itch.io

i see now, yes! i'll do my best to drum up some extra support for sure.

hi team boke, thank you! do you mean the video trailer? our kind participant xiri has made these in the past, and i can ask if he will again. any other video editors in the group are also welcome to put together trailers if they want!

thank you!! i really appreciate it. i made this <24 hour buffer time before, you know. so i'm very grateful for the attention today.

thank you so much!

hi support moderator! QGB plans to launch tomorrow, so in about 16 hours, and i need a few stragglers removed, hopefully something that should just take a minute for someone. i'm sorry to add to a pile right now, this is just the bad timing we've ended up with and i know everyone is doing their best. just triangulating to get someone's attention if i can. our ticket is #287080. thank you!!

Hi manadream, if you see this, please check your email urgently! Thanks very much.

oh i'm so glad!! good.

wait, but you definitely are! i just took this screenshot now. i will email you with the URLs now. we'll get it figured out.

hi, thank you for posting this, you made me aware of an admin issue that affected just a few people! ashley's instructions are good but let us know if they aren't enough.

Please check your email for links to the two approved bundle pages and info about that process. I forgot one important thing, and will add any other important questions people are asking to this same post.

Before the bundle goes live on July 30, double and triple check your "percentage to itchio" share. I believe the default is 10%, but you can change it to any number you want. It's good to support itchio if you can afford to, but you do not need to afford to. Just choose the number before any purchases occur to avoid problems or surprises later on.

Q: The bundle links are 404s for me.
A: Please make sure you're logged into the same itchio account where your projects are, then try again.

If you don't approve both bundle pages, you will be removed.

Update on this, no word on this simpler request since then, sorry for being Charlie Brown with Lucy and the football, but I'm asking itchio about this again after 11 days.

I've learned that our request was obstructed behind the scenes again by some factor. Just to be clear, I asked repeatedly if someone could just let me know if that was the case, and they didn't.

As we did last year, I'm falling back to plan B, which is a flattened bundle with just "revenue" or "no revenue" options. Because I don't know the nature of the holdup, I also said that it was okay to flatten us further if needed. That would mean everyone gets an identical split. I hope that isn't the case, but want to be prepared and also let you know. You don't need to do anything about this possibility right now.

Everyone will have seven full days to approve the updated bundle pages after they're built. I don't know yet when that will be, I just sent the new request a few minutes ago. As in the past, we'll send out links to approve those pages. If you're going out of town or anything, please think about how you can get those emails and access your itchio dashboard and plan ahead.

Just kidding, there is news, I'm going to start a new thread with that.

June 26, no news.

And frankly, if you're an outsider who's downvoting anyone's posts in this forum, please know you are hurting people.

I will continue to ask people with no inside knowledge at all to stay out of it.

People continuing to downvote these posts, please feel free to withdraw from the bundle. It's clear that what we do is not working for you.

June 25, no news. Yesterday itchio admin on discord said "really sorry for the wait." They have approved and populated other large bundles during this time.

Sharing the above paragraph from itchio's page on building co-op bundles using their newly required "game jam page" format. We are within these guidelines. 

Our leadership and helpers have hundreds or thousands of hours of work on this same project over several years. Your role as a participant and mine as a leader are asymmetrical, and the leaders face judgment calls and decisions that are not easy to make. I also don't feel "professionalism" is something to demand from a project serving queer survival. I work on this project almost around the clock beginning in March, it's the last thing I check before bed and the first thing I check when I wake up, and I'm not your employee.

(Just after) June 24, no news

June 23, no news

ok

continued documentation for posterity. i emailed support on may 28, june 4, june 11, june 19. i messaged leaf on twitter on june 4. i messaged leaf on discord on june 15.

great, thank you!

for posterity, here is a new thread i created in the itchio support forum. the rules say explicitly not to create a thread about an individual support request. please do not create a new thread of your own, but upvote this post if you can. i can only say it's very difficult to decide what to try or not because, as people are seeing now, our reliance on itchio is very fragile.

text reads: "hi, we've been waiting for admin support for QGB, as in the past four years, since may 28 with no response at all. please, i'm just looking for someone from admin to respond to any of my messages or posts. our ticket is #280521. 

sorry, but itchio's lack of accurate time information anywhere, including on the cooperative bundle instruction page, means i have no choice but to post in violation of the rules in here and in the discord by asking about the timeline of my specific request. support hast not replied at all in over three weeks. that is way beyond the "typically 1-3 days" listed here.

last year, we were bottlenecked because leaf was away and we weren't asking exactly the right way to get the help we needed from someone else. i've asked repeatedly if someone can just let me know if that is the case again. what we're asking is completely in line with the listed instructions and requirements on itchio's bundle instruction page.

