By Bundle of Holding founder and operator Allen Varney
I launched the Bundle of Holding in February 2013 after a 28-year slog as a freelance writer and game designer, 1984-2012: a hardscrabble hustle, an ulcerous tightrope tension, an eking scrounge for the next gig. I kept that mindset too long. Only here in Bundle Year Ten, for the first time, did I stop thinking like an embattled freelancer. This, the Bundle of Holding, is the gig.
Still, it’s not the whole gig. Here in Year Ten, I’m making plans.
Since 2013 the strangest thing about the Bundle has been, Nothing really happens. Average sales per offer go up a little one year, down the next, then up, but the high-altitude view? Flat as Kansas. Offers in 2015 sold an average of 713 copies; in 2017 the average was 770; 2018 was 767 and 2021 was 787. The 2022 averages, after the eight offers in progress end in January, will finish around, I wanna say, 760? By now I take it in stride. Whether you call the Bundle site “retail,” “entertainment,” or even “publishing,” few businesses in those sectors just mosey along unchanging. They go big or go away (often both). Consistency is – good? I guess? It beats scrounging, anyway.
One pleasant consistency: Every year the Bundle of Holding sells to 16,000 to 20,000 unique customers. Since 2013 the site has served about 86,000 customers, which implies many of you buy multiple offers across many years. I’m glad you find the site useful, and I thank you all.
Across the hand-to-mouth decades as a freelancer, I always hoped for one smash hit project that would finally let me relax. Never got close, then or now. But on Cyber Monday this November the Bundle had one spectacular 14-hour window that felt like success. As in, if everybody bought offers in numbers like those Monday customers bought Mongoose Traveller Explorations, Traveller Great Rift, and the Shadowrun 1E-2E Megabundle, I’d be a millionaire. (Sitting in my desk chair, I did a little nerdy dance. Be glad you didn’t see that.) Technically you could extrapolate the same result from any single transaction: “If I made money 2,000 hours/year at the rate set by this one 30-second sale, I’d be rich!”
2022 highlights
The site’s important changes have always been on the backend. This past year my wife (and fellow game designer), Beth Fischi, wrote a Python script that automates much of the drudgery in creating new offers. That program cuts a full day off prep time, hosanna! So 2022 saw, get this, 115 offers, 47% more than the year before. (2021: 78 offers; 2020: 72; 2019: 75; 2018: 69; 2017: 67; 2016: 69; 2015: 53; 2014: 62.)
The most popular bundles of 2022 included Palladium Fantasy 2E (Jan), Worlds of 2000AD (Feb), Sly Flourish (April), Hostile (April), Shadowrun Sixth World Essentials and Power Plays (May), May’s Cypher 10A Megabundle (marking the tenth anniversary of Monte Cook Games), the Fifty-Dungeon Megabundle (May), GURPS 4E (June and October), Fading Suns 4E (July), Arden Vul (July), BattleTech Total War (Aug), DCC Chaos Rising (Aug), Novel Writing Game Tools (Oct-Nov, the longest-running offer in site history), Weird Frontiers (Oct), Level Up (Nov), Cornucopia 2022 (the most successful installment ever in that series), Heart/Spire (Dec), the Rifts Core Megabundle and Rifts Land and Sea (Dec), and the 13th Age Megabundle (Dec). The new megabundle format has sold well, and next year will bring more mega.
Introduced with Bulldogs! (April), the new single-tier, fixed-price Quick Deal format gives the site a practical way to present smaller game lines. Given this past year’s successes – Traveller5, dicegeeks Random Tables, Red Markets, Never Going Home, Warbirds, Knights of the Dinner Table, Engine GM Guides, and others – you’ll see many such Deals in 2023.
