Hi!

I use itch.io to find games to play on my youtube channel a lot. The affiliate code system has been good to track people going through the links i put in my descriptions so far.

Do you have any specific plans for it? If not I'd find it really useful to get not only attempted and bought info but also a way of seeing how many people click it total.

On top of that, the money making part is cool and I think the best way of making it fair is implementing a slider similar to the "itch.io's cut" bar on the developer's end so they can decide what I get for sending people to their game if anything.

I haven't thought on this long so I dont know what problems there might be but I'd love to see it expanded upon!

Hey Josh, sorry for taking to long to respond. I think this was accidentally posted in the app development forum. I still haven't made any updates to the affiliate system. I didn't consider tracking click-through to the links but I think it would be a good idea.

I still haven't decided how any revenue sharing will be handled. It would most likely be a cut of the cut the developers give back to itch.io. Since some developers set the cut to 0 there would be nothing left for the affiliates. I'm wondering if I'll need to publish the developer cuts so affiliates can see what the expected revenue is.

If you have any other ideas feel free to post them

Oh yea good point I'm not sure about showing the expected revenue. On one hand, most of the youtubers I know are unlikely to play a game they dont like even if they might make money from rev share. On the other it might be a nice bonus or incentive to cover a game they might not otherwise.

While messaging how much they might make from posting affiliate links would be good for the affiliate, I can see it being sometimes undesired on the dev end. Primarily if they have it set to zero until they get into the black, it might become bad PR if [the info on revenue cuts] is spread around to the general public.

An idea: if in the settings for itch.io cut, there was a sub bar for affiliate cut [not unlike the humble bundle devs, charity etc. sub bars] and if the affiliate bar is non-zero a tick box appears for if you want to display the affiliate revenue to affiliates. That way it's an opt-in process.

I thought it would be good to leave affiliate cuts to the developers choice. and it should come out of the developers cut.