thank you, please, if anyone replies to this. we just want information based on the past four years of support and the public materials on this website."

for posterity, a message i posted in the itchio discord in the bundles channel -- to be clear their rules directly state not to post about specific support. do not make more posts in there, but if you want, please add a reaction emoji or something.

text reads, "hi @admin i've been trying to get support for queer games bundle since may 28 -- my support ticket is #280521. will caution others building bundles right now that we haven't been able to reach anyone at support in this time."

hi, we've been waiting for admin support for QGB, as in the past four years, since may 28 with no response at all. please, i'm just looking for someone from admin to respond to any of my messages or posts. our ticket is #280521. 

sorry, but itchio's lack of accurate time information anywhere, including on the cooperative bundle instruction page, means i have no choice but to post in violation of the rules in here and in the discord by asking about the timeline of my specific request. support hast not replied at all in over three weeks. that is way beyond the "typically 1-3 days" listed here.

last year, we were bottlenecked because leaf was away and we weren't asking exactly the right way to get the help we needed from someone else. i've asked repeatedly if someone can just let me know if that is the case again. what we're asking is completely in line with the listed instructions and requirements on itchio's bundle instruction page.

thank you, please, if anyone replies to this. we just want information based on the past four years of support and the public materials on this website.

ftr i love all of our projects but we have some VITAL sequels this year for my own specific taste, Copper Odyssey 2, HITM3, Cow Online World, etc. anytime we get to host a sequel to something that appeared in the bundle before, that is really really gratifying -- love everyone's continuing work. this goes for all of you who are making new games too. manabrent's Final Profit spinoff just missed the window this time and i look forward to that next time too.

I want to clarify again that by the time you asked, the application period had been over for weeks. You're asking for personalized investigation that a small team of volunteers reviewing hundreds of applications just cannot do. And once applications are closed, if we reopened them for someone, it would be unfair not to open them again for others. That, in turn, takes away from people who did the right thing in the first place. This is a large project involving a lot of people in great need -- the rules matter a lot and no one takes them lightly.

I want to note that the instructions never said to make two applications, and I added this language specifically to avoid what happened to you last year, Merilynn, when the URL you submitted did not match the project page. I felt terrible about that and wanted to make it right. But it was your choice to submit twice this year and to choose a payment level for both applications. That's the issue. If you weren't sure, there are multiple places to ask those questions before and during the application window.

I'm also thinking about sharing some individual projects as a way to celebrate pride and keep the trail of breadcrumbs going -- maybe 1-2 a day across our social media, picked from our planned final bundle. If it sounds like a good idea to you, could you upvote this post? Any concerns about this idea, please feel free to reply and share. If it won't serve our community well, we don't have to do it at all.

ok! just don't want anyone to think itchio has been anything other than extremely good to us at almost every opportunity, and for almost nothing in return, by design.

Hi, some FAQs about the delay, and an update

1. Have you emailed itchio?
Yes, weekly, have tried other ways too

2. Can't we just make the bundle ourselves?
In theory, we can, but we still need itchio's help in almost any scenario because of the size of the bundle, so this is not a good option for us

3. Should we all email/post to itchio?
Please, please, DO NOT do that. If itchio staff isn't responding, it's almost definitely because they're overwhelmed with work. It is a very small team. Adding more messages of any kind won't help. The social media probably isn't administered by the same person anyway, seriously please don't do anything like this to them

On our end, I've escalated by sending a message a different way to try to reach someone. 

4. What will happen when the bundle is processed? I'm afraid to miss an email.
This will work the same as in the past, so you'll need to approve our two bundle pages (regular price & PWYW price) from your itchio account. I don't know what the timeline will be, but will promise now that you'll have a full week to approve after we send out those links. 

hi, please absolutely do not email itchio about this. please, NO ONE do that. itchio has done a huge amount of virtually free labor for us and many other groups like us that have no other similar home.

i want to clarify that itchio also isn't "a business" in the sense described. they aren't greedy at all, that's a mischaracterization of the founder and the mission. a few years ago some high profile, high income adult game makers spread rumors about this because itchio couldn't afford to hold their large amounts of money for free anymore.

You don't seem to belong to our group -- I would appreciate if you stopped speculating please. Our bundle is moderated, which means a number of projects are removed for many reasons.

I resolved our questions for Ali and Homebrew over email. Merilynn, you submitted twice for two payments, so your submissions were removed.

I'm going to stop answering questions like this in this thread, but again, we need itchio in order to get any bundle online -- everyone does -- and our bundle is not charity.

yes, we're aware of that and that's what we ended up doing last year. we've chosen not to do that this time. we still need itchio support at multiple points in that process, so if they aren't replying, it's not a better option for us.