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What's the inconvenience of using itch.io?

A topic by Holystone created Mar 28, 2023 Views: 418 Replies: 7
Viewing posts 1 to 7

What makes you uncomfortable when using itch.io?

I'd like to hear your opinions.

(+1)

There is only one method of payment

Of course, non-commercial platforms don't care about this as much as commercial platforms, which is understandable

(+1)
  • The possibility that a game file might contain a virus
  • Game devs who try to guilt people into playing/buying their projects 
  • The possibility of someone using my art as an NFT
  • Art theft

Itch.io is a great website and community, and I have had an overall wonderful experience using the site as an artist. These are just a few things I've noticed, but they don't prevent me from coming back 

(1 edit) (+1)

A lot of my qualms have already been addressed with better search filters. There was a point where I had to scroll through a list of 1,000 games to even play one.

Here's the list. I'll probably gripe about things people love.

  • Competing with fan games, sometimes of your own game. That's one of the reasons why I left a different site, now this site has fan games creeping up. Some are rather high quality, which is great for players.
  • $$$ sound effect packs seem to be 99% BSFXR stuff, or RPG Maker SFX. Other times, it feels like a bunch of SNES, Genesis, or Wii SFX with a filter over top. It's turned me off from buying any other sound FX packs here. I'd rather go to a different site for Foley artists and pay an exorbitant amount of money. Doesn't seem like the Foley artists are willing to cross the line to come to itch.
  • Getting 1,000 game bundles to be added to the itch game launcher was a struggle, having to go through each game to claim them one by one so they appear in the launcher.
  • Sometimes devs don't know how to setup their games for the launcher, so they can't be played in the launcher.
  • Sometimes a game can't be downloaded, because the dev didn't setup their price correctly. Like a hidden game that has a choice of donations or not, but setting it to $0 then it can.
  • Some devs have uber cheap sales, where PayPal doesn't allow the payment as it's under 50 cents. Probably just a PayPal thing, but devs don't know this, so "I would buy your game, but it's so cheap PayPal won't let me." 
  • There are other PayPal surprises like if the money goes to you rather than itch, PayPal will take a bigger cut, because you're getting a tiny amount, while you can have it sent to itch, then ask for the money later. That may have changed. Been a few years since I fell into that trap.
  • My friends just don't want "one more place with games," so they won't buy them here, but some friends still buy them here. You get to see how low the threshold is to become a top game with $20.
  • Seemingly tiny community compared to other places, although I notice several gaming, and game dev communities are getting smaller and smaller for whatever reason.
  • I've seen people upload someone else's game as their own, so in the search results, you'll have 2 of the same game next to one another. I brought it up at some point, and I was told "that's just a publisher version, and a dev version." Which one do I buy? Why do they have 2 different names?
  • Game jams that last YEARS, where it feels more like a "make a game for me with this criteria." Some could even argue game jams fill the site with 99% trash from first timers who will never get played.
  • I see people starting to get turned off with the "play in your browser" and even "download only." I suppose there are some players who only want to download a game, and other players that only want to play in their browser.
  • Vengeful game reviews, especially with game jams. I've seen questionable reviews like "they didn't like my game."
  • Buying art packs seems to have a lot of "you could pay $10 per pack on itch, or you can get all packs for $10 a month on my Patreon." Perhaps that's just good for the consumer.
  • No wishlists, although you can make lists, but I get asked by friends and others, "needs a wishlist."

I've made games for bigger companies who won't touch itch for a lot of these stigmas.

(+2)

Inconvenience: It's very difficult to find full-length games (at least 3 to 5 hours of game play). You have to go through pages of game jam submissions (despite the option to exclude them), someone's 2-minute first game, yet another flappy bird or some other popular clone, prototypes, wrongly tagged games and duplicates.

The site is flooded with games that take longer to download than to play.

The average session length is used differently. Some people will show average session as 2-3 minutes when they mean a level takes two to three minutes. You can't really accurately filter on "average session length" to get to games that will take a few hours to play.

Deleted 1 year ago
(5 edits)

What bother me the most in itch.io are some people trying to scam the public into buying something they made without any effort and knowing it, usually because they count that the tool they used is either oldfashion and/or discontinued or simply underground (usually they grab the tool and make something in 5-10 minutes based on demo project or something similar). 

I'm not talking about beginners learning game dev. and releasing tiny games and even charging for them (these are ok), I'm talking about people knowingly trying to sell something made without any effort or intrinsic value (if they were for free, then I'd see no problem). There should be an easier way to report these game/assets

(1 edit)

Quite a few things:

1) Only few payment methods

2) itch.io isn't much famous so it's hard for our games to get popular

3) Some people post shit in the community 

4) You can get scammed (some people just copy and post other games for a higher price or just steal some source code) and hacked