You could do something like, the first 5 levels are free or something, and then you could have a link in your game that redirects to a site where they can buy something like a key, and with that key they can unlock the rest of the levels... just an idea, hey that's how it works in the mobile market isn't it?
Viewing post in Selling web games
This has several problems imo. For a starter I have no idea how to do that. It’s not my expertise, I’m sure I could figure it out, but these are things I would like a platform holder to take care off, since they can provide a better, more secure version than me.
There is also the problem that if I would do that, itch wouldn’t get a cut from it, which sounds like a positive but if everyone does that we’ll soon no longer have itch.io and that would be sad :(
Not a real problem, but the last thing is that my suggestion is simply more convenient and easy to understand for devs.
Your example would be very easy to do with it, just upload a version of your game with only 5 levels as the demo, and upload the full version of the game with every level as the paid version. No need to setup a website with payment services myself, make a key generation thingy, etc.
The goal should be to
- Make it possible for devs to sell web games and keeping their games accessibility and platform agnostic.
- Make it easy and none intrusive for paying players so that they get the best experience and can play the game on every platform that has a browser without paying extra for each platform.
- Making it (optimally) impossible or as annoying as possible for websites to steal the devs browser game to put it up for free. Goal number 2) should take priority over 3)
With your suggestion the developer might as well put the game up for free, you’ll find that key on google day one. The proposal I made would be none intrusive to players who own the game, they just need an itch account. It’s still not really safe from people who want to steal the game, but itch can make it annoying enough to keep this to an acceptable minimum.