itch.io

I’ve never heard of a distribution platform that dictates the terms of your refund policy on other stores. That’d be between the developer and that other platform though.

Steam does this, Google’s Play Store does this, as far as I know Apple’s App store does this. From what you’ve experienced Itch does it as well. I’m not sure why you haven’t heard about it. The marketplaces you are using lose money with refunds, just like you do, it just doesn’t make sense for them to not get involved.

You’re coming across as pretty condescending here. I’m not sure where you got this thing about giving people refunds “to be nice”.

I didn’t mean to sound condescending. Less than a year ago I started selling my first paid game, and had a similar attitude, where I wouldn’t mind to give free copies to people if they asked, or give refunds to everyone. But once you upload your project in a marketplace and read the rules, you can get in trouble if you do that.

Or why you seem to think I’m new at this.

Whenever I type comments, I always write them in a way to be approachable by a new person. Sure you might have experience and knowledge of how the system works, but a future reader might not.

I have two products on Itch, both of which have technical restrictions that mean they only work in certain countries. I do try pretty hard to make it clear on the store pages, but obviously sometimes people miss that, or they misunderstand what they’re buying.

That makes sense in this case, so you can keep checking with Itch for every refund request, and for the most part it will all go fine. One thing to keep in mind is, if one user buys your project, downloads it, and then gets a refund, during that process Itch lost money. One user doing that is fine, when thousands are doing it, you may have to rethink of how you distribute your project.

In either case I highly doubt that I’m going to somehow get Itch.io or myself into legal trouble by giving them a refund.

In your case sure it won’t happen, but if a feature like that was implemented, it would be available for everyone, so someone who has no experience selling games could end up with legal trouble.

But point taken, not a feature you want. It’s not something I thought would be controversial haha.

As I said in my previous comment, wanting a button that automates the support ticket refund process is fine, because it still has to go through Itch. If you want to handle refunds yourself, the only option is to self-host your projects and sell them yourself.