Lab Surprise is the coolest bundle idea for App Lab

It’s time for an exclusive preview here on The Ghost Howls: I’ve been able to explore Lab Surprise, a new bundle of indie games coming on App Lab this afternoon and I’ve found it so cool that I couldn’t resist talking about it with you even before the launch.

What is Lab Surprise?

Do you remember “Waiting For App Lab”, the first bundle of games for App Lab? Some weeks ago, some indie studios decided to join their forces to promote together their App Lab games. The bundle was a good success, and the developer that ideated it, Julian Dorra, has also shared the lessons he has learned during this adventure on this blog.

Now Julian is at it again: he and other 17 indie developers are proposing again a bundle for their App Lab games, but this time it comes in a very interesting format. While in the first bundle, you could purchase all 14 titles together, now you can buy again 14 games, but in a group of three… without knowing which games you are going to buy. What you get, is a surprise.

How does it work?

You head to the official page of the initiative, https://labsurprise.me/, starting from today, April 16th at 15.00 GMT. You will find in front of you three surprise eggs, with a super-cheap total price written below. Every egg represents a game, and you at this point don’t know what games there are inside… you only know that they are three different games from the fourteen that are participating in this initiative. If you decide to buy them without knowing what there is inside, you get a huge -70% discount on the titles that you are buying.

If you want to be sure that at least you like one of the games, you can open one surprise egg, and see what is the title it represents. But at this point, the total discount becomes only -50% on the sum of the prices of the games. If you reveal another one, it becomes -30%. If you reveal them all, only -10%.

If you don’t like the game that you have unveiled, you can always refresh the page: every time that you reload it, a new surprise bundle of three games gets generated and you restart from the -70% discount. Of course, you can use the trick to refresh multiple times and click on all the eggs to see what are the games that you can get with this initiative.

With this mechanism, you have to find a balance between the knowledge of what you are buying, and the discount that you have on it. It’s an interesting and fun way to proposing a bundle. It looks to me a bit like a fun lottery... and it is also a bit evil 🙂

How do you pay for the games?

The developers are using Paddle, a safe and secure payment processor and merchant of record. As soon as you perform the payment for the bundle on its website, the 3 Oculus Store keys of the game you have bought are shown in front of you and are also sent to you in the email receipt from Paddle. You can redeem the key in the usual way that you use for all the gits on the Oculus Store.

What is the price?

The price depends on the three games that have been extracted for you: it is the sum of their prices, slashed by your current discount.

When will it be available?

From April, 16th 15.00 GMT to April, 28th 2021.

What are the titles that participate in it?

I am not allowed to say in this preview what will be the titles involved in Lab Surprise. I can only say that there are 18 developers proposing a total of 14 games.

Why do you have to choose 3 games out of 14?

Julien answers this question perfectly in the press release:

One challenge when you organize a collective event like Lab Surprise, or the Waiting for App Lab bundle back in February is to showcase the whole group of games, not just one or two games… And as our collective of game developers grows, we need to find interesting ways to reach out to players, ways that don’t exclude or sideline one developer or the other.

Lab Surprise is a super inclusive way of giving different games, in terms of price, gameplay, etc. an equal chance to be seen and bought by players.

One frustration we had with the Waiting for App Lab is that we couldn’t add new games along the way to the bundle (because of how the Itch co-op bundle system works).

With Lab Surprise, we can welcome new developers and add their games to the surprises, or even do special events where a game will be in the surprises but for just a few days… It’s much more inclusive, we could have much more App Lab games in the selection.

Julien Dorra

What are the total combinations of bundles?

Again, I’ll quote Julien over it:

The combination of 3 games from our 14 games gives 364 completely different bundles

But wait, then you have to add that there are 4 prices possible for each bundle, depending on how much surprise egg you opened, and it gives you 1456 unique combinations of bundle and discount!

Julien Dorra

Have you tried it? How is it?

I simply loved the idea as soon as I’ve heard it! As an indie developer myself, I know how it is hard to get visibility among the community, and this Surprise Lab is a very original initiative that I’m sure will get a lot of attention because it is something new and fresh. This is an amazing thing, and I hope that will help all the indie developers working on it.

I was so excited that I asked to have a preview, and the Lab Surprise team was so kind to give me the opportunity to try it! I can tell you that the sensations that you have while using it are like the one of playing a strategic game. I’ve found myself in front of these three eggs and a very small price, and I had different thoughts while watching them. A part of me wanted to buy all three games without knowing because -70% is a huge discount and I also like surprises. Another part of me was like “no, you can’t do that, you risk buying games that you don’t like!”.

I spent the first minutes exploring what were the possible games by refreshing the page and trying different bundles, and then, when I had a clearer idea of what I could get, I started playing with the eggs. Unveiling all three games gave me a too tiny discount (just -10%), plus it canceled all the magic of the surprise… I love surprises, so I couldn’t accept the idea of knowing already all the titles I was going to buy. All three uncovered was too risky. So in the end, I tactically chose to get a -50% discount, refreshing the page until I revealed a game that I liked. At that point, I could proceed with the payment, happy that I could get a game I liked for sure, plus two surprise games, all of them at half of their usual prices. Not bad as a deal!

I didn’t know Paddle, but using it was straightforward: I put in my credit card data, and without having to register, I could buy the games! After the checkout, I could also see immediately in front of me the three games I bought, plus the keys to redeem them. I didn’t even have to wait for the confirmation e-mail.

Everything was fun and easy to be used. If I have to find a shortcoming, it is that the graphics of the website look very simplistic: probably if the initiative becomes a big success, a heavy restyling would be necessary.

Any Final Thoughts?

It’s very important to support VR indie developers, and I think this is even truer when these developers come up with an innovative and interesting idea like Lab Surprise.

Starting from today April, 16th at 15.00 GMT be sure to connect to https://labsurprise.me/ to experiment with this surprise bundle you too! And when you’re ready, be sure to buy some games 😉