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
