itch.io

We're in the second big historical gaming crisis with studios dying by the dozens, one big reason being the incredible price pressure that mainly Steam is putting on developers. ITCH is different and better with its adjustable revenue sharing and voluntary pay-more-for-this-game feature.

This should reflect in the search filter system. Currently, it seems to follow the prevalent idea, "Get it as cheap as possible!"

And what if I want to find games that are probably pretty sophisticated and thus more highly priced? ... Currently not possible. :(

From this game https://gl-studio.itch.io/liminal-state I opened one of its discussion pages, e.g. this one https://itch.io/t/4239858/what-do-i-open-it-with and then clicked the "Add to collection" button, typed a collection name (since my account is still empty), clicked "Private", and confirmed "Add to collection". The error message is probably not true, instead I believe it's a programming mistake: "We seem to be having server problems right now! Please try again later."

I clicked on the tab "Game" to get back to the main screen of this game. From there, "Add to collection" works fine. The screenshot shows a later (successful, aka failing) reproduction attempt.

Hm ... now I am getting "body: expected text between 1 and 20480 characters" error message when trying to post this. I will now delete the unimportant screenshot of the described collection creation attempt ... Does the image count for the amount of characters!? Are you counting the BASE64, by chance?

You may be right about that ...

This could still be avoided by setting it up differently. The HTML says

name="user[display_name]"

Guess Chrome is a bit overzealous with filling it out.

The question is, is this a common occurrence, and could it easily be avoided by e.g. changing the HTML name value?

When I go here https://itch.io/user/settings I find my email address in the "Display name" box (annotated as "Name to be shown in place of your username, leave blank to default to username").

I did not put it there. Turns out, this is a suggestion itch.io makes ... which would become public the moment I click "Save" at the bottom. This is a very easy mistake to make and clearly unintended by itch.io and definitely by the users.

If I enter a name here and save, that name is shown at the top of my profile. If I now remove that text and save, my profile shows the true user name again ... and the "Display name" box is again populated with the private email address. This is a serious issue.