All users in this thread have been successfully paid out. Please follow up with your associated support desk tickets if you have any other questions or concerns.
Thank you all for reporting your issue, and we're sorry for the snafu!
Issue resolved
Hello everyone,
I've sent a couple of emails to the support, posted on this forum and still, there is no answer from Itch and still no payout.
I can see that I'm not alone in this situation.
If you have the same issue, please reply in this thread. Maybe we could discuss it and maybe act on it, so the support can hear us and finally do something about it.
As for myself, I've already decided a couple of weeks ago to set the revenue share to 0%, until I've news from them and I receive the payment.
What do you guys think? Feel free to reply and suggest ideas in this thread.
I had similar issues, but recently got paid. Here is what I did, I'm not sure which of these helped.
- switched my payment option to go directly to Paypal so they no longer hold any money
- redid the tax information
- suggested on the forums that everyone in this situation should work together to make it into more of a story
- explained that I would be considering taking further action if the matter was not resolved swiftly
My feeling is that a combination of redoing the tax information and putting a little pressure is what helped. I don't think they are acting in bad faith, it's more that they do not seem to have the time and resources to deal with the issue properly. Clearly this is not good enough on their part, since the share they take from developers is ultimately what keeps them going.
Thanks a lot for your feedback!
I redid the tax info a couple of months ago. That was weird, because that was the first thing I checked when I realised the payout was kind of stucked. At that time the tax info was right. A few weeks later, it wasn't so I did it again.
Today I've made some changes in my settings because I noticed a (new?) error.
Apparently, there have been some issues with Paypal, and the "version" I was using so far was now considered obsolete. I had to reconnect to the "new" paypal. (-> account settings -> publisher -> payment processors).
I read your comment and went to check my “payment processors” and realized that my PayPal was also connected in “legacy” mode. 🤷♀️ I connected on the new mode and hope that means something.
Did this fix work for you at all?
It would be much easier if an automatic email were sent to inform us of these pending issues, or a text message explaining the necessary steps were sent. Or better still, a human being reading the emails and providing the essential support. So many better options than simply ignoring us.
We are not ignoring any users intentionally, we just have a small team and limited bandwidth. We are working very hard to address all of our users but we have a lot of users, and a lot of payouts to work through on a daily basis, with more issues to address as the days continue. We do sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and thank you a ton for your patience while we continuously work to address as many of our users' issues as possible.
For the sake of clarity, the delays are just due to a high volume of requests. We pay out hundreds of payouts per day, but we receive a huge volume of them per day as well. Additionally, we have many users who have been affected by tax information changes in the new year, leading to a ton of extra overhead that has made it difficult to address every user experiencing this issue in a timely manner. We are doing our best to work through our backlog while also constantly receiving new payout requests and support tickets, and we appreciate your patience!
For 40 days, however, my problem is more that I can't contact support, because I haven't updated the TAX information for too long (the output may not be available if you updated it later than 3 years ago), but you can't do this without contacting support. Support does not respond with anything other than the bot's auto-reply. At least thanks to the moderation of the forum, which says that it notifies the administration, but I did not see that this issue was resolved by anyone.
I don't mind giving back the interest to Itch. I consider this site to be unique and wonderful, so I am very saddened by the fact that such an excellent service does not clarify and makes people nervous and worried about the loss of their funds.
I will rely on the prudence of the itch administration. I want to continue working with them and am ready to wait for the issue to be resolved, however, it is extremely sad that the only one who answered me is the moderator (For which No Time To Play many thanks) and the users, but this at least slightly clarifies the solution to the problem. But I'll keep your advice in mind.
I'm also really saddened by the situation. Like you said, we could have at least received a message from their part (even if it's an automatic one) just to show their acknowledgment of the issue.
I feel like the bad guy, having to resort to such measures (i.e by putting the share to 0% until a reaction from their part). I really love Itch and the community around it, but leaving us into the void like this is for so long.. that's just so unfair. It really damaged my trust.
I hope there will be soon a viable solution for everyone. Maybe that situation was caused by some new issues. But those need to be investigated and definitely fixed.
We focus primarily on addressing support issues through our support desk, especially payment issues as they often involve the exchange of sensitive information that we don't believe should be discussed on a public forum for security reasons (both for us as the marketplace and for you as the seller).
We apologize again that we haven't been able to efficiently address your issue in a timely manner through the support desk but we appreciate your continued patience, and we don't expect you to continue to have payout issues once the tax information issue has been resolved.
Been 6 months without any response from them. Tax info is up to date. I have had to send an email threatening legal action if this isn't resolved. I imagine they expect nobody will ever follow through with it, but it's such an easy win that it's a no brainer.
Companies need to be held accountable. A delay of a month.... I can look past that. 6 months and multiple emails ignored... nah.
