I'm really encouraged to see this discussion, and while most of my potential suggestions have already been covered above, I just wanted to voice my support for this direction.
1) Make the tags freeform
Tags are already freeform! We have a list of suggested tags that we encourage people to use though, it's easier to find certain things when people agree on tagging conventions. This topic is about finding the right tags to suggest to people creating tabletop games and the like.
2) Sidestep the media-bound classification
Tags can be anything, but at the moment it's impossible to browse all content by a tag, you have to select a primary content type (game, book, etc.). I'll think about this for a future update.
I would love to see Itch grow as a broad tabletop/analog games community space. We would benefit from itch's established moderation practices and opportunities for intersection with digital games creators.
Thinking about not only the fact that we need a space, but what that space sense was in concrete terms, it strikes me that rich and vibrant online RPG communities like the one that formed on G+ (or historically, places like The Forge) have two qualities:
1. A shared and common space where a diversity of voices can be heard. That is, a shared timeline or a forum for people to speak into, where what you can see and who can see what you say is not silo-ed by who you follow and who or how many follow you.
2. Are driven primarily by conversation between and with designers, focused on facilitating the creative excitement, cross-pollination, and sense of possibility (see point 1) which motivates people in the community to become designers themselves and make new games.
I believe that these two are some of the major contributing factors to creating a rich creative environment for new forms of play to develop, and it is new forms of play which expand and enrich the community.
So I'm really excited about this forum!
I’d also like to have the ability to set prices like this for sub-products on the same page, rather than setting price levels.
Evil Hat has a specific rubric for PDFs of our RPG books, in that we price them at 1/2 of the cover price of the physical product. Not applicable to all publishers, of course!
We had a similar issue with comics and we ended up coming with something that would scale your image to fit the cover while preserving the aspect ratio, and adding a blurred background behind it. You can see some examples here: https://itch.io/comics
If you think that's a good solution I can enable it for the physical games section.
It looks like the bulk of the comics on the first few pages opted to resize to fit itch's formatting, but for those physical game creators who don't want to do that, the blurred background is a good solution.
Oh and to add to my own thought. Itch also has already integrated support with Patreon. A lot of supplement game content creators are on Patreon, so that's a win-win for them using itch to distribute.
Hey, so I was trying to set up a page for an RPG supplement earlier this week and one thing that stood out is that there's no (obvious?) way for me to do revenue sharing.
Aside from my tabletop development work I also write technical stuff and publish through Leanpub - one of the best features available there is the ability to add contributors to my books/projects and share revenue directly with those folks. Below is an example of the sort of UI I mean.
For a lot of us collaborating on projects it'd be super helpful to be able to do a transparent revenue split at the project level - this way we could say allocate 40% to the artist, 20% to the person who did layout, etc.
Another feature LeanPub has which I would love to see Itch adopt is the ability to earmark a percentage of royalties for non-profits. I am a contributing author/editor to a book series the royalties of which go straight to the non-profit instead of the authors - I would love to have a way to do this here for TTRPG projects.
Otherwise, pretty much echo everything else said in this thread and thanks for making an incredible platform!
This feature would help out a lot with a few groups I've been chatting with who are looking to get Coop-Style publishing together.
If I could mash like and get that to +100 I would.
This is a feature I know that's been requested before on itch. At one point, one of the itch developers previewed what it might look like on the site. Still hoping this becomes a real feature some day.
That's a really interesting idea. It also allows smaller businesses (like me!) to avoid having to deal with independent contractor/royalty payments to other artists, which means less tax paperwork. I'd be more willing to collaborate if this was a feature. Great idea!
Yeah, I gotta fully get behind this as my highest priority. I realize that doesn't mean a lot since I haven't published yet, but that's exactly why I haven't: if I can split royalties with my cousin (who I collaborate on pretty much every project with), that would be a huge hurdle. Running the finances otherwise is a pain.
There's a dedicated thread for revenue splitting you may want to chime in on then! I think if we can get some more of the attention as seen here, it might help them see it as something we need tackled.
https://itch.io/t/391522/split-revenue
I would push for Analog as the top category. I think it fits nicely and you can easily have two forums next to each other and people know what you're on about (i.e. Digital Game Dev and Analog Game Dev, etc)
On a customer level though, are most going to know what analog means? I'm mid 30's now, so it's a no brainer for me. But that's not necessarily a term that's thrown around in regular chat anymore. I'd worry that we're losing some of the customer base by calling it something people won't know and therefore won't click on. I think physical games would be ok if it was fleshed out and it had more of a prominent role on the front page with the rest of the digital content.
I'm not sure physical games is any clearer than analog games. Physical games may seem misleading when most of these games are likely distributed as PDFs (and they may be played e.g. in an online chat), and I've seen analog games used elsewhere whereas I haven't seen physical games anywhere else.
yep, that was my thought process to push for TTRPG (the tabletop part identifies as "something you play at the table" ), maybe "Tabletop + LARP" or use the "+" to identify as "there is more stuff related but we didn't knew how to categorize it".
It seems that there is no a super-easy answer (in certain light, this is good, this is a very diverse hobby even in outputs produced)
I don't mind a TableTop + category, I think that could be a good way of saying "here's the main category, but it also has other misc games that don't fit" (LARP, etc).
I don't think these terms are very useful for a lot of stuff, and as far as tabletop adventuring and role playing games go most would fit into all these categories or none. I like where you are at with aggregation though!
That would be something pretty dependent on play style which is unique from table to table. As far common language game terms are defined 'strategy' has a pretty clear meaning at the table and in computer games. Likewise, I can see some utility in calling D&D a dice game, but it is nothing like another dice game I love which is cee-lo.
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I agree with CONE in that the list tends to be non-exclusive, and in a sense, a bit too abstract for customers. I think more precise terms are ok, even if that means we have more categories.