itch.io

The way I heard that term first time, long, long time ago, it was player versus player and player versus environment. But the context was multiplayer, massive multiplayer online role play game, to be precise. 

mmorpg servers could be split into pvp and pve, where you can attack other players without their consent on pvp, and only with consent on pve servers.

The way I perceive the terms nowadays, pvp is used to indicate competitive multiplayer. For "pve", the more popular term used is coop/co-op.

The term(s) probably evolved. Maybe not as bad as rogue-like. But I never heard pve used as a synonym for single player. 

Which is better, chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream?

Pistachio Ice Cream

Chocolate is for brownies and vanilla for cream pudding.

You are not comparing pvp and pve. You compare multiplayer vs singleplayer. Both pvp and pve are multiplayer.

All three have their audience. If you are single developer, multiplayer is hard. Especially real time multiplayer. And there is the question, if it is mandatory multiplayer or optional. Is the core game a multiplayer experience, or is it just something that could be shared by several people playing together. Or is the game fun only there, because you can play against other players.

In games, pvp is very popular. It's just, that pvp is so often seen in real world. Be it chess or any sports.

I am hard pressed to find real world examples of pve. I believe those evolved from the fact that in computers and board games, you have to face the problem of a sore loser - and of grievous play. And pve is somewhat easier to implement in a computer game, than in a sports event. So they are there, because it is possible. You now only face the problem, if the pve game should be playable by one person or if multiple persons are mandatory.

It is a complex question and there is no straight answer. I depends too much on the type of game. And of your capabilities to actually implement any such game.

See also https://itch.io/t/3744851/help-me-get-this-virus-page-removed-from-itchio-blogs#...

There are many such accounts. People here are notoriously lazy to report things. And blog posts do not even have a report button, so even less people will mail a report to support. The interesting part is, how many followers some of those fake accounts have. The other one had over 50. Were all those people not recognising the scam for what it is? I certainly did not, but when I saw those, there were no links on the pages.

They should close this and other exploits the scammers are using. The more popular itch becomes, the more attractive it is for scammers, so attempts will increase. I see too many hacked accounts already.

Abandonware can a game get removed cause of it?

Of course. To whom would the store front pay the revenue?

doesn't the payment stuff apply to both platforms?

No. Steam is multinational. They could just transfer money internally and pay money to your bank account. I do not know what they actually offer, but they accept a lot of payment methods. It stands to reason they they also offer more than a few methods of getting payout. Itch on the other hand does not want to act as merchant in some situations or the developer configures it such. This is called direct payment. Ever saw projects where you can pay in Yen or Australian Dollar or Euro? Those are direct payments.

Also, if you pay a game on itch, taxed are handled ... not very well. Prices on itch are vat exclusive. Prices on steam are vat inclusive where it is local law, because they are multinational and actually do offer the items in the local markets. And they are converted to local currency in the shop, by the shop.

But in the end, each removed game has its own story, why it was removed. Some stories might of course be similar.

There are lots of possible reasons why a game gets removed.

Abandonware and no clear legal situation about the owner. No One Lives Forever for example. You cannot buy this game new for that reason.

Legal issues about used assets, licences, other things and legal disputes. Even though some issues could be solved, it leads to the next reason. Only Up has some of these problems.

Stress. Some people do not want to be public and famous. Some viral apps went that way.

The developer has regrets about publishing the game. For various reasons. Flappy Bird was removed for such a reason.

Fake games and impostors. Less likely to happen on Steam, but depending where you find a game, it might not be the real one, and got removed. Some "demo" versions on a free platorm might actually be malware scams.

Lack of time and commitment. If you release a game, you are somewhat responsible for it. Some games here have disabled comment sections because of that. (And others have it disabled, because they are scams). Indie developers are usually more to the ground and approachable, so they might feel uncomfortable to give support for a years old game they maybe not even have source code anymore.

Embarassement or other reasons for not wanting the game to be known. There is this thing with the director's cut in movies. If a creator of a work is unsatisfied, they sometimes try to fix it and sometimes just move on. It is artists and there is this trope of a painter destroying his own paintings.

