Yes, please. Since this option exists for bundles already, I believe that itch.io can reasonably include this in products as well. Please do so and enable collaborative projects to properly and conveniently monetize on your platform.
i would also like this Feacher...not just because of collaborations, but for derivative works, like, a creator can say "you can hack my game but pls give me x%"
🌈ideally🌈 you'd be able to enter any payment-linked email address, not just itch accounts—so that revenue can be sent directly to a charity or wherever—but i know that's probably something that just cannot be legally/practically implemented
Ok. Time for some dumb questions.
How does this work, if the project has direct payment active.
Who has control over the revenue split ratio.
What happens if one of the enthusiasts doing revenue split on their hobby project screws up tax information or gets legally, because their business partner did not uphold agreements in shared work.
Who can remove the project or change the price.
To my limited understanding a thing like revenue sharing is not possible at this point of the chain of distribution. You need to have a single entity having the rights to sell. A single entity responsible for all the legal stuff, including holding the rights of the project. After all, the project could be sold on a different platform and different distribution channels as well. If you "share" on itch and your partner sells it on their own website without sharing, how to deal with that.
If you do a limited colab to bundle sell things, that is different. There are two entities having each a concrete project and agree on a limited sale with a defined sharing option. The purchase gain is shared, but the projects are still separate and can be separatly be dealt with legally.
In reality of course those entities are small companies that are still often controlled by a single person, but the legalities how the company is controlled is the internal affair of said company. Trying to do revenue sharing on the distribution level of the sales platform is making those internal affairs external, actually making the company obsolete.
That is my two cents, and I know very little about all this stuff, but I believe there are loads and heaps of pitfalls, that people naively do not consider when idealistically thinking about revenue sharing of their hobby projects. Sure, it sounds fantastic, some strangers collabing on a project, making money along the way and sharing the revenue. But I fear itch has not the legal capacity to be such a place.
I've thought about this a lot, because money is a complicated thing, especially when people are involved.
I think it makes the most sense for revenue splits to work a lot like how bundles work. If you've never organized or been in a bundle, all of the people involved have to approve the percentages / split for the bundle to go live. Once everyone has approved a bundle it cannot be cancelled or modified, but obviously for a project it would make sense for it to be changeable.
So, for a project with a revenue split to go live, everyone involved would have to approve it. And if the split was ever going to change, or a new person is being added to the project, or someone wants to delist the project, everyone would have to approve a new form. In order to prevent angry people from spamming split changes, there would probably be a limit to how often changes can be suggested by individuals, maybe once a month.
There maybe would be a setting [that contributors have to approve / consent to] that would allow some contributors to be considered "core", and others to be considered minor contributors. The only difference would probably be that minor contributors wouldn't have a say in whether or not a project can be delisted.
I think what I'm imagining is basically as good as it gets; itch.io moderation doesn't have to get involved, and while people might regret things they approved later, ultimately nothing is perfect. For larger projects [6+ people], it maybe would make sense to have a voting system instead, because if a single person in a thirteen person team is always rejecting changes because they're trolling or pissy, that would be a huge issue. And the difference between core and minor contributors would probably be relevant here as well.
Not sure about the tax problems you're discussing. I've never been at risk while participating in a bundle because someone else in the bundle didn't do their taxes properly, and I imagine things would work the same here. I think the whole point of revenue sharing is that nobody wants to be an accountant responsible for paying other people, and that they want the money to be split before it even reaches them. But I'm not a legal expert.
Your comment about someone selling the item on another website; I already sell all of my albums on both itch.io and Bandcamp. There is nothing stopping me from selling my music for less money on Bandcamp, and vice versa. It might be against the ToS of itch.io or Bandcamp to do such a thing, I'm not sure, but the point I'm making is that this can basically already be done. I think it falls outside of the purview of itch.io's responsibility, and it ultimately would just be a massive dick move if an individual developer sold an exe on their own website to bypass a revnue split. That's something the devs would have to hash out between eachother.
And finally, your point about who owns a project; there would clearly have to be shared project pages or something. Regardless of who initiates the creation of the project page, when everyone approves said page it would probably not be "owned" by any individual member of the team, and people would have to go through the aforementioned approvals processes to make changes. Maybe, when the project is first being created, everyone can approve a single person owning the project, which would allow them to make a lot of changes unilaterally, which would make a lot of sense for projects where one person did 90% of the work and everyone else just contributed a few assets.
Obviously none of what I'm suggesting is perfect, and a lot of it would be really annoying, but that's just how money is, and even collaborative projects with shared ownership in general; they're the kinds of things that can destroy relationships.
It would be complicated for itch.io to sort out how it works, but if they can make bundles work legally, I'm sure it would only be marginally more complicated to have shared projects.
EDIT: I forgot to mention this earlier, but I recall hearing that DriveThruRPG has revenue sharing, so it has been done before.
I guess it would be easier to set up with two key ingredients.
First, finished projects. No risk in some of the collabs to drop from sight and leaving the project before it is done. You have a sellable item and can concentrate on selling it.
Second, take a third of the sale price. This will take care of lots of services that include dealing with additional requirements for revenue shared projects. Including being the merchant, instead of the individual collabs being the merchant. If all those pesky details are dealt with, it is only a matter of paying out to different accounts.
Maybe the thing with the merchant is the biggest hurdle for itch to implement such a thing. They have the option to not be the merchant for an item, sometimes they even require it. Bottom line, that status can change. But it could not change for a revenue sharing project. How would that work, if a user wants to buy a thing from 10 different merchants at once? From user perspective it has to be a single merchant.
Given that I, and many others in this thread, use other platforms with this feature in place, I feel fairly confident in saying none of those problems represent a block to doing this. But, in short, most of the contractual relationship is governed by whatever agreements are in place between the creators and Itch need not be involved in those at all.
The only real issue would be that changes to the revenue split and this could function like collaborative bundles do now — everyone has to agree. In that event, all Itch has to do is distribute the funds based on the agreed upon amount. Any other conflict is already remediable under existing contract law and mediation between the parties.
How do those other platforms handle the merchant situation? Who acts as merchant? Itch does not act as merchant for all projects.
While not a technical block to implement a feature, itch is low cost. That prohibits implementation of some features. If only because it would cost money to implement them. Just think about direct messages. Why are there no direct messages on itch? It is a thing most run of the mill out of the box message boards have. There is no technical barrier. My assumption is, it would cost money in terms of staff time for moderation and arbitration, spam removal and so on.
My best guess is, they shy away of implementing such a feature for a combination of reasons. Among those reasons, that for games mostly unfinished projects would try to set out like this and not already finished projects would try to start selling like this. And fledgling collab projects of amateur developers from around the world sound nice, but are bound to bring in a heap of work in support. Mostly unpaid support with the current pricing scheme.
Or let me ask differently, is there a way to do such a revenue sharing on Steam? Maybe on some other game platform? I got the impression with very few data points, that those revenue sharing things are more a thing of basically book publishers. Books are only a very small part of itch.
if you make a deal with someone, all they have to do is give you their email on itch and that's it, no boring additional banks or papers work. Once itch implements this feature, i have no doubt other giants like steam will have a new competitor, because no one likes to have more than 30% of their earnings cut, or pay 100 dollars before publishing.