Hello.
Thank you. This is very instructive.
I never had any intention to scam anyone.
I set the project in paid mode as you suggested.
If I understand correctly, now, anyone who has ever bought a "file" can have access to the game?
Anyone that ever gave any money at all will be considered an owner and has access to all the regular project files of a paid project.
So should you consider including a Steam key and have a lot of $ 1 supporters, you should bear that in mind.
I often use the general meaning of you. I did not want to imply that you are trying to pull a scam off. I did not follow your communication and devlogs. It could have been, that you meant to have a support version akin to being subscribed on Subscribestar. Being a subscriber also does not guarantee the retail version, unless promised so in the tiers.
If you intended to sell the early access version all the time, changing the project to paid, is achieving what you want. With the side effect that people that gave you less than the file price now also have access.
If you wanted to collect support and now release a retail version, I think creating a second page that is paid and freezing this page with the last development/testing version might achieve this. Third Crisis did something like that. Though I do not remember if they collected support money on their free version.
This file price feature is so bad. Honestly. I do not understand why they have it. First time I read that, I thought that files could be sold individually, like it says on the tin. And a lot of people also do not grasp it. They ask in comments, if they have to pay again for a new version. Extensive study of the faq and community discussions sheds a bit of light on it, but it still is a bad feature. It is more of a one time tier payment. But without subscription. And no possibility to increase, short of paying again.
Some use it, to appear in the free section of games, but still sell for minimum price.
The better (cleaner and flexible) solution to do this is, to have two projects. One free with a public version. The other paid with the premium version. This also has the benefit of appearing in free and in paid, as some people might search for paid games specifically.
If one never intends to change price, that tier pricing might work, but as I said, someone doing so would effectively scam previous customers when raising price of that file. The faq used the nicer wording of "lock out" ;-)
This means that if you change the individually priced file to be more expensive, you may lock out access to that purchase tier from existing buyers. We strongly recommend considering how you intend to price your project in the future before using an individually priced file. Use individually priced files for quick bonus content, not to set the price of your content. Use the minimum price on your project to set the price of your product, as this will allow you to change the price at a later time without affecting ownership.
I'll be honest, I don't remember seeing anything about this in the faq. That being said, it's been a long time since I looked into it and I most likely wasn't attentive enough.
I didn't even know the site separated paid and free games.
I'm ashamed to admit that I'm gonna have to look into all that more closely... 5 years after creating my account...
I am only on Itch for about two years, I could not tell how it was back then. They changed some things. I read that they once had press accounts to give away test games and removed it at some point - but did not remove the buttons for it. Stuff like that. Maybe priced files once was recommended for pay what you want games. Nice to see a game come to release. Many games I saw are abandoned.