itch.io

Would you have asked this question for a game you bought on Steam? Because the answer to your question is basically the same. 

But since there is no real difference between a publisher/developer account and a user account on Itch, there is the asset section aimed at creators and there you will find things meant to be used in other projects. Those projects do include licenses or at least spell out what you can do or not do with the asset. Personal usage for games does not need a license, but using a thing in a project you want to distribute needs clear rules - mostly because it is not allowed per default. Not seeing a license does not mean anything goes!

The web games you see here are not assets. If you can buy them, you are not buying the web game. You are buying whatever download version of the game there is. If there are no downloads, a web game cannot be a paid game, it can only collect "donations".

It is release announcement. Not announcement of the beginning of development. Posting there to talk about a game that cannot be downloaded is a non sequitur.

Itch has no regional pricing.

You can put your finished Steam game here and give a Steam key with the purchase, if you like. Use the US price.

You can make a blog posting (a devlog). But if you do not direct people to it, there will not be much discussion there. You have no followers on that account, so no one will get informed about that blog posting. Except people looking at the global feed at that time or finding the post by internet search.

If you have a working prototype, set your project up as usual and disable payments. It is a prototype. That is even less than a demo version. If you get paid, and would upgrade that project, all customers would get the release version. If know what the early access price should be, you can set the price (and designate the old prototype as a demo version on the same page). You will get more feedback and comments on your game page than global itch community. Individual results may vary, but that is how I perceive it.  But you can try the feedback section as no time said. If you ask specific things, people might be more inclined to answer.

Edit. I might have misunderstood. But your mentioning of prototype was making me think you are working on your second game. If you are releasing your first game, just set the early access price the same as the US version of Steam and decide if you want to give a Steam key or not. The benefit of Itch versions usually is, that they are drm free, so not everyone is doing this. Otherwise all of the above also applies. If you set no price, no one can buy, but still download your demo versions and talk and rate and follow. Once you go to buyable early access, you can set the same price here and regularly sell, as per default all games on Itch are "early access", unless specified otherwise (the released and in development states of games are not to be trusted. Some people "release" their in development, and some released games do not switch from in development to released once they are done.)

Clarification: no price is not the same as pay what you want with 0 minimum price. Paying 1 $ gives ownership of the project for all future price changes of the minimum price.

I do not really know what counts as accessibilty features. How would a painter make an oil painting accessible to a blind person? Making a dexterity based game with hand eye coordination being "accessible" to someone impaired in those areas, how would that even work? It would be a new game. A text and dialoge centered game can have voice, but if the story happens in pictures, that's tough. I would say, making this "accessible" is not merely a feature, it is an adaption with editorial work. I know movies/tv shows that do have such an audio track with descriptions of the important visuals along with the dialoge.

Anyway, I like your list. Most of those should be in games for all people. It is quality of life features, not specialised accessibility features. But most of them can be used to make a game more accessible, if someone would prefer a setting not out of preference, but out of necessity. Like keybindings that require both hands. Or even simple things like wasd with index on f vs. wasd with index on d. All people want configuration choices for their input devices.

As said below, a lot of this could be done on engine level, so developers that use that engine do not need to implement it anew every time. Third party tools can only do so much, and while keybindings are trivial, a color blind mode is not.

https://itch.io/games/in-jam 352k

https://itch.io/games/exclude-jam 782k

I would not say that it is mostly devs doing jams here, what with twice the games not being in a jam.

With most games using some sort of engine, the accessibility features should be done at engine level. A single developer has neither the time nor the expertise to develop these things every time. Same as a dev would not implement a save mechanic for a renpy game. It comes with the engine. You do not want to have each developer coming up with their own clever way of saving.

Also, most devs will not have the capability to even test out their accessibility features. They cannot even test the game for different platforms. How does one test a color blind mode, if one is not colorblind?

Don't use the term AI if you mean old school AI. Calling them robots fully does the job. As it would have done 10 years ago. That robots have artificial whatever is implicit. They are robots. They are not remote controlled automatons.

Otherwise you confuse people, because they hear "AI" all day long with the meaning of generative large language models. Or maybe I am mistaken and you did incorporate some of the newly fangled AI into this.

