Okay, this is my first time dealing with support (via support@itch.io), and suffice to say that the experience has been extremely negative. So far I have loved everything about this community, but I had a very basic request and haven’t heard anything back from them in TWO FULL WEEKS. Compared to other retail outlets that host video games, Itch support is officially the worst one.

Since turnover is listed as 1-3 days, I submitted a new request, assuming I got lost somewhere in the shuffle. Apparently in the ten days between, some 1200+ requests were added. This is likely the issue: there aren’t enough people handling support, and there’s no system in place for organizing requests by complexity. If the support team is just going through tickets one by one, that’s absolutely the wrong way to do this.

I’d strongly recommend you look into this, because when you’re significantly worse than Valve/Steam at something, that really leaves a bad impression. If support has become overloaded to the point of breakage, I feel like an automated system should be in place, that updates you via email every so often on what position you are in the queue. As well as sorted requests, because simple ones that require very little effort to resolve should go through ASAP.

I literally just wanted CSS access on my account, to fix a few margins and float an image div in a game jam page. The hoop jumping and extreme delays to get that basic functionality has really soured me on trying to interact with support at all. My game jam needs time to be approved and go live, so I can’t just wait months for these features to get enabled. And when the pages say that turnover is 1-3 days, that lack of transparency and communication is particularly frustrating.

Thinking about this more, here’s what I’d suggest changing as soon as possible. I think the main issue is the https://itch.io/support page, because it has a catch-all email and a few narrow solutions below that. This is creating one big opaque queue for almost everything else, with a fingers crossed approach that some of the other text below will be read, to alleviate a tiny amount of message flow.

I’d redo that page immediately, and add these things:

1. A publicly visible number of the current count of requests in the queue. Maybe also how many were handled over the last few days, so we can get a sense of the time-frame for support right now.

2. Hiding the support email address behind a small survey-like system, for organizing requests and solving common problems immediately. All of the other information on that page could go into this. (i.e. “Feedback or problem?” > “Are you a player or developer?” > “Is your problem related to…”) Then you can only show the support@itch.io email address if the survey fails to resolve the question, and it’s more likely people will read through and organize themselves. Add as much as you can to this survey later, every extra answer reduces load on the system.

3. Unique email addresses for specific kinds of support. At a minimum, dev-support@itch.io and shop-support@itch.io. You could also possibly do this via title filtering, with codes that the survey gives you at the end with the contact email. As in “Please add ‘D105 Requesting CSS Access’ to the title of your email, to help us resolve your issue more quickly.”

Of course, none of this helps with the underlying problems of the currently unsorted and overloaded queue. But that gives you a starting point for bandaging this from further breakage, and makes the support delays more transparent for the time being.

The next thing I’d suggest is sorting all requests that don’t need back-and-forth contact into separate lists, and maybe making it someone’s full time job to just organize the current queue for a couple weeks. Then assembly-line the rest of support, so they encounter similar tasks as often as possible. I’m sure there’s more that could be done, but this would be a start.

I think there’s a lot that can be done quickly and would help tremendously with the current support delays, which seem to be happening to a lot of people right now. The lack of any contact for weeks is probably causing many duplicate requests in the queue as well.