itch.io

There is a pricing feature that is called individually priced files.

It basically is causing a lot of confusion and no one uses it "correctly", since there is no clear cut use case. The biggest problem is, that a buyer cannot increase the payment level. So if you have a 10 $ file and someone paid 10, they can access it. If you have yet another file on that project that is 20 $, they cannot access it. But they also cannot access it, if they pay another 10 $.

Since Itch has no dlc mechanisms that I know of, people use it for dlc. But as explained above, it is quite frustrating and misleading for that scenario. Or they use it to have a public and a paid version on one project page. The "demo" mechanism would be misleading here, since a public version is a complete game, and a demo is a very restricted portion of a game. If you have a free game, you maybe want to be seen among the free games for advertising. But you also want to offer your upgraded version as a sort of dlc or just like you see all those apps on mobile platform where you have the in-app purchase method to upgrade it.

At the very least Itch should make it impossible to have more than one level of "individually" priced files. Even the term is misleading. It sounds like you can buy the files individually. Or fix it, that you can upgrade your level. Or generally overhaul the feature.

So if that dev you spoke of used that feature to implement a minimum price and raised that later, yes, people will not have access to the higher price tier. He should have made that price level the minimum price and ditch the individual pricing scheme. So anyone that paid any amount previosly would have access to all current files and future updates.