The friendly robot is a gimmick. Having a voice giving input to the player, giving warnings, or tell jokes is seen regularly. Putting that voice into an avatar is not a bad idea. I suggest you enhance this with clever puzzle mechanics where you need the extra pair of hands, or other ways to utilize the robot beyond doing what a voice over a communication device or a narrator could do. 

I agree that some sort of money making might help the situation. $ 5 would be enough to discourage a lot of spam, scam and joke projects that keep up the time of staff as a side effect. Nothing against a good joke project, but if it provokes mails to support or takes time away from staff to get indexed or removed from index, that can pile up.

For the crosslinking of socials/release platform, unless prohibited or there are reasons, it should always be done. For marketing and search engine optimisation alone. Someone might stumble upon one of the socials but does not like that platform too much, but would prefere one of the other places.

But, no, there should not be a direct linkage for getting indexed, just because you link to Itch from Patreon. But having natural traffic from Patreon to Itch from people curious about your Itch page might speed up indexing, as it is said that projects with more natural external traffic might be prioritised. It can also calm down anyone concerned about you being a possible impostor. They might get some warning about an unsigned exe or even a false positive from their scanners. What to do in such a case? Ask the suspected impostor? ;-)

This seems unprofessional

It is.

But then again, did you pay 100 $ up front to publish here? Were you asked to show your real life ID to proof you are who you claim you are?

You have a patreon. What did they ask from you, before approving your account? And why do you not link from your patreon to your Itch? Anyone crosschecking if you are who you claim you are, will not find such a link. Maybe you are some scammer impersonating the real spicy pixels ;-)

Unfortunately, Itch's services get abused every day, so they do have automatics to look out for anything that might need human staff attention. And unfortunately, that staff seems understaffed and that automatic gives false positives. We do not see the correct positives.

That includes game disks that most people sell at yard sales

It does not. "resell" is not a clear wording, since it can mean two different things with software and licenses.

You cannot buy a software and sell copies of it. But you can sell your copy as an used item. And depending on your jurisdiction you also can sell your license, even if the license tells otherwise. There is a reason why big software companies want to call it software license and not treat it like a physical item. They sneak in things in those eula "contracts" to give them "rights", like selling your data, be not responsible and other dubious or illegal things, like forbidding you to give your license to someone else. The parody Southpark did about the Apple license covers the spirit of that.

And they sometimes change the license after the fact. I saw it happen to a game. They changed the license to allow them to collect and sell my data. Now I cannot properly access the game I bought 5 years ago, since I of course do not agree. The "benefits" of drm.

I want to play a game, not sign a contract to do so. I was never asked to agree to an eula on a game on Itch. Things like not buying the right to redistribute when buying a game are regular law, there is no eula needed for that.

and the user just uploads it for free. That's literally pirating

And Itch will remove it. But it needs you to report it. (Insert meme about that fire fighter bear). Might take them a while though.

Ask the author if the license can be transferred. It could be that the commercial entity using the license needs to purchase the license directly.

It does not exist.

I made my own solution. You need a browser extension that can run tampermonkey scripts. Or you can craft a user css in the browser console, but you need a method for your browser to apply user styles. See that thread for more information.

Hence my suggestion to just ignore it. This is not like a situation where police screamed at you: freeze! Officially you do not know that your game is on quarantine. Itch did not inform you about this and suggested things like logging out and in again with 2fa or whatever could be done to prove being not a hacked account.

If they want to be fair, they should not punish you for ignoring a thing you would only know by accident. (The punishment would be pushing the game at last place of queue)

Now that I mentioned it, logging out and doing a fresh 2fa log in might actually be a good thing, should that behaviour metric look at such things. 

I did not want to imply that the problem is with you. The problem is with Itch and the currently very long time they take to clear such situations. It is a general problem, also seen by all the complaints about non indexed games and waiting times for payout.

I do not think support answers such requests. How would that work? From Itch's perspective at worst case your devloper machine including your account and mail was hacked and taken over. So any request from you could be a scammer talking. And yes, at one time, such a scammer made such a thread here in community asking to be indexed. But I think it was a fake account at that time and not a hacked one.

That they take so long is frustrating. But that they quarantine games with a trigger sensitive automatic is actually good. Not for you and other false positives. But there are indexed malware projects every day. In fact that automatic is not sensitive enough. Or it is, and the actual number of daily malware is a lot higher than estimated - I only see the indexed ones, and those are far too many.