As the 2021 year-in-review post foreshadowed, many past offers returned in 2022. Most of the 32 revivals sold quite respectably, typically two thirds of the original run. Heroes Unlimited almost exactly matched its 2018 total, and the Buffy-Angel revival outgrossed the Nov 2016 original. Some offers are evergreen; they’ll return every few years as long as the publishers permit. Of 683 offers to date, 170 (25%) have been reruns. Thirty-two revivals in one year is a record (2021: 20; 2020: 28; 2019 and 2018: 17 apiece; 2017: 16; 2016: 14; 2015: 11; 2014: 21), and next year will break that record.
For longtime mailing-list subscribers who might not want to hear about revivals, your “My account” page lets you choose to receive announcements of all offers, or of new offers only. (When I revive a past offer with a new companion bundle, that announcement counts as “new.”) You can reach “My account” from the three-line “hamburger” menu at the upper right corner of each page on the Bundle site.
This year’s first-time contributors to Bundle offers included Barrel Rider Games (The Hero’s Journey), Heroic Maps, MageGate Games (MageGate 5E Treasures), Peril Planet (Neon City Overdrive), Stellagama Publishing (Stellagama Cepheus), Stiff Whiskers Press (Weird Frontiers), Wet Ink Games (Never Going Home and Jiangshi), and most of the contributors to Mork Borg Compatible, Troika Worlds, Indie Treasure Trove 2022, and Cornucopia 2022, along with everyone in Novel Writing Game Tools. They joined returning publishers Arc Dream, Bully Pulpit Games, Catalyst Game Labs, Cubicle 7 Entertainment, EN Publishing, Evil Hat Productions, Expeditious Retreat Press, Far Future Enterprises, Free League Publishing, Goodman Games, Green Ronin, Kenzer & Company, Legendary Games, Magpie Games, Melsonian Arts Council, Modiphius, Mongoose Publishing, Monte Cook Games, Palladium Books, Pelgrane Press, Rowan Rook & Decard, Schwalb Entertainment, Sly Flourish, Steve Jackson Games, and Ulisses Spiele, among many others. As always, I thank all these publishers for their support.
Witness Protection
Along with the Cornucopia and Novel Writing Game Tools, 2022 brought more lineups featuring multiple contributors, such as the Bundle for Two 3 (Feb) and third-party offers for Old-School Essentials, Apocalypse Engine, and Monster of the Week. These hydra-headed offers are challenging because it’s difficult to reach the designers. Many small publishers meticulously scrub any online hint of their contact info. I had to call off a planned offer of third-party Mothership adventures because I genuinely couldn’t reach any of eight prospective publishers. Are they all on the lam? Undercover? In Witness Protection?
Publishers: If you’re selling your books for actual grown-up money, best practice is to provide a public-facing email address where your customers can reach you. Do you think your WordPress blog contact form works? Your WordPress blog contact form doesn’t work! That form forwards to a mailbox you haven’t checked in three years. You haven’t logged in to your Facebook account since 2018, nor Twitter since last May. Post an actual current address, please!
You want your customers to communicate with you, right? Why wouldn’t you want that?
Charities and sponsorships
Ten percent of the revenue (after payment gateway fees) from most Bundle of Holding offers goes to a recognized charity. In 2022 the Bundle’s cumulative ten-year total charity donations passed US$1.1 million. Some of this year’s individual contributors chose to support institutions important to them, such as the Arapahoe Rescue Patrol, Mines Advisory Group, Paved Paws Animal League, RollVsEvil, and the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank. But as in 2021, most of this year’s donations went to Direct Relief, which sends protective gear and critical care medications to health workers, with emergency deliveries to medical facilities across the US and to regional response agencies across the world.
In the holiday season the Bundle supported a new RPG-related charity, the Diana Jones Award Emerging Designer Program. Each year, the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, amplifies the voices of up-and-coming game designers by featuring them during an expenses-paid visit to Gen Con. The global Emerging Designer Program focuses on creators from marginalized communities.
In February 2022, to mark the Bundle’s ninth birthday, 700 gamers once again donated actual money – more than $3,300 – for a Birthday Bundle collection of games you can download free elsewhere on the net. Those donations supported The DOTS RPG Project, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that makes roleplaying games accessible to visually impaired players and other people with disabilities.
