With Rewards you can provide limited quantity access to your project if they purchase your project at a specific price point, or if they claim before the quantity runs out. Adding a reward to your project is a great way to give exclusive perks to your early buyers. It’s part of itch.io’s refinery toolset.

itch.io does not guarantee the fulfillment of rewards, it is the seller’s responsibility to coordinate with the buyer to deliver the reward when necessary. If the reward can not be fulfilled itch.io will processes a refund at the buyer’s request.

How you can use rewards

Giving limited quantity perks

A limited quantity perk is anything you might want to provide that has a limited amount.

For example, you might give buyers the opportunity to have a character in your game named after them, but you only have a dozen slots. You can create a reward and set the quantity to how many slots you have. Once the reward is sold out it can not be purchased anymore. You're free to adjust the quantity remaining if you discover you can support more.

The reward editor lets you specify a custom field to collect from the buyer, you can use this to collect the name the buyer wants to use.

Selling physical goods

Another use cause for rewards is selling physical goods along with your digital content. In this example you might create a reward above your minimum price that comes with t-shirt. As more shirts become available you can boost the quantity. You can specify on the reward that you'd like to collect a shipping address, and provide a custom field to get the size of the shirt.

Limiting the total number of copies you sell

It’s possible to make a reward a requirement for purchasing your project. With this you can restrict how many people buy your game in total. This makes for a great way to slowly roll our your game for testing when using our refinery toolset.

Providing “early-bird” discounts

You can set a reward price lower than your project’s price. Combined with a limited quantity on the reward, you can give your first visitors a discount on your project as a way to say thanks. Rewards come with any files and external keys that would be included in a regular purchase.

Giving away a limited number free copies or perks

It’s also possible to set the reward price to 0. Anyone with an itch.io account will be able to claim the reward while there’s quantity available. Because claiming a reward also grants access to all the project files, they'll be owners after they grab the reward.

Setting up your rewards

Once you've enabled payments on your account, any project you control can have rewards. On the project’s edit page, in the top navigation, find the Exclusive content menu item.

On this page you can customize all of your rewards, along with any configuration options. The two configuration options are:

• Custom noun — If you don’t like the name exclusive content you can give your reward program a custom name. You're free to call it whatever you want, just make sure you use a name that’s clear to someone viewing your page, otherwise there might be some confusion.
• New purchases & downloads require a reward — Someone must choose a reward when buying or claiming your project. This will make it so that the total number of copies of your project that can be bought is limited. If you'd ever like to remove the limit, you can disable this option at any time.

Describing your reward

Every reward requires a few fields before you can save it. All of these will show up on the reward listing of your project page.

• Name — What should itch.io call the reward?
• Description — What does the reward include?
• Quantity — How many, in total, are there available?
• Minimum price — What’s the minimum purchase price to get the reward?

Collecting information with custom fields

If you need to collect additional information from the buyer you can add a custom field. There are currently two types: a shipping address and a free form piece of text. You can name each field to make it clear what’s required.

Once someone buys a reward they'll be prompted to fill out the fields on their purchase download page.

We currently don’t support adding an additional shipping fee to a purchase. We recommend you incorporate the shipping costs into the price of the reward in the meantime.

Fulfilling rewards

Once you've sold some rewards you'll need to fulfill them. This means delivering the reward to the person who bought it. From the Rewards panel in your dashboard you can see a list of all the unfulfilled rewards. From here you can also see any custom field responses the buyer provided.

Once you've done what you need to do you can check the reward off as fulfilled to dismiss it.

Archiving rewards

If you decide to remove a reward that no one has bought then you can just click the delete button to get rid of it. Rewards that have been bought are a different story: they must remain in our database so we can track fulfillment. Instead of deleting the reward you'll archive it.

An archived reward is no longer purchasable, and it won’t show up on your project’s page. It will only appear in the Rewards panel in your dashboard so you can track fulfillment.

Running a limited release with rewards

You can soft-launch your project to a limited number of people by creating a reward (or set of rewards) with a limited quantity and selecting the New purchases & downloads require a reward option on the rewards edit page.

This option will force any new downloaders or buyers to claim a reward before they can access the project’s files. Each time someone claims a reward the quantity will decrease, when the quantity hits 0 no new people will be able to access your project’s files.

If you'd like to open up your project to everyone then you can unselect the option.