Hello, I am trying to reach out to a game creator as I want to license his game and pay him money to use it, but there is no way to send a private message to him and even trying to find any public posting board to contact him is difficult. I can see he left one comment on someone elses game, so the only way I can see of contacting him is to reply on that message and hope he sees it. I saw an old thread of someone who raised this quesiton 7 years ago, and the reply was that you didn't want to set this up due to the risk of spam/unwanted messages/abuse. I want to feedback that this seems to me a major limitation and weakness of itch.io and is in this instance hindering game creators from opportunities to  sell their games/start partnerships/collaborations etc. There must be a simple solution such as each member has their own private message board where people can post comments to.

I have mixed feelings about this.

There are times where it would be nice to contact someone in private. But then I imagine what this feature would be used for. And I have seen many scams in open message system. Especially developers get scam offers often, that are tailored for small business. This one here should be a warning for all small content creators, not only games: https://pbfcomics.com/comics/hacked/

If the developer has no contact info, no socials on profile and project, maybe that developer does not want to be contacted.

That being said, if there is a project and that project has ratings enabled, you can write a review that is only shared with the developer, if your reviews are private.

For general collabs there is a message board here.

And if I remember correctly, some sort of profile message board might be considered for the future.

(oh, and if that project is licensable, there might be contact info in the downloaded project in a readme or some such)

At the bottom of the game, you have an area to leave messages, by default, if you write there, he will receive a notification.

Although it is public, it is a more specific area.

I'm assuming you've already looked, but many developers put their contact information, such as social networks, in their profile.