Maybe a scammer is sharing your IP range. Maybe your rpg maker version has false positives when scanned. Maybe there are many reports against your projects from people uncertain if you are an impostor, because of the other account with almost the same name. Maybe your behaviour when updating matches that of a known scammer.

The thing is, this is not possible:

All I ask is that my games stop being put in quarantine unless there are real reasons to suspect they might be fake, contain a virus, or something similar

The reasons are real. You just do not know them. They are not verified. Hence the quarantine and not a suspension. For them to recognise fakes/viruses and so on better, they would need to be able to recognise them better, as silly as its sounds. But the feedback loop of the criminals is very short. They immediatly know, if their method does no longer work and switch to new methods.

This is speculation: since you were not told by Itch that your games are in quarantine and they were probably put there by an automatic, you should ignore the quarantine and update your games as you would do normally and have done so in the past. It does claim to be "due to potential suspicious behavior from the page owner". Tiptoeing and waiting to get indexed and then updating again would sound suspicious to me. So if you do as you normally do, that automatic might recognise this. Or not. I do not know how good or bad the automatic is, I only see a lot of indexed actual malware projects and a lot of devs complaining about not being indexed or having games in quarantine. It is symptoms of a fight against malware uploaders.

Use a classic translator page. 

The license you ask about can't be resold or given to other people.

And the question if it is commercial use depends on the game those assets are used in, and not how the license was aquired.

It is written in the description.

使用经典翻译器页面。 您询问的许可证不能转售或提供给其他人。 而它是否是商业用途的问题取决于这些资产用于的游戏，而不是如何获得许可证。

它写在描述中。

高级版许可证（至少支付 3.99 美元）： 此资源包可用于任何商业或非商业项目，您可以根据需要修改资源。 此资产包即使经过修改也无法转售或重新分发

免费版许可证 此资源包可用于任何非商业项目，您可以根据需要修改资源。此资源包不能用于任何商业项目，转售/重新分发，即使经过修改也是如此

It is an arbitrary limit. And there are like three of them. Unzipped file size. Unzipped individual file size. Number of files.

I do not really understand the limit, since a browser will probably download the 27MB zipped into cache anyways. In theory only the files needed would be transferred and loading each tiny piece of texture individually would create an overhead. But as I said, the limit is arbitrary. Apparantly the theory is, that engines that export with so many files are better suited for having downloadable games and using the engine export as a html5 game lessens the user experience, so it is discouraged by that arbitrary limit: read that as, Itch would rather want you to have a downloadable game, if it has to have so many small files.

The way you mention vaporware and ransomware together with malware as an extra does not make me think you talk about the same things as I do. It is like saying you bought bananas, apples AND fruit. 

Ransomware, worms, trojans are types of malware. Mal-ware is mal-icious soft-ware. It does harm. A virus scanner would detect it, if the scanner is good. Depending on the harm even a heuristic should detect it.

Vaporware is not malware. It is announced, but unreleased software. A "classical" example would be a kickstarter software project that does not deliver. If this is intentional, it is a scam. If it is just a long time, it is fans complaining. Duke Nukem Forever and Cyberpunk 2077 were both vaporware - till they eventually did get released.

There is no dispute over malware being spread on Itch. Read the public service announcment by leafo. Wanna call the people in that thread liars too, just because you did not see it happen personally...

My point and reason for this thread is, that direct messages on discord with a link to a password protected "game" are not the only method the criminals use to distribute malware. They upload malware as a regular game and wait for unsuspecting players, that never saw viruses on Itch and are trusting and happy to have found a shiny new game.

If your content was ok on Patreon, it will be ok on Itch. The reverse is not true. Patreon has some particulars, that they ban.

If you have payments collected by Itch, well, Patreon collects money by the same Paypal as Itch does. 

If you have direct payments, then you need permission from Paypal for selling adult things. I would imagine they do not give that permission to every small time indie dev that asks. And even taxes might be a problem there.

There is no subscription, but projects can be bought several times and Itch has the pay what you want pricing model. So people can overpay.

You can make devlogs and blog postings, those are shown to your followers.

You could periodically create a project collecting your latest art works.

