June 1 is here, which means it’s Pride Month, baby, and the Queer Games Bundle is back with another massive collection of games, zines, and more for less than the price of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Now that’s a good way to celebrate Pride, ain’t it?
The 2023 Queer Games Bundle offers “450 games, software, and zines from nearly 300 queer artists across itch.io” for just $60, according to its official page. Games include Fist, a paranormal mercenary RPG; Repurpose, a queer dating sim; The Long Shift, a TTRPG set in an interstellar rest stop; The Case of the Serialized Killer, a murder mystery; and He Fucked The Girl Out Of Me, an intense exploration of sex work and identity that former Kotaku staffer Sisi Jiang played earlier in the year.
The bundle also has a ton of visual novels and short books spanning various queer-related topics and interests, including orc erotica, girls in love during an “eternal mech war,” a short story about a romantic hydra, a cozy novel about a cat and a blanket, and a story that promises “all lesbians guaranteed a happy ending!”
Itch.io often bundles games together for a good cause, whether it’s for racial justice organizations or funds for devs who couldn’t attend GDC during the height of the covid pandemic. But purchases of the Queer Games Bundle go directly to the LGBTQIA+ developers, writers, and artists who made the content in the bundle.
“If we had the budget of an AAA game, we could give every solo developer in this bundle a livable wage multiple times over for a year and every single team a massive funding boost. Imagine what the developers and artists in this bundle could create a year from now if they weren’t worried about starving or how to pay their rent this month,” the bundle page reads.
If $60 is too much for you right now, there is a Pay What You Can Edition with a sliding scale payment scheme starting at $10. But considering the Queer Games Bundle is such a perfect example of direct action (economic/political acts that seek to achieve ends in the most effective way possible), you should fork over the $60 if you have it. Doing so will help foster creativity and support a diverse, queer community of artists and developers.
One of last year’s contributors to the Queer Games Bundle told Kotaku that sales from the 2021 bundle “supported him through the development” of both a visual novel and a horror game that were included in the 2022 bundle, so the impact of your purchases couldn’t be more clear.
