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every software

while games can be classified as software, i make a serious distinction between  most software and most games.

most games on itch are single time encounters. download. play. move on. it is rare to immediatly download a new update, even if it comes out monthly or even weekly. i can update it, when i feel like playing it again. no need for any update companion scheduler. there are only so many games I could "really" follow, like installing an update when it comes out.

and if you have an account for some webservice, you are prime target for hacking.

but the bottom line for me is, i do not even trust bigger companies to manage an update service, so i absolutly do not trust a single dev with it, and to make it worse, in most cases i do not see the need for such a service to begin with - not for the type of content we are talking about.

to put into another perspective, from what i saw on itch so far,  game devs do not even bother to make their games installable. rightly so, because it is not needed. unzip and you are done. in ye olden days thsi would have been called portable. the olden days where itsy bitsy tool devs had installation routines, routinly bundled with adware and leftovers when you deinstalled.  I saw about once a game with some kind of "companion" app. Maybe twice. And it was basically to ensure some kind of drm by way of a launcher/updater. (still talking about offline indie games)

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If I was planning to make a one-play-time game, yes I'd not bother to not even make a installer for it, the project I'm working on atm is supposed to have at least 10hr of gameplay, that's why I think the user would be plased not have to relocate his save files everytime there's a new version of the game. That was one of the critiques about itch.io, I got from people is steam: it's hard to manage updates.

I myself am not a fan of installers either, so I understand an auto-update could trigger some disconfort in some people, thanks to your input, I will prompt a message asking if the user wants the game update itself once a new version is out there, if not I'll simply prompt a link to the download page.

the user would be plased not have to relocate his save files

Huh? save game locations are to be put into a user specific folder, not the game folder.

You seem to reinvent the wheel a lot.   As a rule of thumb, if no one else is doing something or everyone is doing things a certain way, there usually is a reason. It might be a stupid reason, of course. Or a limitation of some engine.

Like in this thread, the overly big games. The offenders are usually visual novels with heaps of pictures.  If those are lossless output of their rendering chain they are needlessly big and could be made a lot smaller. But here we go back to the reasons why I would not trust a single dev with an updater companion. It is different skills.  Some of the devs are not capable or aware how to make their games reasonably small. Or they just do not care. Or they do, but in a different way. They hear lossy compression and fear for their art to be diminished, or so i imagine.

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Huh? save game locations are to be put into a user specific folder, not the game folder.

Sorry, I was not clear, the actual save file is in a user local folder, but a huge portion of the game is procedurally generated, thus needs to be cached. Whether I could also save that in a user folder or not is a good question, I think it would be better to not do that so the loading time would be only in the first time anyone runs the game.

limitation of some engine

That's the reason I've seen dev. complaining in another thread in steam, I'm making my own engine so reinventing the wheel some times with more flexibility is a common thing to me.

And yes, I really don't think my game will even be larger than 1GB, as I said most of the data is procedurally generated in the first time you run it, so the actual download size will not be that big.