Personally, I strongly dislike things that ask me to reveal personal information in exchange for something "free". I'll point out that Itch already has a "follow" system that sends email notifications. Maybe they could add a section to the homepage that would show updates/devlogs from games that you had previously played?
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Itch.io already collect this information, this is how they send these digests through the follow feature, so why not allow me to as well?
The follow feature is not the same, this is itch.io's building their relationship with their costumers, not me.
I think that if I am providing something for free, in monetary sense, I should definitely get something in exchange. It is easy to get out there taking everything for free with no commitment.
The only other way to actually get something in return for people using your assets and playing your game would be to fallback this trade of favours, to a mere product-costumer relation, making everything paid, which is something that I would like to avoid because I know not everyone is able to pay, and especially, not everyone will understand the value of the product at first glance, preventing a healthy relationship to happen because of a monetary barrier.