This year the Bundle of Holding has sponsored journalist and designer Thomas Manuel’s excellent Indie RPG Newsletter, a hub for curated content from around the web. Thomas contributed his solo RPG The Spider and the City to this year’s Indie Trove.
The ever stranger mailing list
The Bundle’s free (and spam-free) mailing list remains your best way to learn about offers, but the list is so, so weird.
For ten years nothing has changed about the offer announcements, yet the list size grows herky-jerky, inscrutably, without pattern or sense. The first couple of years, 2013-2015: wham, rocket growth, thousands of subscribers, to the moon baby! The next four years, to 2019: stall, stasis, endless churn, blehh. 2020-21: occasional modest bursts of new addresses. Then, this year – brace yourself – regular, steady, uniform increase. Forty-six new subscribers every week, 46 week after week, January to December!
I mean – what? Why 46?! And I never change anything!
Social media, gah
The Bundle of Holding Twitter account still has close to 6,000 followers, though I haven’t posted there since mid-November. (Need you ask why?) Facebook has reorganized the Bundle page so efficiently, I can no longer tell how many followers it has. Month by month, Twitter has never sent more than 2% of the Bundle site’s total visitors, and Facebook no more than 1.5%. I’d love to exit both, but some customers still ask questions there. Meanwhile, the r/bundleofholding subreddit nears 1,000 followers. I hope the subreddit grows to become the site’s principal social media platform.
In November I resumed occasional posting on my torpid April 2017 mastodon.xyz personal account, and I frequent the forums on RPG.net and RPG Pub (where there’s a stickied Bundle of Holding topic).
The Bundle’s most popular social media post in 2022, or ever, linked to The Only Edition’s 08 September story by Leif Nelson, “Delusional Man Buys Yet Another Bundle of Holding.” On Reddit’s r/rpg this story got 515 upvotes. Only Edition creator Leif Nelson has a Patreon; I was his first patron.
This year saw wide new attention to the Dead Internet Theory, which explains our online angst, ennui, squalor, and depravity by suggesting most social media content is generated by bots and AIs. Venture capital has inflated the whole empty apparatus in service to the magic-beans folly of targeted online advertising. “You know, secretly, even if you’re pretending not to, that this thing is nearing exhaustion,” Sam Kriss wrote in his September 18 Substack post “The internet is already over.” “There is simply nothing there online. All language has become rote, a halfarsed performance; even the outraged mobs are screaming on autopilot.”
Rings true, doesn’t it? If nothing else, this explains why I couldn’t track down those Mothership designers. How long before GPT-4 starts writing all RPG books? And I wonder – can an AI assemble a bundle?
The year ahead
For the first time, the Bundle of Holding starts the new year with a complete 12-month draft schedule! Okay, no, I haven’t actually contacted any publishers yet (cough), but by golly there’s a LibreOffice spreadsheet with 70 imaginary new offers (including seven new Megabundles and 27 Quick Deals) and 45 imaginary revivals. And on the Storefront, look for new ongoing Starter Packs this spring. Well, maybe summer.
Yet such schemes as these are flighty twaddle. A yearlong plan when, in all of 2022, I never pulled two weeks ahead! Pssh, it is to laugh, not only because the publishers are sadly ignorant of next year’s schedule, not only because it’s a titanic amount of work, but because I’ll be running a Kickstarter!
This, the Bundle of Holding, is the gig – but it’s not the whole gig. For many years Beth Fischi and I have been pulled away from creative work: Beth as a department director in the telecom industry, and me as, well, you know. But in this past year of lockdown we wrote a D&D sourcebook called Manse Magnificent, and we’ll launch its crowdfunding campaign in late spring. I hope someone sees it – someone who isn’t a bot or an AI. If that’s you, then from one human to another, while we’re both still here, I wish you well.
(Previous year-in-review posts: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014)
