would also donate or pay some yearly fee to keep ads off my own download pages!
4 years ago (+3)
Thanks for the offer. I’ve frequently considered the idea of asking for money (whether it’s one time donations, or monthly subscriptions, etc) as a way to cover costs but I’m never really sure of the viability of it. Here are a few considerations:
- I think asking for donations for a company that already has a monetization model creates a weird relationship between the user and the platform. I don’t want to be selling pity. Do we offer functionality or something? I don’t want developers to be charged, I want distribution to be open as possible. In the the past if people asked to donate I just suggest that they go buy some games.
- Our bandwidth costs grow have grown substantially with the platform, around $30k a month. Running a donation program to cover that is a huge undertaking. A few people sending in 20 bucks a year isn’t going to have the necessary impact. We would have to grow out a program to match our scale and that would take a lot of resources.
- This obviously is a problem of our own making, not to pick on anyone in specific, but as an example you have a lot of first time developers uploading large Unreal engine games with prefab assets :). There’s a wide range of content being uploaded and downloaded. I don’t want to create a system where people have to be approved to distribute their work. (And yes we have default limits that we adjust accordingly, that already takes up a bit of our support team’s resources). The goal is to find a balance between how we monetize covering the costs to provide the service we have to everyone indefinitely and independently.
- In the realm of websites that show ads, I think what we’ve tried here is pretty tame comparatively. It appears in a very limited area, to a subset of users, with only one ad unit, and using Google as the provider. I think it’s easy for people to jump to conclusions: if we see it here soon it will be everywhere, but no, that’s not the case. (Of course we want to ban any fake/scammy ads that appear though)
- I also want to end with: I know there are a lot of other ways we could try to monetize but they cost a lot of engineering resources and time and aren’t always guaranteed to work (aka our job board), so that has to be taken into consideration if you’d like to share some ideas.
4 years ago(+3)
Again, thank you for the detailed and considerate response. Perhaps this is solvable from a graphics design/affordances approach and can avoid almost any engineering costs. I mocked up a version that shows what I'm thinking. Separating the ad with white space and a bar so it is not associated with user's "where do I click?" thinking. Add a redundant but visually dominant Download button with an icon that suggests its purpose. That way even if the user can't or won't read they are less likely to click on the wrong thing even if it is a phishing button. Last, a bit of text explaining the purpose of the ad so it doesn't look like Itch is going the way of Sourceforge, Neopets, or Download.com and that this is a limited and mutable feature of the site. Logged in users can retain the old download window, it is perfect as is. Perhaps some version of this would work?
I appreciate you and the invaluable service Itch provides to the indie community. Thank you for your hard work and attention to this.
re
4 years ago (+1)
Thanks for the suggestions. I would not add another download button. This particular dialog has appeared because the download has already started, it is confusing to then present a new download button to the user.
4 years ago(+2)
Thanks for the detailed reply and all your work you put in this platform! Since you've asked for some ideas:
- itch.io purple - $5 a month for a purple name, purple border around your profile pic and a good feeling ;)
- sourceforge seems to be successfull in keeping misleading ads of their download pages, maybe they have some infos on how to achieve this
- itch.io awards - you can award games with special badges for gamefeel, funny story, etc, awards cost $2-$10 and revenue will be split with creator
- probably needs some kind of itch.io coins that you can exchange for awards because of transaction costs
- creator can opt out of awards, award categories?
- reddit could be of inspiration here
4 years ago (+1)
I think itch should allow for donations. If you guys didn't have the open revenue sharing model I think it would be weird but as you do I think it would be okay. Especially if it's something simple like getting a badge on the forums and a role in the Discord server. Maybe there could even be a cool little tag on games that says the dev supports itch.io. Regardless though even if it doesn't bring in a lot of extra income it's better then nothing.
For cost saving measures I'd look into web torrent. You might be able to make downloads torrent based which would save a lot of bandwidth costs. You could also offer a subscription if someone doesn't want to use a torrent for a few dollars. Another cost saving measure would be to use hashes to prevent duplicated files being stored.
Random revenue ideas:
- itch.io based merch
- let people pay to use their own domain name you could do a whole thing with that where you effectively host indie dev's game sites and charge for it
- let devs advertise their game on the website
- let users buy rewards for games or unlock custom emojis for the comment/forum section on game pages (obviously you'll only get what the dev is sharing though)
- while this wouldn't bring in revenue immediately I think letting users split the revenue from sales (similar to a bundle but on a single page) could attract a lot people as it makes working with teams a lot easier
- I saw there was work for some api that allowed for in app purchases if that was finished it could help with revenue
- letting users donate directly to devs could help (something Patreon-esk I suppose)
- you could attract more people by promoting games that can only be found on the platform
- this one is crazy but the community could create something similar to Steam OS, that could attract more attention . You could then sell flash drives with it installed or raspberry pi's
Anyways I know that's a lot of random ideas but I hope you guys figure something out because I love itch.io and I don't think I would be even attempting game dev without it.
Also is there anyway I can help?
4 years ago(+1)
I get where you’re coming from but offering premium options for money also means locking them away behind a paywall for a certain subset of developers and other artists. Particularly the kind that have to create some kind of fundraiser every time any part in their (hand-me-down-)computer breaks, that it would be more expensive than a new mouse…
Certain people might think having a computer automatically means somebody would have enough financial cushioning to afford a monthly subscription to something that directly affects their (second) job, but there are software developers, game developers, and various other artists out there that are keenly aware of the prices of food items at the supermarket.
P.S.: I do not blame you for trying to help or for maybe not knowing these things. Sometimes something about the way I write seems to give the impression that I’m angry. Right now I’m not.
4 years ago(+2)
Sorry if it came off that I'm okay with putting everything behind a paywall. More what I meant for that is someone could pay itch.io to run their infrastructure for them. The last thing I want is itch.io pay walling things.