For releasing on Steam as paid and not on Itch, specifically, there are idiosyncratic reasons. Payments are handled not in a way on itch the same way as on Steam. It is sometimes not possible to sell on itch for a developer, for some reason or another. Remember, that while itch is US based, the developers and users are all around the globe. There are projects here, where you can even get a steam key with your purchase. Of course not releasing on both platforms can have all sorts of reasons. The most trivial can be, that it takes effort to manage several distribution places. And let's be honest, itch is a puddle compared to the steam ocean. A game can have thousands of reviews on steam and have single digit ratings on itch. I kid you not. This game here has 2.8k reviews on steam and 4 ratings on itch.

Of course there are counter exampels. This one has 2k ratings on itch and 5k reviews on steam.

I have mixed feelings about this.

There are times where it would be nice to contact someone in private. But then I imagine what this feature would be used for. And I have seen many scams in open message system. Especially developers get scam offers often, that are tailored for small business. This one here should be a warning for all small content creators, not only games: https://pbfcomics.com/comics/hacked/

If the developer has no contact info, no socials on profile and project, maybe that developer does not want to be contacted.

That being said, if there is a project and that project has ratings enabled, you can write a review that is only shared with the developer, if your reviews are private.

For general collabs there is a message board here.

And if I remember correctly, some sort of profile message board might be considered for the future.

(oh, and if that project is licensable, there might be contact info in the downloaded project in a readme or some such)

What if the game you search was released in winter, but you only found it in summer.

I am not implying anything. But try to download an older version in a store like steam or gog, or other places. It is not a common feature. If you want upload and offer older versions you can do that on your project page, just use different file names. You can even have links to external file hosting.

I doubt they will tell you why your game is quarantined. It is speculation, that this has to do with the positive results of virusscanners. Could be any reason. There are many godot games on itch...

I also was surprised when I first read about that. One would assume that the game engine makers would be aware of such things and tried to avoid it.

Why would you preserve previous builds on the game page? Itch is a store front and not a code repository. If you want to do this, why not simply use a version number in the file name.

No, your newest exe flags as malware when scanned. No auto flagging it because it is unknown, it is heuristic positve. Many godot games have this problem, you can google it, and maybe ways of distribution to avoid that. Like a portable version inside a zip, instead of runtime package or whatever this is. It is very bad, because, how are we supposed to distinguish godot games from real malware inside a godot game? 

When you send an email to support you get an automated response with a request id. Did you sent those mails with your mail client or with the feedback button?

Your mail provider should have given you a response within 7 days, if the mail is undeliverable. You did check the spam filter of your mail provider / client, did you?

Also, please reconsider uploading different versions as different projects. It makes you look like a spammer and, well, you quoted the faq: "Avoid uploading ‘reskins’, or many project pages for minor changes"

Another thought, maybe your mail provider is on a blackhole list.

Oh, and it does not help, that your game flags as malware. You might have been reported for that, and it might take some time for itch staff to investigate if it is a false positive. Godot exe packing should not be used in my opinion. It only creates strife and makes people ignore positive scanner results.

It is similar to how people watch youtube videos of amateurs, instead of pay-tv/streaming high budget series and movies.

Or rather, they also watch it. It is just different.

It gets kinda tricky, if you do try to compete with big budget games toe to toe. I guess this is one of the reasons, why there are not so many 3d indie games. And not so many big budget "rpg maker" games.

Of course this is a way of thinking about pitching the game to, say, a publisher. But you do not pitch a game to a player. You might advertise it, certainly. But you would not use all the same advertisement material in a pitch and vice versa.

Also, the scenario was a bit narrowed down to convince personal friends to play the game, and they responed with, oh yeah, you made a game with that topic, we already have big budget games with that topic, why should we play your's? (to paraphrase it). And than it got expanded, to literally, the question, why play racing game, when top racing game exists, why play city builder, when top city simulator exists, and so on.

It is pointless to compare what games offer in this direct confrontation. We all would only ever play big budget games, and only a handfull at that. And reality shows, that players do not select their games by this logic. 

So I stand by my answers. "Because it is fun to play. That is why you should play my game. And because I made it, and you are my friend. And when you tried to cook that awful pizza, you made my try it too, and I did not ask, what does your pizza offer me, when there is a good pizza restaurant nearby."