We understand your frustration, but we do not intentionally withhold funds for any of our users unless they have active support cases, are being investigated for fraudulent or otherwise illegal activity, or unless they have some other account issue that is preventing us from being able to complete payment. Any payment issue that is *not* one of those things is simply a result of a human mistake, or related to other issues that we may not be immediately aware of, such as users having invalid tax information that hasn't refreshed its status until we've gotten an opportunity to manually refresh it on our end.
We are working to improve both our speed and efficiency at resolving these issues, but we are naturally limited by the fact that we are a small team handling a lot of work, and we have to address support from a number of different avenues. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we continue to work through these issues and get as many of our users situated as we can!
It's been 52 days since we requested a payout, and it's still stuck in the "in-review" status. (Our tax validation status still says "Pending Validation") Sent two emails to support but got no response. I've seen people with longer delays. I suppose that they eventually received their payouts though? Because I haven't seen anyone mention not receiving payouts at all? If it's just a matter of waiting, it's fine, but what worries us is the uncertainty.
We have responded to your ticket, but for the sake of clarity to everyone else, any payout that is significant in either revenue or payment volume (especially both) is likely to experience delays, as the manual review process will naturally take longer when we have to sort through hundreds (in your case, thousands) of payments and ensure that all payments are legitimate and safe to fully process, especially as the rise of fraudulent activity on the internet has necessitated additional security measures. Thanks for your patience!
I was prompted to take the tax interview again, also according to the email I received it's necessary to update tax information every 3 years or so, maybe that's why others are having problemns, I think it's better to file a ticket and wait for a response than redoing the interview by yourself, since my status said "vaild" the whole time and changed to "invalid" just now, maybe, but it's better to ask support just to be safe.
Either way, thank you for the response.
The UI for tax information sadly does not update immediately and for some users may require a manual refresh on our end in order to begin processing new information or updating your information's status. Occasionally we may not know your payout has tax information issues until we have reached your payout in our queue and our delivery attempt fails. In these scenarios we will typically reach out to you about the problem, but occasionally the high volume of support requests and payout queues may result in some cases experiencing additional delays.
We definitely recommend that any time users update their tax information to contact us via the support desk about the change!
133 days for me. I tried redoing my tax info a couple of months ago, but not only is it still not validated, the tax info window straight-up says I haven't taken the interview since 2022??? I may need to swap to direct payments at this point, it's fucking ridiculous. Also, has anybody else noticed how the company has deliberately made it impossible to contact them? There's no phone number listed, and the only email is the bullshit automated support address.
The change is not retroactive; that's stated in the rules and has been discussed in other posts.
If someone purchased your product through Itch, they've already paid Itch, and the only way to withdraw that money is for Itch to pay you through the normal withdrawal process. Only new payments made after the change will go directly to you, because that person will be redirected to your PayPal account at the time of purchase, not to Itch.
We do not see any support desk emails from you, it's possible you reached out with an email not associated with your itch account. When sending support emails please ensure that you are contacting us from the correct email. If you would prefer to use your alternate email, we recommend pairing it to your itch account in order to avoid issues with verifying your identity.
Country of origin has no relation to payout delays, other than users who have entered tax information for their account that has resulted in an incorrect withholding rate (not hugely common, but it does happen).
A common thread for just about every user in this thread who have replied is outdated tax information that we were unfortunately unable to reach out to about the issue before the payouts became delinquent. This is an issue that has affected many users at the start of the year, enough that it's been challenging to contact every user who has the issue until it shows up in the payout backend or until we are notified of the issue by a support ticket or a moderator.
We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused, and we apologize that we haven't had the opportunity to make a larger statement on the issue, but please rest assured that we are constantly working to address these issues and get them sorted for everyone. Thanks again for your patience.
Thank you for being here and answering questions. Speaking only for myself, these explanations are enough to keep me satisfied for now. Allowing these explanations to arrive more quickly would certainly avoid all the worry.
Maybe an automatic email, a fixed text on the payout screen, or a message in the feed explaining the adverse situation could prevent a lot of tickets from being opened and reduce the workload.
It would also help if there were a clear explanation somewhere of the need to redo the tax interview and connect Paypal in the new mode, something we had to find out for ourselves and by reading each other's experiences here.
Note that we like Ichi.io very much, and what is worrying is the thought of having to abandon the platform due to a simple lack of communication.
We have plans to automate a fair amount of this process especially when it comes to sending emails to users who are experiencing tax information issues. Unfortunately at the moment we're limited in the rate at which we can accomplish such tasks due to our team size (leaf is currently our only programmer, and as he is also the head honcho of the site, he ends up taking up a significant amount of work that occasionally leaves him with little energy to work as efficiently as he would like), and so for the time being we've just gotta work with what we've got. We really appreciate your patience and understanding as we continue to work our best through these issues, and we hope to be able to push out some updates soon that can make this process a little less of a pain for all involved.