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We need to showcase projects from other itch.io pages on our own page!

A topic by Broken Paternoster Games created Apr 05, 2024 Views: 260 Replies: 4
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(1 edit) (+1)

Dear itch.io moderators,

We are a publishing label for students at Cologne Game Lab. Cologne Game Lab (CGL) is a Cologne University of Applied Sciences campus dedicated to developing games. We help our students publish their games by providing marketing and quality control services. We are encouraging our students to self-publish their projects on itch.io. To do this, they create their own itch.io accounts and pages. However, we want to also showcase some of these projects on our page to gradually build a portfolio of the best student projects. And we don't want to take ownership of the projects by forcing students to publish their games under this page. Therefore, we need a feature to showcase/redirect to these projects without publishing them ourselves.

As of today, such a feature does not exist on itch.io. We have already done this once for a project by contacting the support team at itch.io (see attached image). However, it would be great if this became a feature so we didn't have to bother you for every single project. Here is a list of what we think should be included in this feature for showcasing each project:

  • an image or GIF of the game
  • title
  • name of the developer (=owner of the itch.io page)
  • genre
  • possibility to write a short description
  • and a hyperlink on the image/title to the owner's page that opens in a new tab

Thanks for your consideration! In case you need to get in contact with us or ask for more information, you can send us an email at label@colognegamelab.de.

Moderator

Yes, you can. Simply use collections.

(Students could also publish games on their accounts, and add yours as a contributor. Then you could showcase their games in the main section of your profile. But that would give you admin rights over all those game pages, so that's probably not good.)

The issue with collections is that it is not shown in the main section of the profile, and whatever text or info we add to those games is also not shown (unless you open the collection's link separately, which then takes you away from the profile and whatever info is there).

We might try the contributor approach though. Thanks.

Did you try to actually edit the html of your itch page? As far as I know, you can just showcase them with regular html. Put a picture, link, blurb and so on. There is a button to switch the profile to html. And if needed you could ask for css permission.

Switching from collection to being contributor and have games listed this way would only net you the one liner short desription that is still not editable by you for the page to be a blurb. It is just the regular short description. And is even cut off depending on screen size of the player. It is literally one line, two at the most and as wide as the game cover.

Oh, and you should encourage your students to crosslink to your profile. None on your collection do that. And only one mentions that it was a student project. It might be like being taken to school by your mum and being seen by your friends while she wipes the dirt out of your face ;-)

You give contradictory information. Either you are the publisher or you are not. There is no such thing as publisher/developer distinction on itch. There are only publishers. And most of them are also the developer.

The role of a publisher is precisly to publish. If you encourage students to self-publish, you literally do not publish them.

If you do not "take ownership" to use this term, the games are not under your umbrella, not under your label, not published by you, have not your seal of quality control, as you have literally no influence over the game's publication or presentation.

Presenting them on your creator profile is no better or worse than any fellow gamer presenting his own favorite game list in a public collection named "Has my seal of approval".

You can edit your collection to be in list view to show bigger blurbs and advertise the collection perma link. That does not look good for bigger collections though, and grid view has a blurb as well.  Should you have any followers they will get notification if you put a game on collection, but not if the game gets updates. Space on your profile page is limited, if you showcase collections there. It is 20 games in side scroll with a link to the whole collection above.

Look here for examples. https://itch.io/feed?filter=collections

And of course, you can and should showcase them on your own website. There is no promotion on Itch, like there is on Steam. Games you "publish" will not get any attention whatsoever, just because they are endorsed and visible on your profile page. You are not a social media influencer.

You can embed a link to the project on your site.

https://itch.io/docs/creators/widget

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