From a technical standpoint itch.io seems crazy good, the ratio free to paid games/assets is crazy in my mind. How does itch host so much free suff and not go bankrupt?
The storage cost alone for all the games must be 10s of thousands of dollars a month. I would not be angry with leafo if he set a minimum revenue sharing percentage to 10% or even 15%.
Yes I think this could be it, I've since learned that you can get quite cheap storage from places like bunny.net for like $1000 for like 40TB or blackblaze which offeres $6 per TB examples:
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing
It could be possible to get 100 TB of storage under $10,000 per month. You may also get more discounts for being a customer that uses a lot of storage. It is still fascinating how itch functions.
Very carefully. ;)
From a technical standpoint itch.io seems crazy good
This is true. I know I like to complain about the lack of multiple filters, but itch is exceptionally good, from a technical standpoint. If you look at pretty much any other site, it is drowning in javascript bloat, but itch has none of that garbage slowing it down. It's simple, it's fast. As a programmer, this is how I like to do things. Efficiency is everything.
It does seem that the site needs more staff. But as a business owner myself (really small, in my case) I think I can guess the reasons for that.
(seriously though, multiple tag exclusion would be great :D)
Many of those free games include an option to donate, so there is still a bit of revenue coming in there. I'd be curious to know how many games are actually free with no donation option, although that section probably also includes the highest percentage of unfinished or extremely low quality content (and therefore not much bandwidth usage)
One thing I forgot to say, at 10% default earnings on every sale, even with a non-optimised earnings model, I would guess that itch is probably raking in the dough.
That said, it seems a standard for every second half-finished and broken game to be ~700MB, so yeah, on consideration I share in your wonder.
