Introducing itch.io: a marketplace for hosting indie games | Hacker News Reader

Introducing itch.io: a marketplace for hosting indie games

leafo.net

92 pointsneur0mancer35 comments

I created itch.io, I posted it on hacker news back in march.

You can find the homepage here: http://itch.io

Here's the traffic I've received (the initial spike is hacker news launch): http://leafo.net/shotsnb/2013-12-25_11-16-16.png

A few milestones, I've paid out 12k so far to developers. I use pay what you want pricing, the average purchase is 1.79 above the minimum price of the game. 35% of all the money paid to developers on itch.io is "extra" money paid above the minimum price of the game.

Since launch I've primarily focused on adding features, hoping for organic growth to come along. (hence the huge flat line for months in the graph above) I've been starting to network more, mostly over twitter, which is really helping to bring the traffic up.

I'm very open about the process, feel free to ask me anything.

If you want to follow my development adventures you can follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/moonscript

Here is an interview with the founder we did a couple of weeks ago:

http://www.techendo.co/posts/indie-gaming-interview-with-itc...

Just wanted to say thanks! I published my game(Missilium) last night on Itch.io. It was really easy and pleasant, compared to Desura or IndieDB.

Great work on the site, it's a big help to the indie community

Great work leafo!

I just "reposted" this here, because i didn't know this cool website.

From user's view, some sort of rating/feedback and/or sales figures (perhaps just ranges as in google play) would have been great. Especially for the non-free games.

I've deliberated on this a bit. I don't think I'm trying to build a traditional storefront. If a developer is building a homepage for their game they aren't going to stick reviews and sales data on the page unless they are exceptional. So at that point they are just handpicking whatever data that happens to market the game well.

I want itch.io to be the place where people make the homepages for their games. Not another storefront page filled with links elsewhere. For that reason I purposefully don't force anything on the game pages.

Discovery of games is a separate issue. Up until now 99% of game discovery comes from external source (mainly twitter). The itch.io homepage and browse pages are potentially good places to discover games but the library isn't good enough where people see it as a place to go to find games (yet). If I do start aggregating reviews then you might see it on those pages, but never on the game pages.

>I want itch.io to be the place where people make the homepages for their games.

I like your intention, but from the looks of it, these indie game devs are no web designers. These homepages they have come up with... well... aren't exactly a thing of art.

Stores on the other hand, kind of have a better visual page for each page. So perhaps you can provide you devs a set of themes to choose from when making the homepage? I know they can just Google those themselves, but they don't seem to be doing that.

Discovery of games is not easy. One suggestion, although not very significant to boost game discovery, could offer some interesting pieces of info and regular readers:

have a weekly(bi-weekly/monthly) blog article with a kind of template interview with one indie dev that has games published on your site. interesting to other indies, might be interesting to players, and gives some promotion

> I want itch.io to be the place where people make the homepages for their games.

I see, that makes sense then.

> If I do start aggregating reviews then you might see it on those pages, but never on the game pages.

That is enough for what I was asking about. Perhaps a best-selling titles, etc..

I joined last March when you first announced it .. and I have hung in there hoping that things would get 'better' than my first impression, which can be summed up thus: "hope you get better games".

So .. my question is .. what do you think you might do in order to increase the quality of the games you are offering? A lot of the games don't .. well .. appeal .. on initial inspection. But I hope that changes.

I really don't have an answer. I just need to convince some of the more well known developers to upload their games. I need to try hard sell them on uploading, tell them it costs nothing and will take very little time.

More well known developers are uploading their games over time though, I think more people are starting to discover the utility of the site. Recently got two games from Vlambeer:

http://vlambeer.itch.io/gun-godz http://vlambeer.itch.io/wasteland-kings

So I guess the real answer is time. I need to prove the platform isn't going anywhere and that it has the features that are truly indie friendly.

