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Scaling itch.io revenue share

A topic by Sysop-Delco created May 22, 2016 Views: 1,931 Replies: 2
Viewing posts 1 to 3
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As a developer, I'm not always sure how much to give to itch.io. Will my game sell well? Or will it tank? I don't really know, but what if I set it low and it goes viral? I could make a lot of money! But I may not be able to set the % to itch.io for a bit, or know exactly when to. That could mean I get a lot of money, but itch.io could get little after the fact, even if I set it after, theres no guarentee that sales will continue (again making setting the % uncertain).

So I got to thinking, what about a scaling price cut feature based on sales revenue?

For example, lets say I set the itch.io cut to 10%, and set a scaling threshold at 1000$. So if I get less than 100$ in sales, itch.io would get nothing (or 1%), but for every 100$ in sales itch.io's cut increases by 1%, up to a maximum of 10% beyond the threshold of 1000$ in sales. This way, if I get very poor sales, then itch.io wouldn't get much, but if I get a lot of sales, it would automatically scale to give itch.io a better representative cut. This could also potentially be determined by total sales per week, month, or total sales in general.

This might help developers be more comfortable giving itch.io a cut of sales, since they don't know whether a title may do unexpectedly well or not. It could give them the opportunity to plan ahead should it unexpectedly turn a profit and want to share the resulting revenue accordingly.

Something to think about, heh.

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Well Itch.io already lets you choose fully what to give them. So upon withdrawing your profits you could just decide their cut based on how much you've earned like you describe here. Making it an official system seems unnecessary.

Ah, I see what you mean, but would that not depend on your choosing for itch.io to collect payments on your behalf over direct payments? Still I guess the language is a little mixed on that, I had assumed that the percentage revenue share was subtracted at point of sale (which it may well be with direct payments), and that it would be the same for payments collected by itch.io with profit share subtracted at point of sale, not at the point of payout.

Making that clearer as an official feature at least I think wouldn't be a bad thing (like a more explicit revenue share slider on the payout screen as opposed to only in settings, or at least a better description that you can do that), and there still could be room for a similar feature with direct payments.

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