And yeah, I do think there is a difference to whom and why you pitch your game. There is a reason why indie is indie. With the exception of small studios that still call themselves indie, just because they are small, all indie games are essentially games that were not pitched to a publisher to do the publishing. Either by choice or because, well, because while they might find their audience, they are not exactly pitchable material. Just look at rpg or visual novels, or, gasp, horror games. Everyone and their dog is making a fnaf clone. Rpgs are hero saves the world from big evil, visual novels are boy meets girl and so on.

But bottom line, the trivial and good answer to both, why should you play my game, and why should I even make that game should be: because it is fun. We do can play more than one game, even if they are the same genre and topic.

When player runs a program containing sensitive strings("Cheat Engine" or somewhat), the game will automatically shut down itself. it's only a self-close.

The game may occasionally ask you to enter a 3-digit verification code.

When the game asks for a verification code, please come to this page to download the latest verification code.

Please be careful, as entering the wrong code will cause the game to exit.

Please keep your internet connection stable. The game will only use the network to transmit the verification code and won't transfer any other data.

That sounds like your game has a lot of things in it, that would trigger antivirus.

I am curious what type of drm and anti-tampering mechanisms your game will be allowed to have on Steam.

Personally, I would not trust any self made drm of any indie developer and a requirement to be online to play a single player offline game, and to tolerate anti-cheating software for an offline singleplayer game ... it does not sound inviting.

Oh sure, you can argue about competitor games, but actually, your competitor games do not really have those things. It is an exception. I have seen many indie game descriptions, and the number of games that have some kind of drm, let alone anti-cheat is very near at zero. I have seen sometimes things with codes or online stuff, but I think anti-tampering is a first.

You can of course protect your game any way you like, but the non legitimate users will just download a cracked version of your game, that has those things removed. We do not need to hate or love drm, but pragmatically, it has little use. And there is the risk of hurting legitimate users. Like when they can not play your offline single player game, when their internet is down.

But you do you. And I am really curious what Steam will allow your game to have.

Not all games are indexed, not all games are indexed immediatly, some games will never be indexed, some games will be indexed and deindexed later.

And itch will generally not tell why a particular game was or was not indexed. If your game is not indexed, it can be assumed, that it is in a waiting queue, and that waiting queue might be longer than expected. It would not be unusual to wait longer than two weeks.

---

Why do developers think, it is a good idea to let an AI write texts? And who did write the original texts, that those AI learned that style from?

The problem with that question is, that it just does not apply. I implies some arbitary restraints that offer you two choices: play this game (yours) or play another game (not yours), that somehow still is like your game, but "better". Or rather the other way round. Your game is inferiour to that hypothetical other game. Oh, and you can't play both, of course.

In reality, preferring to play that polished ww2 game does not hinder them from trying out an indie take on the genre. If they dislike indie games as such, meh, bad luck.

You are on itch. If you would take this philosphy of only playing the "better" game seriously, 99.99 of all games here would be a waste of time. Actually you could go full out Highlander (the movie), and play meta death match with all the computer games out there, till there is only one game left, the game that is worth playing, more than all the others. (You could split it for genres, and have the best ego shooter, the best rpg and so on.)

The important question should be: is your game fun to play? And it better be. Why else make it. Or rather, whatever it might be, if it ain't fun, it ain't a game.

You might want to counter ask why the most popular game ever, Minecraft, has such horrible graphics. Huge pixels. Why do people not play games with nicer, state of the art graphics? Why is pixel art popular, despite advanced high res graphcis? Why are 2d platformers a thing still, when there are  3d platforms for over two decades now? (This was to illustrate, that it is not about a game being "better")

My point is, it is pointless to compare games in such a fashion, with asking provocativly, why should I play your ego shooter, when I could play this established ego shooter that I already know?

Possible answer: Because it is a different experience. If you do not like it, ok, not everyone likes that game you would rather play either.

Now, of course, if you only made a clone of an existing game, ... asking why play your knock off, if they can play the original is a pragmatic question.

This thread makes me think about this meme. Mom, can we have ww2 shooter game? We have ww2 shooter game at home!

Because it is your game.

But seriously, what kind of a dumb philosophical question is that. Why play any game? Or why play any fps game other then the one you already played?

Why try new food, if you can have pizza everyday.

Why bake your own pizza, if you can just order some.