You can have access price tiers on a project. Those are made by having multiple individually priced files. You can rotate those files by hand. Like have a project where you put the files for 20, 15, 10, 5, 0 and rotate the files in for 20 and make them cheaper after a week/month.

It also depends, if you release your art for free eventually or what your Patron's benefits were. Some of this can be simulated. There is for example a limited pool of goodies you can sell extra on a page. https://itch.io/docs/creators/exclusive-content#how-you-can-use-rewards/giving-l...  

You can also change the price later. So you could put your art collection at higher price for dedicated supporters, and like a month or later you lower the price.

The pricing options are detailed in the faq. The main difference to Patreon is, that Patreon is centered on subscription to a creator and Itch is centered on projects. So for an artist, collecting the art works of a few months till a nice project is formed, is probably the most natural option. But this depends, if the art is supposed to be behind a paywall, or supposed to be accessibly by everyone eventually and Patrons only get the benefit of accessing it earlier as a thank you for the support. But even with paywall, usually you would get access to the previous works at one of the subscriber tiers, for the price of one month. If you distribute it over several projects, one would have to buy all of them. But access to a project lasts, while with a subscription you can only access it, while subscribed.

This is Itch community, not the community of the project you are trying to install.

Unfortunately you can't recognise a genuine project by description and screenshots, because the malware projects often copy those 1:1 from an original project. Sometimes even from the Itch page of the original project. And yeah, I have seen fake and original side by side in search.

Account age is overcome by using hacked accounts. That got a little better compared to last year. But I did see hundreds of hacked accounts last year.

I saw a bot army doing fake comments. I saw scam accounts with over 40 followers doing links to malware as a blog posting.

I saw criminals answering comments. It is rare, but it happened.

I saw fake projects with good ratings. They are not distinguishable from new projects that also have no or few ratings.

I saw malware with faked exe signing and malware that did not trigger virustotal scanners. (And a lot of legit projects that do have false positives).

I saw malware here that was two years out in the open.

So, yes, stay safe everyone. Look for genuine and authentic projects. But unfortunately, there is no single thing that will make a project such. If there were, the criminals would fake that.

Using a sandbox mode to execute untrusted software protects against some malware. It should not be able to steal your credentials that way. The Itch app provides such a sandbox mode.

What argument? I did not make an argument. You talk about vaporware. I talk about malware.

You saw malicious software on Patreon? If not, please make your own thread about unreliable indie devs abandoning projects.

The fake projects I was talking about are not fake in the sense that the creator just tries to milk the users. This is called vaporware, I believe. Although for indie developers that usually is not by design. Real life can have a huge impact on a single developer. And most of the developers are hobby game devs and therefore unprofessional or untrained in the business. But I also saw projects that came to Steam after 5+ years of development. "Indie" means more than non mainstream.

Anyway, the fake projects I talk about are vehicles for malware. Viruses. Trojan downloaders. Malicious software that steals your data. 

It is the things warned about in the try my game on discord thread, but with a different method. Instead of luring people directly to the page, the criminals just put such fake projects on Itch and wait.

As is said in the try my game thread:

• On itch.io, it is safe to view the page, but do not download any untrusted software

And to elaborate: being hosted on Itch itself is not enough for a software to be trusted. Being indexed is not enough. Being months old is not enough. Having some ratings and some comments or followers is not enough. It is a combination of many things and the criminals try very hard to circumvent any automatics and to trick users.

It does not make sense. Many people complain about this.

I imagine they made this, so people would not complain about not finding their own games. But this can be solved by other means. Like activating the option, after uploading/updating a nsfw game. And not by locking that option.

There could even be a dialogue after uploading/updating a nsfw game that shows that option and reminds people that it is turned off. In big bold letters. Before they hit update/publish.

Just locking the option is about the most user unfriendly solution for this. Make sure to also use the suggestion box and tell Itch in the designated channel how you feel about the current lack of options.

They might approve the refund, but they do not have to. There is no buyer's remorse clauses or similar.

https://itch.io/docs/legal/terms#9-refunds

Summary You may be eligible for a refund if the product does not work or does not represent what was advertised.

How do you know this? I am genuinely curious. Maybe I am quite mistaken here.

