Post by TAZELEE in Why is itch.io not providing pay-to-play (P2P) services?

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Thanks for your reply.

In re games being designed to stretch out play time instead of fun and interesting time, I think players would pick up on this pretty quickly and simply stop playing those games. That is, players would have more control of the market because they would ultimately seek out and play games known to provide a good ROI, and those games that are the most fun & engaging for the longest periods of time would also be the most profitable games. More of a meritocracy for both players and devs.

In re Itch-team wanting to focus on current platform and not take on challenges of host cloud-based P2P services and DevOps. Yeah, I get that. I just found Itch yesterday and I was pretty amazed with the platform and business model. I couldn't help but see the potential for Itch to provide their monetization model to P2P services. I think it would be an ROI-driven win for all (except for games that aren't engaging to play).

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leafoAdmin5 years ago(+3)

In re games being designed to stretch out play time instead of fun and interesting time, I think players would pick up on this pretty quickly and simply stop playing those games.

This is not at all what will happen. Developers will gravitate making a certain kind of game to be designed to consume the player’s time with just enough engagement to keep them invested. It would cause other genres or styles of games to be pushed out, since they would not be able to be monetized in that way. Payment models like this are bad for a healthy ecosystem of game development. Only certain kinds of games can succeed. It would encourage development of games that are not respectful of players’ time as the developers attempt to optimize their revenue.

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TAZELEE5 years ago

Thanks for the reply. Greatly appreciated.

In re: trying to predict what would happen if players and developers were provided a P2P option, it is entirely guesswork and anecdotal without having actual P2P metrics and analytics. But I take your point, and agree that it would probably effect the statistics and ecosystem for both game design and genre.

In re: pushing some game designs and/or genres out and/or negatively effecting the itch echo system of game development, I disagree and believe that it would have the opposite effect and allow game devs to explore and leverage more options for generating revenue in the hopes of sustaining and growing their product. However, our disagreement on this issue may be more of a misunderstanding. I'm not suggesting that itch change/reduce/eliminate ANY of their current platform or business model. To the contrary. I'm suggesting they consider *expanding* their current model to support P2P, in a similar format and presentation that they are already using. For example, players could still be offered all of the same options for donating to or purchasing a game, with the added option for devs to protect their very valuable and hard-earned intellectual property (IP), simply by putting some basic game logic on cloud-based servers and then allowing players to set a price on how much play time is worth per hour. Such a P2P *option* (NOT a requirement, but an option) only adds to the itch ecosystem and business model for sustainability and growth. Allowing players to freely download, redistribute and basically give away the hard work of devs, without consideration or compensation for the devs, is fantastic for the players, but very not-fantastic for devs to sustain themselves. Having wrote that, I think itch provides, by far, the best alternative to the industry standard ~30% tax and big brother control. I think itch is awesome. I'd like it to expand with a P2P option, without changing and/or removing what's already successful.

I'm very new it itch and I've just been reading up on its origins and evolution. To itch's credit (or rather the devs :), when I first came to the site I thought there must be a team of no less than 20 serious and full time engineers. I don't know if this is the case, but from the readings I gathered that I considerably over-estimated the size of itch's engineering staff. In which case, throwing out an idea for cloud-based P2P services is probably more annoying than useful (I'm imagining Jira with never ending backlogs).

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TAZELEE5 years ago

I forgot to mention. It would also provide a potential new revenue stream for itch, in the way of developer services, and without imposing DRM.

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TAZELEE5 years ago

Um, wait, leafo... Sorry for not putting that together earlier. Wow, fantastic. Again, thank you very much for your time. Never would've imagined I would be able to have a discussion with the founder and creator. In the interest of your time, I'll be brief(er)

1. Great idea, model, implementation. Wow.

2. Thank you very much for this site.

3. OK, if you think it will negatively effect the site to be something you don't want it to be, got it, I'm certain that you know what's best. Again, didn't realize this was the founder and creator.

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