Why even create any game? All has already been done this way or another. It is so repetivite, that we can identify tropes happening or codify a game/movie/story in such a way, that you only need to change a few words to have the same description for several things, makeing it seem like they are plagarisms.

But back to your question, for the same reason, they would watch your holiday pics you try to show them. Demanding that your single developer game has anything to offer in terms of competition against AAA games, is a bit much to ask. If you make an RPG they compare it with Baldur's Gate 3, I imagine.

Oh, and the best game of that type I know, is Hidden&Dangerous. (Disclaimer: I do not know all games ;-) )

If you never heard those concepts, they are hard to grasp. It is not a fake user. It is just a different profile to use, to play potentially unverified and amateur made games. I think it is telling, that the itch app even offers this feature. Maybe there were other reasons, or they just implemented it, because, why not. It is rather easy to implement, and it does kinda protect the main profile from shenanigans an amateur might have done. Some horror game developers try "clever" things, to spook the player.

Note: you do not need to use that feature. But maybe follow the advice you cited. Do not download and play the newest things, when they are new. They are mostly unfinished anyways, and full of bugs.

You might want to seek out solutions that have nothing to do with game making. Any activity requires some sort of focus, so it should be a general problem, and I would assume what helps someone to express art in a hobby with conditions such as yours, would maybe help in creating a computer game as well.

For computer stuff and a game project you can of course use time tested approach that anyone could and should use, regardless of any conditions: Divide and Conquer. Break down the project into smaller chunks. Finishing them should motivate you. And you know your own limits, so do not hesitate to break down small chunks into even smaller chunks.

There are only two maturity settings on itch. On or off. And nudity is generally put in the category "on" . Even if it would be artistical or could be shown in day time tv. Ok, maybe not in the US.

I understand what you mean, but itch is US based, and they do not differentiate between different shades of nsfw. At least not in this case.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox

https://itch.io/docs/itch/using/sandbox.html

It is the same as run as administrator, only in the opposite. You do not log in as that player, you just start the games this way. Should you decide to run all itch games this way, you might want to copy some of your save games over. The link above has some explanation how to do this.

To answer your earlier questions, I use 2fa, but later found out, that it will not protect against account hacking by credential stealing. Mixed feelingers here. And I do not use the itch app, but I sometimes use the same method of sandboxing manually. Generally, I just do not download suspicous games, but wait a while. I put them on collections for later viewing. Chances are, after some weeks, the comments and ratings will indicate better, what kind of game it is, and if I would like it. Also, most scams are gone till then. Stumbling on old scams is the exception, but it can happen.

Read about Sandtrix. Read the letter they got. Read about what constitutes trademark infringement. It is not about exact copies. If they can make a case that the combination of elements can make someone mistake your game as a game of their franchise, they probably will sue at some time.

If your game is at a glance clearly not of their franchise, you should be safe-ish. And it is not helping, that you named that shield skill glitched shield skill. As I said, it is the combination of elements.

Maybe read about other games that have parodied known franchises. How far could they go, and were there troubles.

Both things are protecting from different things. Since you asked about installing things twice, you did not understand how this sandbox method works. I already told all there is to it. So maybe read other explanations on the net on the topic, maybe they explain things better.

Just be aware that itch is not steam. If you only play popular games, sandboxing should not be necessary. And by popular I do not talk about that shiny new game you saw on steam that is now free on itch - those are malware most of the time.

I was only told to maybe not use the newest games and see if someone mentioned a lot of problems viruses or odd things in the comment section. I also usually stay away from stuff that doesn't even show any pictures since that gives me a low effort feeling.

Good advice. But be aware that it is trivial to copy description and screenshots from an existing project and publish it on an old hacked account.

 If you have nudity or sex in your art, it usually qualifies for being necessary to be marked as adult. The setting is what you want. Unfortunaly you cannot deactivate that setting, since you have published a marked as adult game yourself.

You can always browse in a new incognito window. That will have that setting off.

Right click on a game link to open in a new incognito window. If the message about 18+ appears, it is marked as adult. If not, not.

And some of those things are not nsfw at first glance. Itch requires "strong adult themes" to be marked as adult. But is lacking a definition for strong, for adult and for strong adult.

