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I don't think this is a good idea.

If someone wants to be updated about your work, there's already plenty of ways to do it. The follow feature is one of them. I don't see how  "this is itch.io's building their relationship with their costumers, not me" makes sense. Your followers follow you for news about you and get notified about your work.

What I understand is that you want a direct way to contact people who tried, but didn't like your work enough to follow you (or subscribe to your mailing list, discord, etc.), which is absurd. Downloading something does not mean you will like, care or support it. Most of the games I download on itch I get just to see if I'll like them. Giving away my private information is absolutely not a commitment I'm willing to make just to try something out.

I get that demanding feedback instead of money sounds great, but I don't see how it could be enforceable. I think the best you can do is ask nicely. 

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I don't see how  "this is itch.io's building their relationship with their costumers, not me" makes sense. Your followers follow you for news about you and get notified about your work.

If this is true, than why they highlight other's project inside this email, an email people get because they followed me, not these other highlighted projects? There is absolutely nothing wrong with this btw, but this proves my point that this feature is a way for itch.io to build their relationship, not mine.

What I understand is that you want a direct way to contact people who tried, but didn't like your work enough to follow you (or subscribe to your mailing list, discord, etc.), which is absurd

You understood it wrong, then. This that you suggest that I'm trying to do we all already do, we can contact people on twitter to get them into our landing page, which main responsibility is to convince people that get on it that the project is good enough to deserve a chance, by downloading it.

My concern is to maintain that interest and to show people that, if they liked that first impression, and liked the iteration of the project they experimented at that point in time, maybe they will like to try the updated version, or another files, or tiers of that project.

Most of the games I download on itch I get just to see if I'll like them

If you like to do that, is OK.. But most people, if not convinced by the landing page, won't even try.

That's why we have so many features to try to show them the project's value, using video trailers, screenshots, about session, etc...

If the games you download didn't convince you just with their landing page, this is another discussion. My point, again, is: if someone downloaded the project they may have some interest on it, and I want to show them more about the project.

Giving away my private information is absolutely not a commitment I'm willing to make just to try something out.

Then don't try it and don't provide it, is that simple. I mean, is not as if your email wasn't available already to itch.io, you already made that commitment, you got a user after all, for free, look how funny.

Just to make it clearer, what I am asking is not for itch.io to just print your email to my computer and provide me a plain text file with all emails of everyone that downloaded my projects.

My request is: itch.io already has a built-in emailing tool, but this tool doesn't send emails to people that didn't pay for the project, so my request is: this feature could send email to these people.

For that, I don't even have to know your email, you are not exposing yourself to me all I'm asking is to add the group of people that got a files of the project for free to that feature as well, instead of just those who paid


Right now, when you download a free game Itch doesn't require you to be signed in or to enter an email, so they literally don't know the email addresses of free players. There could be a per-game setting to force people to enter one, but in my opinion that'd be pretty annoying and I'm glad they don't currently support it.

if you don't have an email, then there is nothing to be collected then...my point is not to enforce anyone to provide anything, I really don't know your guys' point. Are you really getting the context of what I'm asking? Because it seems that you are throwing points that makes no sense for the sake of what I'm asking in this post.

There could be a per-game setting to force people to enter one

As I said, I am not asking to force people to provide their emails otherwise they won't download the game, if this was the case I could just put the games paid and make a 100% permanent sale or make an unlimited Reward that costs $0 and turn on "New purchases & downloads require a reward", this would do the trick, but that's not what I want.

As I said, if itchio already has their email and we have a tool to send email to people that downloaded our game, why not include free downloads as well?

I think you're clinging too much to the interest a person gives when it downloads your work. If they don't decide to keep tabs on you after downloading, then I think it's better to let go. From what I gather, you want to employ an "aggressive" marketing strategy I disagree with and find kind of disrespectful.

I don't mind Itch having my email, because I trust them to handle it carefully. Allowing the feature you're asking for would at least damage that trust. I've played a lot of games here. I don't want every dev to have a direct line to my private email.

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You can disagree with whatever you want, that's your opinion, this doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to do just because you have that opinion. But to make this clear, that's not what I'm trying to implement, this is already implemented by itch.io, so they already have what you so called "aggressive" marketing strategy built-in and already being used, if you disagree with that, there is an option on your profile to turn this off, and if I remember correctly, will turn off the emails from that feature I pointed as well, simple like that, actually I think you can even turn Itch emails on and updates from games off...

See, I think you are just putting your bias without actually thinking, just to be that "ohh I praise so much my internet privacy" standard. What I mean by that is: this tool that I pointed is a tool from Itch they are in power of deciding what this tool does or not, for instance, we can't send more than 1 email/week per project, they can turn this down to 1/mo for free downloads if they want. This is all already controlled by Itch, which you claim to trust, and thus this is not a "direct line to your private email", Itch is under all the control of this tool, if I send something using this tool I am almost sure they have access to that content, so if you trust Itch, you are already trusting what I'm proposing here, this is already available, this is already being used, I guess that never annoyed you, so why bother now? At the very worse scenario you can have a "player email" that you never look at, and tell itchio to use this email for updates 🤷🏻

I mean, all I want is to include free download to that feature.

Contrary to what you seem to believe, my replies were well thought out and I still think they stand.

I guess I wouldn't mind it being implemented if I could disable the feature for all games. A bad feature you can disable is still a bad feature though.

It can be good or bad, depend on the perspective, for me it is good :)

This is really bad, not only the creator could use it to mass market like steam but the emails can be faked. there are too many programs and websites that can create fake emails. So this won't work as a customer or a creator.

What do you mean by email can be faked? That doesn't make sense, as I say, people can turn off this feature and is not a prerequisite to download the game to have an email, please read the whole thread.

It doesn't mean scammers wont use it to take emails and as email can be faked, all anyone needs is a free domain that can be thrown away, its very common thing to do.

Please read the thread, we don't have access to the email, is all on itch.io's server.