Hi all, thanks for being patient! This is BáiYù of tofurocks & Project Ensō, and I'm here with a postmortem about the Queer Halloween Stories Bundle 2023. For those who missed it, the QHSB2023 was my second year running a bundle and thus the second year of this spooky bundle I founded. We recycled the presskit website from last year and updated it with new information, and if you're curious about my thoughts on how the QHSB2022 went, you can read last year's postmortem here.
While we did better in some aspects there were a few minor things we forgot to do; regardless, this was a valuable experience that we hope others can learn from so they can start running their own bundles! We will be splitting this year's postmortem into multiple parts as there's a ton of details behind this year's bundle and I have a wide berth of related topics to cover. Part 1 of this postmortem will cover what we did to prepare and launch the QHSB2023.
In February 10-24, 2023, Nathalie of KRITIQAL ran the Trans Witches Are Witches Bundle, a bundle of queer indie games and other content themed around Magic that was sold as an alternative to an infamous AAA game (which we will not be naming here) in protest of the original IP holder's virulent transphobia and other bigotry. The bundle contained media from 56 creators and was sold for $60 and $10+, with both versions of the bundle largely offering the same content.
Nathalie had previously run the Be A Better Cyberpunk Bundle during December 10-24, 2020 and sold it for $60 as an alternative to another certain AAA game whose development studio was infamous for unethical labor practices and attitudes. The Cyberpunk Bundle was composed of just over 25 developers who had developed games in the cyberpunk/sci-fi genre and sold 876 copies, raising USD$55,978.07 by the end of its two week sales period. From this experience, Nathalie and the participants of the Trans Witches Are Witches Bundle, myself included, expected a similar outcome in 2023.
Needless to say, all of our expectations were blown out of the water in just 24 hours.
The Trans Witches Are Witches Bundle was quickly picked up not only by many mainstream gaming journalism sites but LGBTQ+ pop culture news sites and eventually general news organizations as well (including an interview with The Wall Street Journal, a request which she declined). None of us could really believe the numbers going up in real time; this was more sales of our indie games than any of us combined could have ever imagined, and it was only snowballing with each passing hour. Some anonymous buyer had even purchased a copy of the bundle for a flat USD$1k! At the end of the Trans Witches Bundle, both versions of the bundle had sold 5,412 copies combined and raised USD$242,322.10 in total. Each participant would walk away with approximately USD$5k each depending on their tax interview, platform revenue split, and payment processor fees.
Those two weeks were not without hardship however: a slew of transphobic remarks were directed towards KRITIQAL, the bundle itself, and the participants as a generalized group on social media in the midst of the what was becoming a morality and ethics debate across the entire internet. A few individual participants became nervous about what this sudden wave of traffic would mean for them in terms of their personal safety, as many of these developers were trans themselves. Others would either post about their games in the bundle and try not to read the comments or log off of social media entirely for the duration of the bundle.
Still, success was success, and without a doubt the Trans Witches Bundle provided what was finally a first taste of breaking even on development costs for many participants. My portion of the revenue I received from the bundle would fund my plane ticket and hotel stay at Game Developer's Conference 2023 later in March, which is where I finally had the chance to meet Taylor McCue in person thanks to her extending one of her Indie Games Festival team member passes to me. While in San Francisco, California, I gave a micro-presentation about itch.io bundles at the informal Yerba Buena Gardens Lost Levels talks and networked with many other developers. On the last day of GDC, Taylor invited me to help moderate entries for the Queer Games Bundle 2023 when it would begin, which largely meant checking if developers themselves qualified for the bundle and if their submissions contained anything against the bundle submission guidelines.
As the QGB is one of the largest annual bundles on itch.io, there were hundreds of submissions for us to review and play; this process was very intense and spanned several days with discussions held on some titles that the moderators marked as needing a second review. All of this was necessary work, but surely there was a way to do this more efficiently and without so much pressure on the moderation team on a tight deadline?
As the QHSB2022 was a private invite-only bundle and my plans for 2023 was to expand it to open submissions, I knew I'd have to start making my application forms early and find some folks who had time to moderate entries with me. I also had to purchase the rights to the cyclops character design that inkymaw drew for the promotional graphics last year as I determined that I wanted her to be our mascot from now on; it was a simple matter of reaching out and discussing details, and as we sealed the deal I asked Inky to name her; privately, he code named her "Candy," which I felt was perfect as is.