The wording with strong adult implies that there are adult themes that do not need to be marked as adult. Non graphic sex maybe. Or naked feet. Cleavage. From the other side, a pure text based game can have strong adult themes too, depending how graphic the themes are.

but if you look closely, it is not in an accurate enough font to be considered trademark infringement

And you know that, because you asked an actual legal expert on this? If not, then your statement is just an unqualified opinion. The ip holder might have a different opinion. Also, as I said, they can make a case out of a combination of things, that would alone maybe not be enough to infringe.

If you are greenlit on steam, that might be a good sign, but why is there no link to be seen on your page? Also, steam giving green light is not a legal advise from them. They take down things for infringement often enough.

I believe you are mixing up some things.

The sandbox user is on your computer. It is a windows user. You are on windows, are you not? You realize you can have an admin user, a regular user and a regular user with admin privileges? Regular users cannot access data from other users. That is all there is to it.

2fa is just the concept of having two separate tokens. One is the password. Another one can be phone, email, a special device, whatever. The method used on itch is "totp" and you need a totp app for that. Print out the one time codes, should you decide to use it. 

Regarding what is "enough". Running games not with your main account, is just a very effective method to gain much security for a little bit of effort. Especially on itch, since sadly many people abuse this platform.

It is just my perspective, of course, and I am not a lawyer. But it is not enough to not be the same. We are talking ip here and not copyright. That is trademarks, intellectual property. If you make a product, that has potential to be confused to be a product of the ip holder, you are screwed. And your game logo, character design and even the content of the game look an afwul lot like the stuff happening in wreck it ralph franchise.

So to me, investing in your game is lost money. I know, or rather am concerned, that it will be taken down. You are no longer treading in fan game territory. So make sure to be legally safe, before investing any more time in character models that might bite you in the back. Ask a professional, how bad it really is, and if there are ways to remedy the situation. Like disclaimers. Or subtle changes to certain elements. Clearly marking certain things as parody might help too. But ask people that know more about that legal stuff.

Read up, what happened to Sandtrix. That game had a different name once. It is the combination that makes it worse. To take three things: character model, the pixelated logo, the plot. Each in each own, might be ok, but in combination they might be seen as infringement.

Ant to say it again, all these were just observations. Do not take it too serious. But reading the thing with the different demo versions in comments, that already caused confusion. And if you try to go to steam, as the logo in the yt video implies, you might be denied, because of unclear legal status. Since you have no link to any wishlist me on steam page, I assume you are not at that point yet.

Sandbox is just a tool, that is cheap to use. That soft sandboxing is little effort and when the itch app handles it, it should be easy enough. If you manually set it up, you would have to shift right click the exe and select run as, and enter password and user. I would not use it to test suspected malware. But rather as a precaution, like driving with a seat belt, even when not expecting a car crash. And just like a seat belt, it will not protect against driving from a cliff. It protects against user level attacks, like stealing your session cookie. Those attacks are very nasty, as they circumvent 2fa and password completely (this is not an itch specific problem).

To protect your machine, you should up your scepticim. I made a tips thread about that. In short, do not trust the new and shiny things, even when hosted on itch. Itch has no account verification, so anyone could be an impostor (yes, just like in Among Us, which incidentally is also hosted on itch). But this is general anti-scam advice. Do not trust strangers on the net, the phone, the mail, on a self publishing store... , even if they say they are royality from other countries and have money to give to you.

Hi there. Of course I am not a marketing expert, just some random commentor, but offputting to me are those things on your project page (note, even if you change them, it would not mean I would buy or want to buy or even want to play for free. it is just random thoughts.):

You have 7 different demo downloads. That confuses me and I have no patience to decypher which one is right for me. You mix zip and rar. You tagged indiegogo and kickstarter - is your game about kickstarter and indiegogo. Character design and style might pose a problem later for ip violations - you should ask a real lawyer specialised in such things. If there even is a slight chance, that the owners of the original ip can claim that your game resembles their's enough to be confused for some of their products, your project is doomed. The youtube video looks much more interesting than the rest of the description and the screenshots. At least the second part of the video, that runs after all the short attention span people already clicked on another video. You have typos in your description.

Sandboxing is a concept. It means running a game in an environment, where it does not have access to critical things. Games that run in a browser are sandboxed. Games that run on Android are mostly sandboxed. Games that run on an admin privileged windows user account are the opposite of sandboxed.

