itch.io

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).