Soon after, I got into contact with Isla from milk+ visual and commissioned her for several pieces of art, including promotional graphics for Only One Of Any Asset VN Jam 2023 and the new graphics for the 2023 bundle itself. For the main illustration, I made sure to specify that there would need to be enough empty space to allow for text, images and other information; one of the references I sent to her was the graphic for Two and a Half Studios' Storyteller Festival, which I felt was much more exciting than some of Steam's own official graphics templates from recent memory.
I also knew I wanted a fun and bouncy logo to go with the spectacular art Isla drew, so I asked Madi from Sad Ghost Studios to whip one up. Finally, I commissioned another large pixel version of Candy from Quinn K., who I had the honor of meeting at GDC and have been a massive fan of after playing An Outcry (one of the games from the first QHSB), for an alternative graphic to use during organizing and hosting the bundle.
Actual preparations for the submission Google Form proper began in the last two weeks of the QGB2023 as sales continued; my work with the QGB was done at that point as Taylor and Caroline handled the majority of official social media posts and fielding participant emails about questions and concerns. Luckily, a lot of the groundwork for QHSB submission guidelines were already complete just by virtue of having the presskits and postmortem I wrote last year. Something that changed between 2022 and 2023 was that the official itch.io process for creating large-scale bundles now used the Game Jam page to import submissions into a bundle page, so I spent time creating the corresponding jam page as a landing site for developers interested in applying.
The jam page for the Queer Halloween Stories Bundle 2023 is noticeably a lot more dense compared to the jam page for the Queer Games Bundle 2023 for a couple of reasons:
It was a struggle trying to figure out what information should or shouldn't have been on the Google Form itself as many of the folks who gave me early feedback said that long application pages, even if the majority of it wasn't taken up by the questions themselves, was slightly intimidating.
Additionally, one thing that I knew I wanted to change this year was to try and include projects that weren't just Digital Games, meaning that I was on the hunt for Physical Games (most commonly TTRPGs and sometimes Print n' Plays), Books/Novels/Zines, Comics, and Bonus Content (artbooks, OSTs, DLC, etc. of narrative games). I fully admit to not being well-versed in the TTRPG scene whatsoever, and I was grateful to have Drazillion agree to volunteer and assist me with outreach and moderation in that community.
The jam page for the bundle was made private but accessible via URL starting on June 28, 2023 as I personally invited some folks to participate. I did this for a few reasons:
The private submission period received 20 entries before I formally announced that submissions were open on July 6, 2023 and set the jam page to visible on itch.io's jam calendar, though folks that Drazillion, other participants, and I had reached out to continued to submit their projects throughout the next few days. Over the course of that time, the jam would occasionally get a few spam entries from bad actors who neither read the rules or submitted to the Google Form, but removing the obvious junk was easy. I also received a few emails from potential applicants and reached out to those with unique circumstances to communicate with them before the submission deadline closed. Drazillion and I did our best to check through entries as they came in, and by August 24, 2023, we received a total of 90 unique responses to the Google Form.
Reviewing applications as they came in was the right call as we had hammered out a good system for marking which submissions were clear to consider and others we wanted to look at in closer detail.
I've gotten pretty handy when it comes to mastering spreadsheet functions, and implementing a "streetlight system" for approvals made it easy to CTRL+F the applications we wanted to review. There were 4 parts to our system:
Ideally, we would have had at least one more moderator to act as a tie-breaker in case there was a disagreement, but Draz and I worked well together. We managed to finish reviewing all of the submissions by September 1 and ended up only having to reject a few submissions.
Unfortunately, there were also a few folks who slipped between the cracks and had applied only to the Google Form but didn't submit their game to the jam page. We did our best to reach out to these folks to get them into the bundle via private submission links, but at a certain point we couldn't wait much longer; if the jam entries changed too much while importing the projects into the bundle, it would complicate things.
On September 5, 2023, I emailed itch.io support to import the games into the two empty bundle pages I created; since that part was out of our hands, I asked Drazillion to help format the graphics template for participants to use.
We used the artwork that Isla drew along with Madi's logo to create a .psd file that participants could use to put their project cover thumbnails on, doing our best to ensure that it was compatible with Photopea (a free image editor that runs in the browser) so that as many people could use it as possible. For additional text, we selected the Metal Mania font that's free to download from Google Fonts.
It was around this time that Dulcia Games was able to help us gather contact information from various press websites and content creators who might be interested in covering the bundle as a whole; as we had a variety of different types of projects, we could reach out to more than just digital games publications. They also helped us create another Google Form for folks to request review/streaming keys for individual games, so while they finished that and drafted up some emails each tailored to the individual writers, I worked on revamping the presskit website to reflect the 2023 information.
