now realizing that TMKF doesn’t read anything but the axe, this feels like talking behind his back.
Hey @BIGHEADMODE, the above post is me making fun of you in what I hope is a lighthearted and not-at-all mean-spirited way.
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For me (as someone who has made games, and sold one on almost a dozen different services), itch is the best platform. I don’t think their app is great, but it does what it needs to do. I’m honestly past launchers at this point - I’ll pin game executables to my start bar before messing around with a launcher.
As for more launchers (and more marketplaces):
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Is it the best because you had the most financial success there or…? Wondering because I’m making a game myself (that won’t be allowed on itch probably but still curious)
It’s the most ethical choice, as far as I’m concerned.
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Not run by a right-wing shitlord (yes I have verified this)
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easiest to use from a developer perspective
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community features are optional per project
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your cut to itch.io is whatever you want it to be, from 0% to 100% and anything in-between
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great interface for setting up sales & discounts
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very customizable store pages
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very flexible payment options that support fully free, free/pwyw, pwyw with minimum, set price, content that unlocks at higher payment tiers, etc
It’s just, like, the best from a seller perspective. I haven’t made a ton of money there but I haven’t made a ton of money in general.
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That sounds great.
I’m probably the only person here who’s never bought a game on there, so I don’t have any experience in that regard. But then I don’t buy many games in general
I think itch is great and almost meaningless in the context of selling games; like this forum, it lives as a small community with shared values, but that scale contains the caveat ‘you don’t have an audience of a size to make money off of here’. And because of that they opt out of every problem Valve and others deal with; if itch became popular, it would have Valve-like problems – in other words, I don’t think itch has solved anything, but by remaining small it hasn’t grown into nasty problems.
I think a better way to think of itch may be to compare it to services like tumblr taking over personal art dumps; itch will host content that would otherwise go on a personal site, content that’s not really commercial, but it doesn’t support a person. You can, though, use itch + a micro-celebrity following on a place like twitter to build a Patreon, following the old adage that a niche needs a deeper relationship with their audience to survive.
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That’s a fair point, and itch doesn’t really have the staff or the resources to scale to Valve or even Discord size.
I should mention that itch also doesn’t have any curation or application process, which is good but also bad. The difference is that the itch front page IS curated. Still doesn’t take much to find the anime tiddy.
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Don’t sweat it!
I, of course, assume that whenever I’m not on screen people are daying, “Where’s TMKF?”
The real answer is Vito, though.
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the itch thing is true but i do think steam / the app store are weird in a way that’s distinct from just scaled-up versions of the problems inherent to any game store (the usual issues with discoverability and cynical advertising stuff and weird pirate clones etc).
i’ve worked with so many guys in my dayjob who’ve talked about putting a game on steam or the app store as if it meant scratching a lottery ticket rather than making something another human being would conceivably want to check out. it’s like the bigger these places get the greater the incentive is to just sort of surf on some intrinsic level of market volatility rather than actually make stuff for a specific audience. vgames as highfrequency stock trading.
not that this necessarily works (any more than lotto tickets do) and i can’t blame anyone for trying but there’s something so gruesome and alienating about the way human culture warps around the sheer density of capital embedded in these institutions (see also youtube, twitch etc). i don’t think a handful of huge companies fighting for this market will change much in the long run but a race to the bottom in platform cut is nice and hopefully there’ll be at least a brief, grudging moment of having to treat small developers and audiences as if they’re something other than captive staging grounds for increasingly hellish forms of speculation.
i do enjoy weird small-scale storefronts like GOG back when it was primarily old DOS games so idk maybe if the game launcher hegemony gets smashed we’ll see more things trying to eke out hyperspecific little spaces. “MANSION WORLDS - - your top stop for games about looking around an ornate mansion. check out our Nancy Drew / Pugsley’s Scavenger Hunt / Mansion Of Hidden Souls official Christmas bundle.”
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This isn’t a side effect, it’s the goal. At least, this review of Artifact makes a strong case for this:
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yeah, I was thinking of that article too (although I think that’s talking more about, like, large games trying to become platforms for these transactions rather than small games which themselves try to fill the same economic place within the platform as a team fortress hat - but maybe there’s not really a difference)
I remember looking around the steamworks forums and it was like this weird dark ages cult of primarily developers telling other developers what they thought steam wanted while actual steam representatives just appeared and disappeared on the sidelines to deny some of the more egregious claims. i do think steam and the rest of the big web platforms foster a certain amount of deliberate obscurity about their own processes, both for proprietary reasons and to avoid being held to account for what they’re actually doing. i don’t know if it’s a side effect or not that this also tends to produce this cringing courtier mindset of people frantically trying to anticipate the algorithm via animal entrails as if it were not designed by human hands but i doubt anyone at these places is losing sleep over it.
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It’s very similar to SEO-talk web developers and YouTube creators engage in constantly (excruciatingly).
I’m not sure how to solve it; anyone building a search wants to present the most likely intended result that organically matches ‘true’ popularity. Algorithms are flawed and a lot of this discussion is about finding the flaws so they can be exploited or, in mainstream creators, pitfalls avoided.
And how can the search creator with monopoly power over its content avoid creating what’s popular by virtue of leading people to what it thinks is popular? How is it not a hall of mirrors?
In our earlier, curated Steam world, this discussion was replaced by, what do you think Steam will like to see in a game to put on its store?
And before that, and eternally, we are always asking, is this something people want? Is this what they will want in 3 years?
And inside all of these questions is our artistic courage, our willingness and trust in making a decision because we think it’s right for the piece. And that’s always being negotiated but I think you have an unhealthy process if you don’t trust yourself less than 80% of the time, because your highest responsibility is to the True and the Beautiful.
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That’s a hell of a URL
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I guess I finally need an opinion now that Epic just bought out the exclusivity to 3 games I’m interested in.
So uhh, here it is: So long as EGS doesn’t delete my entire computer, I really don’t care!? I have no allegeance to Steam, and its garbage fire of a store. Valve should be commended for making a functional distribution platform that finally convinced a whole bunch of Japanese developers to bring games to PC, but they’re also the store that’s killing indie games, filling the store with obscene trash, and ignoring hate speech on their community forums.
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Killing indy games? Nah man, that’s where indy games get their shot.
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Will indy games get their shot? Or will they get shot? Stay tuned!
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obscene trash is indie.
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I’m pretty sure you mean Inti (Creates) 
I’ve got this weird feeling the next Xbox is just going to be a gaming PC in disguise (moreso than now, even) and you’ll be able to use all the third-party launchers and marketplaces like Steam, etc. I can’t imagine why Valve wouldn’t be in favor of this instead of another hardware boondoggle of their own, even if they have to share some profit with Microsoft.
If this did turn out to be the case I feel like that’d be a compelling value proposition for yours truly.
Remember when Steam was on PS3?