Hey, thanks for your feedback. 

But it is still weird to see many distributors hang around Itch.io

There aren't that many publishers on itch.io. Plug in Digital and 4EversGames are actually related companies, the second started by someone who originally worked with Plug in Digital. They just moved their business over.

We don't encourage publishers or seek them out. We always try to get the original creator of the game to post. In this case, the two accounts above only provide Steam keys for their products, and we would much rather have people uploading DRM free versions of the games.

Sometimes developers are hard to convince though, since they don't have the resources to put their game on another platform. In those scenarios, a publisher may be the only way to get a certain game on the platform. We're not going to ban publishers since there may be people who want to support itch.io by buying a certain game, and a publisher may give us more opportunities for that. If we feel like there are too many publishers getting in the way of the developer's content though, we may change our stance.

We haven't added any special code for publishers, but I think in the future it would be useful to make it clear that they are not the developer of the game, if you're worried about people being confused who they are buying from. Additionally, I'm worried about how they're selling DLC, since it's not clear at all that you have to own previous content. We'll need to get in touch with them about it. Thanks for reporting it.

We don't really know the nature of these distribution agreements, so maybe the devs can't really decide how and where their games are being sold. Personally I would be fairly pissed at the low effort that's being displayed here, because it doesn't really speak highly about the amount of care those distributors put into the products they represent.

However I don't think that this neccessarily a big problem, as is when some folks are just selling Steam Keys of their games. Where I start to feel uneasy about, is when the work of bigger publishers gets frontpage features. For example a few months ago DoubleFine put a bunch of their older stuff on itchio and it took a lot of space from other smaller titles. I get that it's important for itch to point out that larger companies are coming over and that the platform itself is growing. But I don't think that featuring games that don't really need the extra attention, are supposed to represent what makes the platform what it is.

This all isn't really big deal to me, at least not right now. These problems are part of what happens when an open platform grows and it's important to adress them properly, before they might get out of hand.

I'm a gamer and (amateur) gaming dev hobbyist.  These distributors both trouble and befuddle me a bit.  I don't feel that Valve would be ok with anyone else flogging Steam keys on other platforms to bypass the Steam store.  That would be a violation of Steam's Developer Agreement.  It feels as if devs are doing these 'distributor agreements' to pay less than Valve's 30% cut while maintaining all the perks of the Steam marketplace.

I don't feel that itch.io should permit key-only selling by devs, publishers, or distributors.  If they want to only sell Steam keys they can do it on Steam.  If they don't want to do it on Steam then they can do it on Humble or IndieGala as well.  Itch.io isn't really meant to be a Steam key purchasing store, nor is it set up properly to that end.

In a worst case scenario, Valve themselves could get involved and start terminating publishing arrangements on Steam with those that violate their Steam Developer Agreements.