Thanks for the honest answer - I look forward to watching you over the next few months and seeing how things take off. I guess you're working towards the critical mass required to make this viable, so it'll be quite intriguing to observe your progress!

Are you going to pimp/promote/campaign/whatever a bit more with the Ludum Dare and 24-hour game jams that go on around the scene? I'm guessing you already know of these avenues for promoting your site .. well I for one will be encouraging my fellow game-makers to consider itch.io as an option for distributing their indie work ..

Thanks again, and keep it up! You've got a fan here!

Do any of your devs offer source for their games and do you or will you provide a way to directly download it?

Wow. I'm more amazed at the variety of libraries you've written for Lua than the end product itself (which is definitely an achievement on it's own) to be quite frank.

I mean, come on, a web framework for Lua AND and a scripting language that compiles to Lua AND Vim and ST2 syntax support for said scripting language? Seriously?

Great work. Oh and sorry for typing like a 3 year old in a candy store (with a laptop in hand?).

Seriously. That's very impressive.

Yes great work by the author. Makes me want to try out lua for web development.

From a user's point a view — itch.io is everything I need, and then more.

  - Upload your game & customize your game page in a few clicks, without artifical walls: check
  - Quickly generate download links for press/friends and monitor their download count: check
  - Manage sales / price / updates from the web interface: check (instead of having to e-mail people a-la Humble widget)
  - Check out analytics on page views / buys / etc. - check

Since the default page look wasn't enough for me, I simply used the widget on my game's website, and it works perfectly well.

I'm a happy camper so far :) With the revamped 'buyer profile' update that's coming, it'll be even better. Plus, leafo is always listening to his userbase!

I'm happy to see another DRM-free game marketplace/store.

This is really nice, I'll almost definitely be using this in the future. I just have one question, how does downloading work? Can the purchaser download whenever they want or is it like uplay where you only have a month to download?

They get a private download url that can be used to download the latest version of the game whenever they want.

That's good. Is there a page that shows all your purchases like humble bundle eventually implemented? If you purchase a lot of games it could become a pain to keep a hold of all your URLs.

Another question occurs to me; Do you have a policy regarding early access to games? I saw you mention it on your twitter but your FAQ doesn't set out a requirement for games to be feature complete.

Right now all purchases are associated with an email address, you can request a list of your purchases to be emailed to you from this page: http://itch.io/about/support

I'm very close to deploying a feature for registered users to view their purchases. I'm doing a revamp of user profiles and that's part of it.

Early access games are interesting, I think it's a realistic alternative to kickstarter. I don't have any rules regarding them, still thinking about it, but I very much encourage them.

I'm glad early access games are encouraged. I enjoy them. However I feel like they run the risk of having potential fans becoming bored relatively early in development and not staying hooked till release. Prison Architect was hit with that for me, I played it none of the updates since have added enough to keep me interested and testing.

Thank you for itch, it's a great service and I hope I can use it in the future.

looks like one of the best platforms for indie games! appreciate the effort to get this up together! :)

Site looks clean but the 10% fee the site takes on every sale seems a bit high:

>First, itch.io will take 10% of the total, 10$. Then the payment provider will take $0.30 + 2.9% of the total price, $10. Leaving you with $8.41.

There's actually no fee now. And I'll be changing the pricing model in the future to something much more flexible and friendly.

Note that this is from March 3, so itch.io has been up and running for some time now.

Is this like the Marching Band? [0]

0: http://itchyo.com/

You should seriously consider to user another payment gateway other than PayPal.

I support PayPal, Amazon Payments and Stripe. The original blog post it a bit outdated as it's form when I originally launched.

Man, no linux games :(

Fortunately, you are wrong: http://itch.io/browse/platform-linux

Its very easy to be wrong on this one, since there are 2 buttons for "win" and "mac", and none for linux

The linux button is not visible on the top if your resolution is too narrow, It's the least clicked button so I chop it off first. As for whether this is a good idea probably not.

What? There are plenty: http://itch.io/browse/platform-linux

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