I personally don't agree with paying money for a game that you can only play online in the browser unless there's a very good reason to make you do it. If it's, say, an MMO or something like Kind Words that depends on user generated content to do what it does, I think it makes sense. But usually, the expectation that I have as a player when I buy a game from here is that I get a copy to format shift as I please and store for as long as I like. So if there's a way to do this that disrupts this as little as possible for me personally, I think I could get behind it.
In short, I tend to think of and prefer Itch as a "DRM-free" store, and allowing developers to sell browser games without a download link might get rid of that quality for me.
I think a good compromise that would make the DRM-free camp happy could be bringing the desktop client's browser game download functionality over to the web client for paid games.
Viewing post in Selling web games
Introducing some kind of DRM is not my intention or why I want this, I wouldn’t consider itch.io as a release platform at all otherwise. It is actually the opposite, I think that web games are beneficial for both, players, and developers. Here is a copy/paste from a discussion on Discord that explains my reasoning behind this suggestion a bit better.
Hey thanks for the info, I actually didn’t know about Neutralino.js yet, but I do know how to use wrappers to create downloadable versions of my web games, that is not my problem. The problem is that I don’t want to do that because it gets rid of the many advantages of web based games.
Let me give you an example. I made a small web based fan game, I made sure that the game can be controlled via touch and mouse. Everyone was able to play the game directly in the browser, no matter the device or OS, no matter if mobile or desktop. You could probably even play it on some consoles if they have a browser with support for certain features. (*speculation, I did not test this)
Now it’s a small game and I’m not planning to sell it, but I do want to sell my upcoming web game and right now I can’t do that on itch the way I want to.
The only thing I can do right now is, provide a web based demo version that people can play in the browser right away and create a downloadable full version that people can pay for.
The problem is that now I provide an inferior version of the game to the people who paid for it. How do I explain a customer that they can play the demo version on all their devices but not the version they paid money for? AFAIK there is no way for me to include a version they can install on their iPhone for example, Android might be possible but is also far from optimal, all I can do is provide an .apk file which they have to sideload.
So it is a worse product for the customer, and it is more work for me as a developer since I have to now deploy, test, and update all the platform specific downloadable files, not to mention that the customer now has to download, install and update the game manually, in the worst case on multiple devices.
And that is why I want to sell web games directly instead of downloadable files.
And I really don’t understand why this isn’t a thing already. All it needs is that users get shown a different embedded web game dependent on if they bought the game already or not.
I personally would be completely fine if, in addition, I also have to provide a downloadable file to “unlock” the ability to provide a paid full browser version. This would makes the whole thing a lot more confusing in the backend for developers though, and it would probably feel heavy handed and intrusive to take away some autonomy from a developer on how they can sell their game.