Itch.io Is Selling $3400 Worth Of Games For $5

Itch.io, the open marketplace for independent digital creators, is selling a huge bundle right now. The Bundle For Racial Justice And Inequality brings together over 700 indie offerings from over 500 creators in the gaming community, with the proceeds going to charitable causes. The exact value of the bundle comes to $3,452 – and you can purchase the whole thing for a minimum $5 contribution.

The bundle spans a whole spectrum of genres and ideas. Here are just a few:

Notable indie games like Night In The Woods, Oxenfree, and Pet The Pup At The Party.
Tabletop RPGs such as Lancer, Black Heart (which is both Carly Rae Jepsen and cult themed), Tricksters, and The Cool Zone.
Visual novels like Serre, As We Know It, and Bunny Hill Horror.
First-person shooters such as Penance, And All Would Cry Beware!, and Midnight Ultra.
Platformers including The World Begins With You, Escape From Life Inc, Outpost Horizon Station, and Parallax.

You have dungeon crawlers, Metroidvanias, roleplaying games, shoot em ups, platformers, short stories, horror games, and with over 700 options, this is by no means an exhaustive sample. There are desktop add-ons like Desktop Goose and Gravity Typist, which mostly seem to exist to make your life difficult, but in a fun way. There are also a few multiplayer games in there.

There are even game assets and development tools, like the CanariPack 8BIT TopDown, the DragonRuby Game Toolkit, and the HPS Cartography Kit. I’d say that this pack has something for everyone but honestly? I think that would be selling it severely short. It’s nearly overwhelming, in the best way possible.

It’s an incredible bundle and an outstanding gesture of solidarity from all involved. The proceeds are being split equally between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Community Bail Fund. $5 is the minimum contribution but you can pay more if you want to. You can also buy the bundle as a gift for others. At the time of writing, Itch.io has already raised $300,000 and counting, and as word of this pack only increases, it seems likely that they’ll smash through their current target of $500,000.

All items in this pack are DRM free direct downloads. A decent amount of the pack is available for Mac and Linux, for players who are on something other than Windows. For $5, it’s hard to come up with an argument for why you shouldn’t buy it, even if some of these games might not run on your system. Keep in mind there are a sizeable portion of browser games and tabletop RPGs that are viable for any operating system.

If you’ve never much looked into indie gaming before, I can’t see a better opportunity than this coming along any time soon. If you’re thinking, “What am I going to do with 700 games?” Well, uh, ah… play them, eventually. Though at the time of writing this article, I’m still trying to decide which one I should download first.