itch.io

Wow, that's awesome to hear, I'm glad she enjoyed it so much!

You probably didn't do anything wrong. I've had some payouts that took 2 days to process and some that took 15. I'm not sure why support wouldn't have responded though. To be clear, you did get the [Request received] email from Zendesk, right? You just never got an actual answer? Support usually isn't lightning-fast but I tend to get a response within a few days.

I mean, they are technically downloading it either way, just to their cache. I don't think you can really expect people to ask permission before downloading a copy of a free game that's public on the internet. Of course, they shouldn't redistribute it without permission since that would violate your copyright. But you should probably assume that anything you put on the web could be downloaded and examined.

I think if you email support they might be able to change/lift some of those limits. But if you're trying to get it working on the web you should probably try to split it up into smaller files that download as they're needed. 600MB is pretty massive for a web game.

If you start giving refunds because you want to be nice, you would be violating the rules of other marketplaces which have their own policy on refunds.

I've never heard of a distribution platform that dictates the terms of your refund policy on other stores. That'd be between the developer and that other platform though.

The reality is once you start selling games, you have to treat everyone consistently, regardless of how you feel.

You're coming across as pretty condescending here. I'm not sure where you got this thing about giving people refunds "to be nice". Or why you seem to think I'm new at this.

I have two products on Itch, both of which have technical restrictions that mean they only work in certain countries. I do try pretty hard to make it clear on the store pages, but obviously sometimes people miss that, or they misunderstand what they're buying. In either case I highly doubt that I'm going to somehow get Itch.io or myself into legal trouble by giving them a refund. But point taken, not a feature you want. It's not something I thought would be controversial haha.

At this point I'm just asking for a button in the seller UI. If all it does for now is create a support ticket with the Payment ID pasted in, that'd still seem like an improvement to me.

Can you clarify what laws you're referring to? I've never heard of that and it sounds like something I should read up on.

As far as I know neither Stripe nor PayPal charge any kind of additional fee for refunding a payment. They don't refund the original processing fee, but personally I'd fine with having that deducted from my earnings if it meant the refund process was more streamlined. And I know fraud is a big issue, but for those of us that have sold hundreds or thousands of copies on here (and paid Itch their cut) I feel like we deserve some amount of goodwill. If it's rate-limited and only applies to payments that haven't paid out yet it seems like it'd be fairly safe, although I'm sure there are aspects of this I'm not aware of. I don't really care how they want to handle it internally, I just wish refunds were easier to initiate and happened faster.

I'm sure this has been mentioned before but it'd be really great if we could refund customers ourselves. When someone requests a refund I'm always happy to give them one, but it's kind of embarrassing to have to tell them "Ok, I emailed support@itch.io, hopefully they'll refund you in a couple days". They always do of course, but it seems like a waste of time for all involved.

It'd be nice if there was just a button in the seller dashboard to refund a payment. Even if you still want to manually review them it would be better than having to write an email every time. And really I'd hope you could automatically approve them so long as a seller's refund rate stays below some target percentage.

Looks cool! Is a controller required? I can't figure out the keybindings.

I'll admit I'm no expert, but doesn't Steam charge VAT too?

Thanks for the feedback!

I didn't include a lot of hard puzzles partly because I didn't want people to get stuck and never finish it. Since you didn't really like the ending anyway I can see why that would be a disappointment. You might like The Black Watchmen if you haven't seen it. It's much more puzzle-focused.

If you use the option on the Interact tab, Itch.io sends the email for you. They limit how many emails you can send out, and they include an unsubscribe link so people can stop getting emails from a certain game if they don't want them. Itch doesn't want you to go outside that system and send your own emails directly because then you might violate CAN-SPAM or GDPR, and people might not want to use the site anymore if developers add them to random mailing lists or sell their info.

Just FYI the link to your Discord server doesn't seem to work.

Looks like your game is requesting v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/static/js/2.b1595f88.chunk.js when the file you want is actually at v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/2414319/static/js/2.b1595f88.chunk.js . My guess is that in your app you have it as an absolute path (/static/js/...). Try removing the first slash so it's just static/js/...

Which games specifically? I don't have a MacBook so I can't tell you for certain what's normal for it, but if it only has is integrated graphics I'd expect it to struggle in more demanding games.

When you buy NITW on Itch you normally get a ZIP of the game in addition to a Steam key. If you get it through the bundle I think you'll only get the download. But you will still be able to play it.

Java applets don't really work in modern browsers. You'll probably have to post it as a downloadable game rather than an embed.

I think it's based on the height of the page. On pages where there isn't too much text content, it doesn't show the extra buy button at the top since the bottom one will be easily visible already. You might be able to hide it with custom CSS, although you'll have to email support to get access to that.

I believe this is a recent thing. It might have something to with bundles (i.e. someone could bundle 4 games together to be more than a dollar even if each individual game was $0.30 or something).

But I mean c'mon, if the game's worth 49 cents then it's worth a dollar.

Someone who works at Itch could give a more complete answer, but generally any taxes/fees will be subtracted from the amount that Itch sends you.

VAT is added to the price of your game, so if your game was $5 and the VAT was another $1, the customer would be charged $6 but that extra dollar would get sent to the relevant government by Itch. So from your side you're pretty much getting the same $5 regardless of what additional taxes the customer paid.

For other taxes/fees that do come out of your side, Itch will just subtract them from your total payout amount. They send money to you, not the other way around.

