Post by Green Frisbee Games in Users who stupidly download PC games on Android/iOS

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It's perfectly possible and even easy nowadays to detect which platform the browser is from. There's no point listing all the download options and it can even be quite embarassing, if like me you have different executables for 32 or 64 bits (leading to 5 different options for me). I have many users that download the wrong architecture, which is much more confusing for the average user.

So we could auto detect the platform and at least put the appropriate one bigger and in front. Is such a feature in progress from itch.io?

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Ofihombre5 years ago

First you say that listing all the options is a nonsense a embarassing and then you say you have users that use the wrong architecture to download? That is a double moral, if you have friends that wrongly download PC/Mac games on Android/iOS for example and it doesn't work, you should teach them in which devices with their respective platform works correctly for that software.

And yes, the analytics of itch.io in downloads should be updated and shown as in IndieDB / ModDB, because there are even people who look for a PC game without really knowing what is a "PC".

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Green Frisbee Games5 years ago

No, I'm just saying the best download option should be given to the user in function of their platform because it is possible to detect their platform. There's no reason trying to teach people, just make their life easier by giving them a single button that downloads the good thing automatically.

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Ofihombre5 years ago

There is no bad in putting a one-button option to download an all-in-one gaming folder for various platforms, it's affordable, but that isn't the way to detect in which platform the game has been downloaded, it's detected from the analytics (as I showed you in the previous comment), and the best way to avoid wrong downloads from the wrong operating systems, is are using Google Play model platforms for Android, App Store for iOS or Steam for PC.

P.D: I don't know what you mean with 5 different options.

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Green Frisbee Games5 years ago (1 edit)

No that's not what I'm saying. You can detect the platform of the user from the browser. From this https://www.npmjs.com/package/ng2-device-detector you can already tell if it's a desktop, mobile or tablet and it even tells you the OS version. There's no need to bundle all of the options in a big zip file. Many website makes you automatically download the good thing when you click download, based on your OS and architecture.

The 5 different options I was talking about are Windows 32 bit, Windows 64 bit, Mac, Linux 64 bit and Linux 32 bit. If you add the mobile targets then you get to 7. Makes much more sense to have the website detect your platform from javascript and propose you the valid download automatically. That's all I'm saying.

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Ofihombre5 years ago

Have told me before, You would have said from the beginning that there is a device detector instead of confusing me. but is it functional? do you use it in your itch.io profile?

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Green Frisbee Games5 years ago (3 edits)

It is perfectly functional for any regular website. However that's not something we can just add to our itch.io page. It's a feature the devs of itch.io could enable for everyone. Perhaps its possible to detect mobiles and tablets from media queries in CSS, but that would only rely on the size of the screen which is way less reliable than this library. Another hacky way would be to integrate an iframe in the itch.io page to replace the download options by something external, which would integrate this script.

No I haven't try yet on itch.io but I use it on my regular website to warn mobile users that my game is only for PC.

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