My nerves got the better of me on September 15, 2023 as I unfortunately hadn't heard back from the itch.io support team, which in hindsight was a mistake on my part as they are constantly inundated with support tickets and I should have sent an inquiry a few days prior to remind them of my ticket. Instead at the time, I created a new bundle page and manually imported submissions myself; I wish someone had told me that you can largely just paste a bulk list of URLs separated by line into the field and it'd take them all, as I learned that only after I began to set up the $10+ bundle. Once both bundles were set up, I sent an email to every participant using the Jam Email function to accept the bundle and did a few reminder rounds in a couple of Discord servers where a significant number of participants were in.
It was a nerve-wracking experience for me personally as time was slowly dwindling until our planned bundle launch on October, and there was one last applicant on the bundle who hadn't responded to any of our emails and left no other methods of contact for us. On September 21, 2023 I contacted itch.io support again to remove the non-respondent and equalize the bundle revenue splits as evenly as possible, and this time they responded promptly. Now that the URL for the bundle was confirmed and able to be accessed by the public, I could generate bit.ly links and send out those emails to that we had prepared.
One of the publications I reached out to was Gayming Magazine regarding their marketing packages, as their QHSB2022 feature was a large source of our external purchases last year and I wanted to make sure that we partnered up with their fantastic editorial team again this year. One important thing to note is that you can contact one of their writers to request one free article, but if you want an article and an ad campaign at the same time, you'll need to pay for the Silver Ad Package at USD$1,000. Gayming Magazine got back to us on September 25, 2023 and we quickly worked out the details to get the campaign set up.
Not long after, Leafo and I were also able to privately coordinate some of the finer details on the bundle page, such as the social media promo images for the meta tags before the promised day arrived. I should note that by the time all the prepwork was done, I had spent well over USD$2,000 on the 2023 bundle altogether; this included purchasing the rights to Candy's character design, the art, the logo, and the Gayming Magazine ad campaign. Is it necessary to spend this much when you run a co-op bundle? No, and I don't think most other people who run bundles come this close to spending nearly this much, especially if they can make visual assets themselves. I personally consider the commissioning of graphics to be part of the mutual aid effort however.
Like last year, the bundle launched at midnight in Eastern US time on October 1, 2023, which fell on a Sunday this year. I unfortunately also had to work that day but had scheduled up several social media posts to go out throughout the day, and the majority of our sales were coming in from other external sources thanks in part to several of the publications we reached out to posting their articles. Both the Fright and Treat bundles hit their initial goals of $1k and $500 respectively on October 2, and we quickly fell into a pattern of hitting a sales goal at least once every two or three days.
We encouraged bundle participants to continue posting and sharing about their projects in the bundle while the Vtubers/Let's Players we got in touch with also showcased titles we recommended to them that fit their audiences, drawing attention to the sale in player and reader spaces. As we approached the middle of the month, the $60 Fright Edition of the QHSB received front page placement on itch.io, which gave a huge boost to our already daily sales.
As you can see, there's a slight plateau in graph for the $10+ Treat Edition in the period following October 8 while the graph for the $60 Fright Edition shows a steady increase, but rather than sales of the $10+ Treat Edition stopping, more internal traffic was directed towards the full price bundle. It was quite exhilarating to have folks DM me during my work weekends letting me know that we hit another milestone!
Behind the scenes, I continued to field private questions and sent more rounds of emails to all the participants. For the most part, things went smoothly on that front.
The end of the month continued steadily, though the $10+ Treat Edition received a final boost of sales at the end from internal traffic. These were our total stats by the end:
| Bundle Version | Total Units Sold | Average Contribution | Top Contribution | Total Raised |
| $10+ Treat Edition | 586 | $10.99 | $35.00 | $6,444.00 |
| $60 Fright Edition | 274 | $61.62 | $121.00 | $16,885.00 |
This meant that the participants for the QHSB2023 would pay out about USD$290 each depending on their tax interview, platform revenue split, and payment processor fees. While this was slightly below my estimation of approximately $300 per participant on the jam page, I want to say that supporting over 80 individuals/teams is no small feat outside of Pride Month or other external events driving positive attention to queer individuals.
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Thank you for reading Part 1 of the Queer Halloween Stories Bundle postmortem! I hope that this post gave some insight into the process of organizing a larger co-op bundle. We'll be diving into the analytics and analysis side of things in Part 2, so stay tuned!
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