Keep in mind that this is all totally separate from income taxes, which you'll still need to pay to your country's government just like you would for any other income.

Which instruction sheet is this?

Keep in mind that the number Itch.io shows you on the Payouts screen is after credit card fees and your revenue share cut are taken out. It might also include taxes if you're outside the U.S., I'm not sure about that part.

The Stripe/PayPal fee alone is something like $0.30 + 3% so if your payments are only $1 then you're going to be losing 33% just from that. That's not Itch's fault, it's just the standard cost of processing credit cards (which is why some mom-and-pop stores have a $5 minimum for credit card transactions). Consider raising your price.

If you go to https://itch.io/dashboard/purchases you'll be able to see all the transactions and how much they were. There's a link to export a CSV (spreadsheet) which will break down all the fees and such.

Yeah, it looks like 2 of your payments haven't passed the 7-day threshold yet. Wait a few days and then check back.

When my game Subtext first launched it got like two sales in the first week. I did some advertising (free & paid) and that helped a little, but the biggest source of traffic (which brings people in to this day) was an article someone wrote about it like 8 months after it came out.

I'm not sure what kind of return you were expecting (you're not going to become a millionaire from one shooter on Itch) but don't assume that your first week will be your best one. Two years later and my weekly sales numbers are still better than they were right after launch.

NOTE: While I don't go into detail about solutions, you might not want to read this comment before playing since it could spoil the puzzles somewhat.

Played with a friend for about an hour and a half. We couldn't figure out the thing with the planets, think we got everything else though.

I like the aesthetic. The music is nice and the environment is fairly interesting. I do wish the lighting was a little better in places though, sometimes the light sources are just invisible spots in the middle of the room, even though there are candles and such all over the place.

It would be nice to explain the controls better. There's a more detailed list here on the Itch page but in-game it doesn't mention that there's a run button, or that WASD works, or that the middle mouse button moves backwards. The walking speed is really slow so knowing about the run button seems pretty essential. I actually think the running speed should be faster than it is. We spent a lot of time wandering around and the slow pace becomes annoying, especially for the long catwalks.

It's a little hard to tell which dots are which if you get what I mean. At first I thought I was wrong about the whole thing when actually I just clicked the wrong dot.

The narration is well voiced, but it's a little hard to hear because they're so quiet. Would be nice to either have separate volume sliders or the option to turn on captions.

The animation when you pick up a piece was cool the first time but it starts to feel drawn out after a while. I guess you don't have to wait around for it but it sorta feels like the game wants me to.

Generally I'd say I liked the aesthetic and the puzzles but the controls were somewhat frustrating and the whole thing was paced very slowly. If I could move a little faster, hit switches that are a little farther away, etc. it would go a long way to improving the overall experience. Definitely some cool stuff in here though.

How would you actually enforce it once they've downloaded the software?

Payment processor fees are typically something like $0.30 + 3%. So if your game only costs a dollar, you're going to lose like 33% from that. Plus whatever your Itch cut was set to, and the fee to transfer to your destination PayPal account. It can add up. If your game is like $15 though, $0.30 per transaction is a much smaller percentage of your total earnings. So consider raising your price. It won't just cover the difference, it will actually lower the percentage that you lose to fees because you'll have more income across fewer transactions.

I have a game that's $6.99, with my Itch cut set to 10%, and about 83% of gross revenue ends up in my PayPal. I think Steam and Google Play take like 30% so that seems pretty good.

Oh, another thing that might affect it is your tax situation. If you're outside the U.S. Itch might have to withhold some of your money for the IRS. It depends which country you're in and if you filled in the tax interview correctly.

Yep. Itch.io is just a place to put games once you make them.

Well, there are lots of different tools out there. Some of the first games I ever built were made in Clickteam Fusion (at the time called The Games Factory). These days I think Construct and GameMaker are more popular though.

Do you mean you don't know how to upload a project? Or you're looking for recommendations for tools to actually develop a game?

Not a huge deal, but it would be cool if I could get an email when there's only a few external keys left for a game. One of mine just ran out and I didn't realize until someone emailed to ask why it wasn't giving them a key.

While you're waiting, definitely change your email password if you haven't already.

Well, the edges of the shapes aren't very easy to discern because of the dot shading. If the dots were closer together it might help, as it is I only have kind of a vague idea of where the edges lie. Also, the shadow from the ball looks exactly the same as the shading on the platforms so it all kinda blends together.

Very cute game. I found it hard to control with my mouse (something to do with the DPI maybe?) but I switched to a laptop and using either the trackpad or the pointer nub worked a lot better.

I like the visual aesthetic but I think it's a little hard to judge the depth sometimes so on thin beams I couldn't really tell if I was about to fall off or not. Love the cozy vibe though.

You could make a 100% off sale with an ownership requirement.

If you're using your own stripe/paypal accounts anyway, I would think you could just build a little web page with a PayPal donate button or a link to a Stripe checkout page or something. Routing through Itch doesn't seem like it adds anything.

I don't know what the actual limit is, but can you not compress it smaller than that? 3 MB is massive for an image of that size.

But why then do I need ITCH.IO?

I mean, you don't. Itch is (from my understanding) mainly designed as a marketplace for games. They host free stuff too because they're cool like that, but they're not really a replacement for a web host. If you're looking for someone to rent you a PHP server this isn't the place for that.