You asked for authenticators, so I assumed you are interested in security. Trying out new and indie games exposes you to amateur level developers and if you are unlucky, to malware. It is of course mostly a Windows problem that exists for decades. Any malicous programm could read the cookies of your browser. And any badly programmed app could mess with your system settings, or leave clutter at places where no clutter is supposed to be.

The sandbox method the itch app uses is to create a new user that has not the right to read the files of your main account. The game when started by the itch app runs as that user and only can mess with the files of that user.

If you use 2fa, print out the scratch codes. They are needed to restore your account, if you lose your phone with the 2fa app.

Regarding dangers on itch, you might be interested in 

https://itch.io/t/1659440/psa-beware-the-try-my-game-scam

quote from the itch creator: "On itch.io, it is safe to view the page, but do not download any untrusted software" "Treat any page you encounter with suspicion if you are unable to vet the creators in any way."

This goes for pages encountered in recent or by random browsing as well. Scammers spam their malware and not all gets cought in time before some unsuspecting user finds the page. Some of the games in your collections went missing, because they were malware - if you are the type of user that puts games in collections to view later. Others are missing because the developer deleted it, or other reasons.

I may not be right, but I try to argue soundly. The thing with the demo version I advised for, was because of observation. I noticed games with paid only content having less ratings and followers and comments than pay what you want games. This still might be a fluke, because of what games I did browse. Maybe there are paid only games that fare better, because they are paid.

Having success as an indie game developer is a bit like having success as an indie musician/singer. There are just so many people trying it. It is hard. Even if you do everything "correct", you might still not have success and frustratingly see projects that did many things wrong yet still are more successful.

Oh, and you observed first hand what a demo version could have as an effect. People posted videos on youtube while playing your demo version. Maybe you got some followers due to that.

Uhm. https://itch.io/docs/advanced/two-factor-authentication 

Two points to add there. It is open standard, you do not need to use the google app. You can use any app that uses that totp standard. And second, sadly a 2fa will not protect your account against cookie theft attacks. Use sandboxing, like the one the itch app provides to add a layer of protection to your credentials.

You talk about this game? I read about it for a whole half minute and believe that your situation is not comparable.

It is like asking, why you can't cross the sea in a barrel, because barrels float and ocean liners float too and they can cross the ocean.

The floating is not the cause, it is just a helpful thing. Same as it is not the early access that gives success. Same as having a demo version gives not success. But take away the floating or the demo version, and you gonna have a hard time. 

Early access is a money grab with usefull side effects. You either satisfy demand for a game that was advertised or you use it for extended beta testing and to get some money. Also, free marketing. And releasing in "early access" gives excuse to have even more bugs in a game that people would be angry about, if it were regular release. And that palworld marketed for a about three years before going early access and we talk about a game with a budget of around 10 million dollars.

The play time is another such thing. Just because you inflate your play time to 15 hours does not make a game successful. But on the other hand, very short games are deemed by some players not worth the purchase. But it depends a lot on the genre. For a crafting game, 15 hours is a bit on the low end. Those can easily have 100+ hours of play time. And if you do it wrong, people might detest the grinding.

Now, there is a bit of wisdom in the play time. But you need to view it backwards. If you managed to make a game that people want to play for 10+ hours, that is probably a good game and might have commerical success. So if you only look at the commercially successful games, you will notice that there are many games with a play time of 10-20 hours - and might jump to the conclusion that the play time is a cause. It is not. It is an effect or maybe only a side effect. Because you do not take into account all the other games that have this play time and are unsuccessful.

And that is my conclusion about all this. There is survivor bias at work. We notice the games that are successful and see things they have in common, but that statistic will not tell us, what is cause, what is effect, what is correlation. And the marketing budget is often forgotten.

Is the payment or donation setting a scam?

Should I worry about hackers and thieves?

Maybe more context would be helpful.

How would the setting be a scam in itself? Who would be scamming whom, and by what method?

Pay what you want payment method is a favorite on itch. One could call it donation, but it is not donations as in donating to a charity. It is just a variable negative discount set by the buyer. Tipping might be a more appropriate term.

