left that position to strike out on his own.

Robotoki, the studio Bowling founded, closed in January after a change in focus for the studio’s game Human Development left the company without a publishing arrangement. Now, Bowling is building a new team that will help Humble’s mission of supporting developers and charity initiatives.

“My role as vice president, creative director is focused on the future of Humble and how we’ll be expanding in the next one to five years,” Bowling told us via email. “I have started a new vertical in the company and am currently building a creative team that will be focused on new products and projects.”

With his background in game development, we were curious about how that might come into play at Humble. While there’s nothing to announce right now, there are some hints about what Bowling might be working on.

“One of the new focuses that I’m bringing to the company is to allow games to be created that would not have, or could not have existing without our help,” Bowling explains. “So, if we did ‘dip our toes’ into original development, it would be in a capacity that helped us test and iterate on a feature or service that would be made available to all developers. At the moment however, our goals are focused on helping other developers with their original creations.”

This sounds like it could be in part related to funding, which might create new partnerships that bolster the Humble Store’s profile. Recently, Curve Digital announced a time-limited exclusive deal with Humble Bundle to bring Stealth Inc. 2: A Game of Clones to that storefront first.

As part of that, Bowling says that Humble will be expanding its capacity to further aid its core constituents: developers and gamers. “We are investing heavily in technology and development that will allow developers to increase the accessibility of their games and for players to have more freedom in how they play and access their games,” he tells us. “I will say, that every initiative we’re currently working on holds true to the values that people know from Humble. We want players to have freedom over the content they own, we want developers to have more opportunity for their games, and we want every revenue we generate to provide for charities.”