I'm just a developer. I've been making games for nearly 20 years, so I don't get emotional about business. It was commonplace to freely distribute Flash games. As a developer, you should intentionally make games that will be picked up by other sites, more players and more money. If someone wants to "steal" my games and iframe them on their site. Please do so, I would be very thankful. The increase in players offsets any tiny bandwidth cost.
Maybe itch can not monetize games that are iframed? I don't work there, so I can't offer much advice. Sounds like a technical problem with the business model. Blocking distribution is causing losses for both itch and the developers that use it.
We do allow links and advertisements inside games. Blocking distribution only gives short term value and eventually results in publishers removing those games. If there is no value for the publishers to publish games, there is little reason to maintain those links to itch and the developers that use this site. Like I said before, we made the same mistake, so I'm speaking from experience, not just self interest.
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I added my game, so now technically itch is hotlinking Y8. 🤣 https://eddieone.itch.io/banjo-panda Thank you
I’m sorry, I completely misread your post. I thought you were someone associated with Y8 since your account was just created and didn’t have any games on it. If they are your games we give you a tool to add iframe embeds on other sites, check it out here: https://itch.io/updates/introducing-game-embeds
Really sorry about the confusion, I’ll edit my original post to clarify.
As a developer, you should intentionally make games that will be picked up by other sites, more players and more money
It depends on what kind of developer you are and what your goals are. This is not true for everyone. In fact, it’s not true for the vast majority of people who upload html5 games to itch.io. Additionally, we took issue with the hotlinking specifically. These other portals could take the games and host them themselves, but they took the laziest approach possible.
Blocking distribution only gives short term value and eventually results in publishers removing those games
I’m not sure what you mean by short term value here. But in any case, we don’t work with publishers who mass publish HTML5 games for portals. We are a self publishing platform for developers to use directly. We want developers to have control over where their property is published.
If a developer wants to build a game packed full of ads, and get it loaded into as many portals as possible that’s fine for them. But, that has to be a choice the developer makes. I hope you understand out stance. Thanks
You are not a 'developer' you are a plagiarist and a coward. Don't try to hide behind the 'but i'm a developer too look at my EXPERIENCE' garbage.
Attribution is REQUIRED for anything linked to or used. Your website(s) do the absolute bare minimum they can get away with because you know most indie devs will either not know or not care to file DMCA takedowns on every web portal that plagiarizes a hosted version of their game.
Web portals are trash and always have been malware-ridden stains on the internet. Gamers use Steam, GoG, itch, and other distribution stores to play games instead. If people want plagiarized spyware-encumbered "free" games, they realize that those have almost all moved to mobile (the new dumping ground unfortunately).
Speak for yourself and never presume to speak for other devs. Plagiarism is one of the biggest problems still infesting the internet.