I initiated a payout over 30 days ago, and still have not received it. From what I've been seeing elsewhere, this seems to be a problem a lot of people are dealing with.
Can itch give us some kind of update? It's been completely silent on your end, and a lot of people are starting to wonder when they will get paid.
There was an issue with earnings calculation on some payouts associated with bundles that had large splits that was preventing them from going out. The issue has been resolved and all affected payouts have since been processed.
We send hundreds of payouts per week, in this case about ~20 payouts got stuck due to this issue.
Essentially, a purchase’s contribution to payout must balance out to 0 before the payout is eligible to be payed. But how we handled distributing the split earnings was causing a few cents not get allocated in some instances with bundles, and any associated payouts were blocked from being eligible to be sent. (You may see a few-cent change in the final amount to be payed on your dashboard)
We’ve resolved the issue as soon as we identified what was going on, and we’ll look into what we can do to help prevent things like this from happening in the future.
Sorry for any inconvenience this caused.
Thanks
I've got two payouts in queue, one for 38 days, the other for 27 days.
The issue that keeps coming to mind for me:
If Itch is a successful website meant to support game designers working independently, then they should be pulling in enough money that they can afford to hire some more of the actual human reviewers they use to vet payouts.
If Itch is not successful enough to hire more staff, or is not meant to support designers at more than just a hobby level, then we should all question whether we continue using this site to platform our work. The "Itch is not a bank" argument doesn't hold water if the designers who want to make a career can't rely on Itch to at least get them their money in a window of time that would let them, say, pay rent or utilities.
Thanks for your feedback. I just want to highlight that’s it’s not just a simple matter of “hire more people get money faster.” Sending money online is an inherently risky business, we constantly tackle fraud and many other things. We use a combination of human review and our software to manage how payments sent. We always prioritize confirming that all monetary amounts balance out before sending money. Sadly, in this case a small set of payouts got stuck because the system wasn’t able to balance out some payouts. We’ve resolved the issue as soon as we identified what was going on, and we’ll look into what we can do to help prevent things like this from happening in the future
I put some more info in a reply to you here: https://itch.io/post/2519663
Thanks
It is a little frustrating that we can't seem to get an actual response from Itch about it either, instead of just a moderator? Like no offense but I've sent emails (as have others) that go weeks without responses, and every thread about the incredible wait time on December payouts (especially bundled ones) just sits, it's not like this is the first time people have come here to complain about it.
At this stage, this is really something where itch needs to move away from manually reviewing every payout. An automated tool for this has to be a priority. No other storefront/market platform manually reviews every payout before they pay people because it's simply not sustainable.
This is people's livelihoods we're talking about here. This is completely unacceptable, and the lack of any sort of official response makes me seriously question whether I continue to use itch long term.
I was just doing some research after hearing that everyone in a popular bundle I was part of haven't been paid either, that's 25 creators that are still under review, and have been for 29 days.
Looking around further on the itchio forums strongly implies that itchio hasn't completed any payouts in 41 days as of today. I'm stressed.
Just wanted to comment on this specifically, the statement about payouts not going out for 41 days is not true. We continue to process hundreds of payouts per week. Depending on circumstances of specific payouts then there may be delays. In this particular case, an automated check on balancing out payout earnings was blocking some payouts from being eligible to be sent. This was due to bundles having splits that couldn’t be balanced to 0. The issue is now resolved and any of those related payouts have since been processed and sent. Sorry for the inconvenience, thanks
got a response from leaf here: https://twitter.com/moonscript/status/1354963142418198539?s=19
We use automated checks to mark a payout to be eligible to be reviewed and sent. At the end of the day, it’s humans controlling software though. In the days that you didn’t receive your payout we were doing business as usual. We process hundreds of payouts a week, and in this case about 20 or so payouts got stuck. It wasn’t immediately apparent what was happening with those payouts, as we have “asynchronous” checks were the system may eventually fill in any missing data and mark those payouts as ready to be sent.
Obviously having payments get stuck like this isn’t great, so we tried out best to get the issue resolved as soon as we identified what was happening. Sorry for any inconvenience it caused.
Thanks
I and everyone I know have gotten their payouts now, so I'm satisfied.
I don't want to kick my gift horse in the mouth (I know this is not the correct term), but I am really concerned by how long this took to be acknowledged, then fixed. I and many others had to use multiple ways to contact itch before this ever came to anything, and I also find it strange that the support email (it must be overloaded) was never utilized, despite our emails.
I guess I'm fine with it, but it gives me steam vibes of being rejected, denied and never getting a clear message why. I still support the hell out of itchio and use it everyday with my friend group, but I really dont want itchio to become another platform that is only supporting the breadwinners at the top, and ignoring everyone else, as I've been doing just fine being ignored on steam and gog.
I don't know what I'm trying to say but like.. itch feels special , and I really feel like the time in which Itch could actually support indies directly and give that human touch has passed. And I'm kinda sad about that.
I wanna add to this to say it's still really frustrating that it took me getting really obnoxious about it on Twitter, for someone to seemingly hit a button that fixed it for everyone. I can offhand name more than 20 people effected by the issue, and there are forum posts going back further about it that didn't pick up a single iota of traction. Just a comment from a moderator that they'd get in contact with an administrator, and then nothing at all. If it got stuck you'd think getting it fixed would let have been a bigger priority than the more recent payouts others were getting. Itch needs to be better at explaining what's happening, especially on their own forums (since it took multiple additional days to comment here what is essentially a copy paste of what Leaf posted on Twitter) to people they owe money to.
