🤑Bundles

The backbone of early Steam

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Introduction

Be carful to protect the value of your product. If you discount to much, to often or are part of sharply discounted bundles then the perceived value of your product and similar products will crash. This is very bad for everyone especially the consumer as it is not sustainable.

Bundles are a tool that allow you to "bundle" up multiple items and apply a discount making it more attractive to purchase the bundle than each item independently. Bundles can take many forms. the most common is simply as a bundle, you have no doubt seen these on Steam such as a publishers bundle or franchise bundle. follows are a few types of bundles and notes on how they are implemented.

Obviously this can be made annoying if your packing bundles full of junk no one wants and 1 item everyone wants but cant get else where. One option to avoid this annoyance is to offer each for sale on its own "ala carte" as well as in a bundle. Be sure to use a Steam style dynamic bundle that can adjust its price based on the items the user already owns or you will fall into another annoying problem ... I already own some of this but not all of it ... is it still a good deal? Steam's Dynamic bundles will remove already owned items and reduce the price for the user. Other platforms typically have a similar "catch up bundle" concept.

Bundle Tools

Seasons Pass / Pre-order bundle

This is a bundle the user purchases typically before the contents are released and are marketed as things such as "Seasons Pass" or "Pre-order bundle". They typically contain 2 or more expansions and or other digital content for some discounted price.

Content Bundles

These can be displayed or called a number of things ... even loot boxes. What separates this from Surprise Mechanics (predatory loot boxes) is knowing exactly what is in side and it being available as a regular product e.g. not time limited or "FOMO" based product. Some classic examples of this would be the "Game of the Year" or "Battle Chest" bundles you often see, these GotY bundles usually include the base game and all its expansions in a single price. You may have also seen "Founders Packs" or "Premium Upgrade" bundles. In all cases these stable valued tools in monetization because they offer a one time purchase of clearly documented products at a clearly documented price.

Game Bundles

Games are digital items to, bundling multiple games together can encourage players to try new things by lowering the barrier to entry ... that is offering a discount. Game bundles might be themed such as "Publisher Bundle", "Franchise Bundle", etc. or may simply be a collection of games that agreed to be part of a bundle ... e.g. Humble Bundle style.