My guess in magnitude is traffic by accident < passive traffic by being indexed < promotion. And I further guess that most games that do promotion will be higher than games with only passive traffic in the popular ranking. In a genre like horror, there are just so many games. Your main source of early traffic has to be promotion, else there will be no real difference between being indexed or not. Not in horror where there are so many new games each day.

You could at least talk about your game at the places where this is allowed. Like the release announcements.

I don't even know if there's a specific word for people that do this kind of task.

Writer. Author. Novelist.

Worldbuilding is the thing a fiction writer does. If you write a contemporary work or a historical work, you "merely" need to develop characters and research specific topics you write about.

There are writers tools for this that aim for fiction writers. Maybe those can be of help to you.

My advise would be to write the story/lore first and worry about fancy words later. You do not need fancy big words for the sake of it. The need for them would arise naturally. To pick up the example above, those "skyborn" and "sky islands". Such do not exist. But there obviously was a plot device to have islands that somehow are not in the water, but in the sky. Calling them sky islands is not a fancy word. It just sounds fancy, if you are not familiar with English. Same for "groundbound" or "skyborn". Both likely were needed by the plot device of dividing inhabitants of the sky and inhabitants of the (ground) earth by using different words for them.

I suggest you read the first page of this comic. It helps if you are familar with pen and paper role playing games. Or ttrpgs as they are called on Itch. https://darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0001.html 

Why would referal links be forbidden? You can have actual advertisements in games. Itch just has no site framework to support this. Discouraged are "obtrusive" ads. And of course hiding the fact, that something is an advertisement. There is a line between adware and software that has ads in it.

https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines#avoid-obtrusive-advertisements-...

Works for me. But my Firefox is on the esr channel and that is version 128. So I would say, it is Firefoxes fault.

What should I do?

Ignore the indexing status of your game and promote it as you would have promoted it.

There is 60000+ horror games on Itch. Being indexed or not is not gonna make much difference without ouside promotion. And a link to your game does not care, if the game is indexed.

It can take over a month. Does it suck? Yes. Will it get faster if you complain? Why should it. Everyone else is waiting too.

More infos here https://itch.io/t/4120453/game-quarantined-search-or-indexing-problem-read-this 

How do you have 300 followers after 3 days without being indexed for 2 of those days? Itch temporarily delists for a lot of reasons to have a human check things. The fight against malware and scanner triggers are only one of the reasons. Suspicous traffic could be another.

Waiting time for indexing of over 30 days is not unusual. That was not a typo. I meant thirty days. Also, you have payment active. First time paid indexings are supposed to take longer.

I have seen literally hundreds of malware projects and I can tell that your project has some red flags and some green flags (more green than red). In combination with your project age and payment active it is a small wonder your game was indexed at all on the first day.

I guess some of the red flags or Itch's scanner triggered a warning. If it were a serious warning, your game would be quarantined and not delisted. Or it is as simple as you activating payment with the update.

Anyway, your external traffic might speed up the waiting time. Your marketing obviously is effective. And following a direct link is not dependend on being indexed.

There should be two buttons on each page. The upper button can dissappear, if the description is displayed wide and short enough. If the upper button is missing, try resizing your window so it gets narrow to the point where the screenshots appear sideways. 

The mod seems to have misread your problem. Your problem is not that support is not answering and you wanna know why. Or is it? That would be in the rules of this category. (You did write both in one sentence though).

Regarding your problem. Is your debit card supposed to work online? Is it working for other stores online?

If the same brand previously worked on Itch, maybe your configuration was changed by accident.

Itch uses Stripe for dealing with debit cards. So I doubt Itch support can help much there. It is a thing between Stripe and the bank that issued the debit card. 

I tried searching for this, but there was no clear answers. Most I could find was recommendations to not use the feature of individually priced files to set the price of a game. 

But even if used for bonus content, as intended, that begs some questions.

What happens if you buy a game on sale and it has individually priced files (ipf)? Game is $ 5 , ipf is $ 10, sale is 50%. You buy for $ 5 in the sale. Can you access the ipf?

What happens if you buy two games in a bundle with ipf? Game A is $ 5, Game B is $ 5, both have ipf at $ 10. Bundle price is $ 10 and you pay $ 10. Can you access the ipf?

What happens in a combination of sales and bundles and discounted bundles? How is the access tier calculated? Or unlock price as it is called here.