You should be wary about hackers. Both as a user and a developer. Developers get scammed all the time by scams that are not used upon normal users. See https://pbfcomics.com/comics/hacked/ for a real life example. Not a game developer, but a content creator on the net.

Scams for users vary in scope, but classical scams are rather rare, at least in gaming. Scammers want money. And selling indie games barely make money for the real developers. Also they would need to advertise, and that costs money or will be seen as spam and give attention from people that realize it is a scam and shut it down. Not that there are not enough famous scams that went on for years, with big sums, like the name giver Ponzi. But selling indie games as the scam mechanic? Nahh. They usually just try to put malware on your computer and steal and sell your data. Bonus if they get account data for valuable sites or extort money from you.

Oh, and yes, some of the scams here on itch have payment active. So you could not only fall for the malware, but also literally pay for it.

In either case, developer or user, if it looks too good to be true, pause a bit and think it over. But also be sceptical in general. There do be bad looking scams too. Remember the African Prince scams? Those were sent to small companies even before there was internet. There are even scams here in community threads. They get removed, but you might have seen some before they got removed. From badly or not at all translated advertisement to cleverly disguised sob stories. There is a non zero chance that a spammer will post in this very thread a spam message trying to lure you on a scam site.

Sorry, that is semantical and basically a part of math, so my language skills are lacking here to express myself. Also, it is art and without a huge marketing budget, it is also luck based.

Hmm. What would be an example to show by other topic, what I meant. I can only think of not quite good enough examples. Maybe this one:

If you wear a seat belt while driving your car, you increase your chance of survival in a crash. But this will not mean, just because you wear a seat belt, have an airbag, drive safely, etc, that you will have a crash - or survive said crash. Other people might have a crash without trying and even survive without buckling up.

If you have a demo version of your game, you increase the chance, a potential buyer will check out your game. But this will not mean, just because you have a demo, a good desription, nice screenshots, and adverstise yourself on youtube and social media, you will attract (paying) players. Other games might go viral without trying and even have commercial succes without advertisment or demo versions.

(Driving reckless would be a marketing budget. As I said, the analogy is not good. ;-) )

Also, this is only my opinion. Maybe look at top-sellers on itch, if you see any patterns. My first impression was, that the current top sellers went viral on youtube.

For your game, it might be as simple as people not wanting to buy it in early access. You have more ratings than some games that are here and on steam and are moderatly successfull on steam. Or maybe the people that previously followed you, were looking for other things or are more interested in free games.

tl;dr reducing a hurdle does not mean that people will run the track to begin with

https://itch.io/docs/legal/terms#9-refunds

If you are really unhappy with a purchase, you might wanna try anyways, but this is not a try-before-buy feature, as some people use it for on steam.

Many projects here are pay what you want.

And what they do not tell you, you cannot increase the payment value after you bought something. It is a bug/design flaw. You will just by it a second time. Some pages have content that says, you get it if you pay 10 $ for example. So if you donated 5 $ before, you cannot just donate 5 $ again.

So best try the free stuff on a page, and then decide how much you want to pay or overpay or tip.

Of course some projects are plain old paid projects and have no demo version. So maybe look twice, before going through the hassle of a refund.

A demo is not a guarantee for having commercially success.

But having no demo on itch, and only a paid game is almost a guarantee for having no commercial success.

At least this is my opinion on the matter.

You would need to be an established creator of games that people would buy from you without trying before. And even there, I have had bad experiences with buying sequels and such.

 Maybe some very good game play videos or other forms of marketing.

I imagine two scenarios:

1. Someone finding your project by marketing. Word of mouth. Have previously played your games. Youtube. Seeing someone play it. Whatever. The point is, the user knows what to expect. And might be inclined to buy, before even visting the page.

2. Someone finds the project by chance. No knowledge. A paywall is a hurdle. A demo version lowers that hurdle. A web playable version or demo version lowers it even more.

"Search for games or creators" should read: "Search for projects and creators and suggested tags". Some of the hints here are not very helpful, if taken at face value.

Just copy a longer asset name and search for it in search box and then search again but leave out some of the title, to see what is happening. Also look at your search url.

On the other side of the issue, the names of assets are often not names, but descriptive. "Baba Is You" is a project name. "rpg pixelart cave tileset [16x16]" is a description and a title, but I would not call it a name.

Second page?