Hi
it seems to me that for board games, being able to sort by language is important. I can play games in English, but reading rules is too difficult...
I wish I knew more about physical gaming as a whole, but I can put in my two cents and say that having a cooperative tag is important to me, as a person. I enjoy Sentinels of the Multiverse, Pandemic: The Cure, and other co-op games myself, and being able to find games like that is far more up my alley.
Something I pointed out on Twitter and elsewhere in the last few days: A lot of creators don't have much or any experience with setting prices for a product, and would greatly benefit from some guidance there when putting their product up for sale. When you see that empty price box and you have to decide what you're going to charge for your game that you worked hard on, it can cause a lot of anxiety for people who maybe have never had to think about their game as being more than a labor of love, and that's hard to put a price on--but there are prices that customers are expecting to see for certain products, and creators should have the benefit of that insight.
Something to the tune of a Recommended Price selector with a few choices, as well as the option to set your own different price, might be helpful. Here's the break-down that I presented on Twitter and elsewhere:
Give the creators the option to set their own price (like they do now), but start with those four options as a way to give them a consistent starting point. (If a creator wants to set an alternative Minimum Price that is below their selected Recommended Price, continue to let them do that as well. Creators seem to have a better intuition about setting their minimum prices.)
I just transitioned all of my titles over here, and I love everything I've seen so far. The comments above are excellent, and I want to see them implemented.
One thing that stands out to me is the formatting and aspect ratios of the cover images. TTRPG covers are usually 6x9" or 8.5x11". That means to get my stuff here on itch.io, I had to go and reformat 12 cover images (which sometimes produces really unflattering results) to have a page image for every game. I was able to upload the full cover as a "screenshot," sure, but being able to display the full cover on my main page would be even better.
We had a similar issue with comics and we ended up coming with something that would scale your image to fit the cover while preserving the aspect ratio, and adding a blurred background behind it. You can see some examples here: https://itch.io/comics
If you think that's a good solution I can enable it for the physical games section.
An advantage that itch.io would have over some of the other online stores that offer online selling of pdf supplement game content is that itch has an awesome client that you can install and it makes it easy to keep your downloads up to date. This could actually be a really cool thing for pdf supplement material because if a creator made updates or added content BOOM the owners of the product that have the itch client can see there is an update and download without any hassle.
Hey, so I was trying to set up a page for an RPG supplement earlier this week and one thing that stood out is that there's no (obvious?) way for me to do revenue sharing.
Aside from my tabletop development work I also write technical stuff and publish through Leanpub - one of the best features available there is the ability to add contributors to my books/projects and share revenue directly with those folks. Below is an example of the sort of UI I mean.
For a lot of us collaborating on projects it'd be super helpful to be able to do a transparent revenue split at the project level - this way we could say allocate 40% to the artist, 20% to the person who did layout, etc.
Another feature LeanPub has which I would love to see Itch adopt is the ability to earmark a percentage of royalties for non-profits. I am a contributing author/editor to a book series the royalties of which go straight to the non-profit instead of the authors - I would love to have a way to do this here for TTRPG projects.
Otherwise, pretty much echo everything else said in this thread and thanks for making an incredible platform!
Yeah, I gotta fully get behind this as my highest priority. I realize that doesn't mean a lot since I haven't published yet, but that's exactly why I haven't: if I can split royalties with my cousin (who I collaborate on pretty much every project with), that would be a huge hurdle. Running the finances otherwise is a pain.
There's a dedicated thread for revenue splitting you may want to chime in on then! I think if we can get some more of the attention as seen here, it might help them see it as something we need tackled.
https://itch.io/t/391522/split-revenue
One thing I'd really appreciate is better ways of filtering/searching game jams to find ones that are explicitly open to physical games/tabletop RPGs/LARPs.
First-class support for specifying a range for "number of players" and "length of game", and searching for such things, would be great.
Being able to easily sell physical books or physical versions of other materials and ship them myself would also be great and allow a lot of flexibility for things like board games.
New member here, just landing because the movement about ttrpg here.
First thing I saw seems pretty covered: "physical games" seems counter-intuitive if we talk about digital downloads (pdf/epub), maybe it's a term broadly used in the computer games subworld? If I see "physical games" I expect to find books (physical) and boardgames that are delivered in a box. Probably TTRPG (+ others) feels more intuitive, even if LARP product are somehow tangencial tthe category (are there LARP products people can buy?).
I'd go with some "TTRPG+" and once you click, some text explains you what to expect there.
Another thing I didn't see covered: Languages. Being non-English-native (Spanish/Catalan as main languages), it feels important to have some language filter alongside the "Genre" or whatever other filters are added. Although it's probable that English remains the unique language for years :S
On a customer level though, are most going to know what analog means? I'm mid 30's now, so it's a no brainer for me. But that's not necessarily a term that's thrown around in regular chat anymore. I'd worry that we're losing some of the customer base by calling it something people won't know and therefore won't click on. I think physical games would be ok if it was fleshed out and it had more of a prominent role on the front page with the rest of the digital content.
yep, that was my thought process to push for TTRPG (the tabletop part identifies as "something you play at the table" ), maybe "Tabletop + LARP" or use the "+" to identify as "there is more stuff related but we didn't knew how to categorize it".
It seems that there is no a super-easy answer (in certain light, this is good, this is a very diverse hobby even in outputs produced)
High level filters for physical games
Here's a list I made by going through the list at https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgamecategory and distilling it down to 5.
Everything fits into:
Strategy
Dexterity
Trivia
PuzzleCard/dice game
Luck
That would be something pretty dependent on play style which is unique from table to table. As far common language game terms are defined 'strategy' has a pretty clear meaning at the table and in computer games. Likewise, I can see some utility in calling D&D a dice game, but it is nothing like another dice game I love which is cee-lo.
I know this is not the right place to ask this questions but I'm unable to to find the correct way of contacting the creator. I have having difficulties getting a tile set to align properly and no videos of the content have solved the issue. If you are seeing this and are able to help please contact me s.vonrader@gmail.com
I think the others above have pretty much covered it, so I'll just add a few extra points:
Hope that's helpful.
Came up in another topic - would there be a way to be able to categorize game jams so you could tell at a glance is it's for physical/analog games, video/digital games, or open to both? I think game jams are going to be a pretty active place for analog designers, considering how the past month and a half has gone, and being able to tell which jams are open to us will likely be super relevant, for everyone using the site.
This would be very handy to have. For some jams, it's clear from their descriptions which kinds of games they accept, but it's not all--and you may have to dig through the description to find it. As someone who makes both video games and tabletop games, I'd find an easy way to split them incredibly helpful.
I mean, the games we have up on here are also books; RPG books. They're both "physical games" and "books", if you define them by their form. If you use the stricter definition offered for the book category on itch, e.g., "tells a story" it's a bit muddier.
At this point I've also got, like, dozens and dozens of entries, so it'd be some work to go through and recategorize them all...