This should be written in the faq! There is no mention of sales or bundles here https://itch.io/docs/creators/pricing#purchase-tiers-through-individually-priced... 

I doubt you will get an answer. Unless they need something from you, to close the investigation.

Look at it from Itch's perspective. Something triggered their defenses. Worst case, your account and mail were hacked and are now spreading viruses. That your development computer is infected and you uploaded infected apps is actually one of the many theoretical scenarios.

From observation I can speculate that the automatics sensitivity was increased. There is malware uploaded to Itch every day. And they have a hard time removing actual malware that was reported as such. I could point you to a dozen such malware projects.

You are using renpy and some versions of renpy trigger false positives.

Oh, and all your games have a pricing and or category problem. They could have been reported as scam for that.

Your games are pay what you want, but have no game to download at price 0. That is false advertising. You are misrepresenting the price of the games.

You seem to have individually priced files at $ 6 on all the games. How is this calculated in a bundle? I do not know. The faq has no information about bundle prices and discounts in regard to individually priced files. Is the $ 16 bundle price applied to all the games or is it split over all the games? Can your customers download all the games at the tier of $ 16 or at the tier of $ 1.06? Individually priced files can only be accessed, if the price paid satisfies the minimum price of the file. 

For project ownership in library this does not matter. You can always access all paid files in a project, even if the price changes. But your projects have no paid files. They are individually priced.

For that matter, I dot even know what happens with individually priced files, if you buy on a discount. Or a discounted bundle for that matter.

https://itch.io/games/tag-unity has 100k games

https://itch.io/games/made-with-unity has 250k games

Overlap is only 50k. Which should make 300k total.

It gets more complicated for rpg maker. But my point is, that meta-infos are mixed in inconsistently with the regular tags. Someone searching Unity games will not find most of them if listening to the suggested tags. https://itch.io/tags/tools 

And even with the made-with tag, about 50k will not be found. I would dislike searching twice and I think many people would not even realize that there are two tags saying the same, one a regular tag, one a meta tag, and that there is a huge lack of overlap.

that could free up one slot in the "All Tags" list for a more popular or relevant tag that's beyond just 300 results

That the list currently has near 300 items is a coincidence. There are no slots on that list. It grows. It is not the 300 most popular/relevant/arbitrarily chosen tags.

Read the initial post of this thread for how this is intended.

but then I realized all of my games disappeared from search

Sounds like quarantine. And it is quarantine. Open your game in a private browsing window and click on your patreon link. The quarantine message will appear.

You ask this on Itch. Experimental games without corporate backing is kinda Itch's thing.

And I disagree with the bold experimental spirit. It is copy-the-thing-that-works all the way back to the 80's and 90's when video games became a form of entertainment. Read the history of Giana Sisters for a popular example from the 80's.

This whole copy-what-works thing is why we can classify games in genres. As soon as something is successful, it is either classifyable as a genre mix or spawns a new (sub-)genre and copycats.

Games need to be entertaining. If you deviate from that, you either have not made a game or you have made a very bad game. So all games that are entertaining will be similar to some extent to previously existing games. Even if they present the concepts in a radical new way or manage to invent new concepts.

Indexing or lack thereof does not affect promotion.

Unless you promote for people to search for your game or username instead of a link to your game.

you have to wait till your game be ready to be indexed

You don't. It was bad luck. Most games get indexed by automatic. Itch will not tell you why your game was picked for a random human inspection. But as it is with humans, all sorts of things can happen to cause a delay. My personal theory is, that they got hit by one desaster after the other without time for recovery. There were some bad ddos attacks in the past months, some server hickups and other things. Also it is winter and a lot of people are sick.

I am not on Firefox, I do not have those nbsps. They only appear if I use two  spaces. I would assume OP is on Firefox.

But since the editbox can use nbsps, this mechanism might be triggered somehow accidentally.  You have 3 in your reply.

I am not. And if a sentence is made up with nbsps, the rendering browser will not break the lines at the nbsps but at any space available or when the line ends in the middle of the word.

If nbsps are created by simply typing, that sounds very annoying. I know they are sometimes created when copy pasting. And I think by typing two  spaces. If so, there should be a nbsp between two and spaces when you inspect my post.

And if I recally correcly, if you delete characters and then press space. So there might be one in front of So.