[Edit: I don’t want to hide my mistakes, but I also don’t want to bore the reader. Basically: I misunderstood/misread the optional part of Auburn Sounds’ suggestion. Please feel free to skip ahead. Otherwise: Enjoy my dogs and cats speech. ;) ]
I get where you’re coming from. When I ask my crystal ball about this idea it tells me that 4 things would happen if itch did this:
- Both developers and customers (on the behalf of developers) would complain. A lot. Because that’s not the “industry standard”.
- Most developers would just raise their prices accordingly claiming/pointing out that this is not their fault, leading to itch.io-users complaining about the change to itch.io’s support.
- Articles would inevitably be written about this change, leading to random people that hadn’t even heard about itch before, registering accounts here - just to complain and put as many users off of itch as they could.
- Sooner or later, the cuts into the server budget due to the resulting losses would lead to itch closing its doors forever, forcing clueless and shattered independent developers to join Steam by the thousands and host their games there for 100 localized $ - per game.
The last point is rather speculative of course, but besides staff salaries and other costs itch has monthly hosting costs of according to the rumor mill 35,k and up - no matter how many games are actually sold. That’s a lot of money for a site that gives developers the option to determine their own cut and allow downloads for donations that might never happen. I love them for it, but their way of doing business puts a lot of trust into people on the internet being generous and supportive - the same people that are clogging support right now. On top of that a loooot of people just bought the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality (the money from which went to charity) so 814,526 users own a ton of games now, giving them less incentive to buy new ones for their library.
Again: I get where you’re coming from. But I think billing devs for having poorly educated (or poorly behaved) customers is the wrong approach to the issue. … “They should bill the customers instead!” ;D