itch.io

I see the "Please purchase on Steam" message on your game, directing potential buyers to the game on Steam. I also searched by name on Itch, "Another Realm" is not found. Then I search on Steam, and "Another Realm" pops up immediately, as the top result. I see you published it on Itch on Jan 27, 2021, and then on Steam on Sep 27, 2024. And looking at everything, the game looks really nice. Knowing how Steam has a very specific way of submitting games (lots of dropdowns, check boxes, etc, and indicators reminding people to fill everything out completely), I don't see why your game isn't even indexed on Itch. Let alone in payout limbo.

I see no reason to believe there is anything wrong with your game or anything. If there is ever a resolution to your situation, I think a lot of people would love to hear what, if anything, Itch's explanation was.

Also, I looked up Itch's alleged investors (using a 3rd party tracker), but when I go to those companies websites, they don't mention any investments in itch. I couldn't find anything by search either. Does Itch have investors at all? Although I don't see why tech companies need investors at all, once they get going for some years, it seems like all the tech companies perpetually have institutional investors, and I couldn't verify any for Itch.

I'm sorry for the situation you have to deal with. This site is so rigged it's a wonder if this site is some kind of social science experiment.

There are other online market places that connect to services like Stripe, for example, and it's Stripe that handles the tax specifics. Not the online market, nor some contractor of the online market. And the tax specifics are so not a big deal, that you can go for a long time on Stripe without giving them your tax info, they continue to pay you out anyway, and then it only could become an issue when you want their site to spit out a tax form when the year rolls over. Maybe, you get the wrong tax form if you didn't fill out your info in time, and then you contact support at that point. 

Of course, no one has to contact support via a public forum, as that just reeks of stuff like whisper lists, "user account info" actually existing in places it shouldn't like emails and post-its like that crypto company that went under, etc.

So, how about this. Every time someone posts a game on Itch, the Itch CEOs must verify their tax info  to each submitter individually, and pass a secretive and obviously subjective smell test as to the quality of their submission. As well as publicly disclose how much cash they collected that they decided after the fact was not worthy of payouts to the creators, for how long they kept it with an interest accrual payable tot he creator at the time of payout if it ever happens.

I wonder who the moderators here are allowed to forward your thread to if you had posted your support ticket id? The same people ignoring your support ticket in the first place? I can't see a reason to include the ticket if that's the case, honestly. 

Hi, I'm curious if Itch can release a statistic on the percentage of games over whatever time frame Itch is comfortable disclosing that have had their info completely and correctly [2] filled out by the submitter, and which are also indefinitely [1] "queued for human review". Also, is there a queue after that where games are nearly guaranteed to sit without indexing indefinitely [1] ?

Also, do Itch systems ding games that were not made with an engine? If a game is a web game, and is nothing but self made web assembly (via usually Rust or C++, sometimes Assembly Script, but I can't imagine anyone using it because it has zero dom/web apis) and js, does the algo say "eeewwwwww grooosss, that's unprofitable, it shall not be searchable"?

TLDR stuff which everyone should ignore probably:

[1]: For over a week, or however you want to define indefinitely such that a reasonable person would say "that definition of indefinitely makes sense", so, for games that are still not searchable after a month from submission, which have all their info filled out and pics submitted completely and correctly.

[2]: We all know that other online market makers, like Google (though, Google may be a bad comparison to Itch, because Google thinks they own the very logistics of human survival, considering some of their ancillary activities, historically, and recently. So I imagine most people will grant Itch quite a bit more leniency than Google), use this term completely subjectively, with little discernable pattern (unless you capture the "ephemeral" data in your browser, and compare it to others who are doing the same). So other than "that game has nsfw and was not marked as such", there isn't much likelihood of "incorrectly" being a real factor here.

Thanks!

This game looks and plays great!

I liked it! The game play is tight, and the style is very nice. On the options panel, the only way the volume slider would work was if I dragged it just barely below the slider. Dragging on the slider, or clicking on the rectangular bar did nothing. Tested in Firefox and Chromium based browsers.

This is great, the hand on the mouse moving in unison is nice and creepy :)

The style and gameplay are really creative!