itch.io - indie game hosting!

[leafo]

Hello everyone!

I've just finished making a new site for hosting indie games. It's called itch.io. Essentially, if you've ever heard of Bandcamp, it's that but for hosting games.

http://itch.io

It's a site for uploading for creating customized game pages where people can download your game with a pay what you want model. As a game dev you upload the files for your game, upload some screenshots, then set a minimum price (which can be 0 if you want your game to be free). Then you can customize your game's page by changing text, colors, font, and images.

I think the pay what you want model is really powerful for indie games. I assume most people will set the minimum price to 0 because they don't expect to make any money off of their games. But with something like this, if someone really enjoys what you have created they can give back to you what they think is fair. Pretty cool, eh? Of course if you do intend to make money off of your game, you can still use the site because all the annoying payment infrastructure and file hosting is handled for you!

I've seen a few other indie game marketplace sites but I've been disappointed in them because there is just too much crap on the game pages. Big logos for the site itself, instead of the game, unimportant things like comments and ratings, and just poor user experience. I tried to make something clean and focused. The page you create is just about your game.

I've got a lot of ideas to expand it, but the basic idea is fully functioning. Here's a screenshot of the game page editor for one of my Ludum Dare games:



And here's the link to the actual page: http://itch.io/g/leafo/x-moon

Payments are currently handled by PayPal. It's the only thing I've had the time to implement at the moment, but I'd like to add a bunch more payment methods. Right now I have it set up to take 10% of all transactions as a fee for hosting. I'm honestly not sure of this number. I wouldn't mind lowering it for people especially if you help me test the site out! (Everything is also in USD at the moment, I'll add support for other currencies as I figure this stuff out)

Also, if you've got a finished game and you're serious about distributing it here I'll help you make a pretty game page. I have custom CSS disabled on the game page editor by default for security reasons until I write a sanitizer, but I'll enabled it for you so you can make even cooler layouts.

This is pretty much the first place I've announced this site. I just finished it in the past few hours. If you get any errors or problems please tell me! There is a support link on the bottom which emails me, or you can just email me at leafot @ gmail.

I'd love any feedback, whether you plan to use the site or not.

Thanks!

[Kyrremann]

Just wanted to say that I think it looks rather spiffy and cool! I'm a frequently user of Bandcamp and I really like their design choices.

One thing I noticed is that there is no pages for users. So if I want to check out other games you had made, I would probably visit this page "http://itch.io/g/leafo" but it doesn't exist.
Other then that it would be nice to be able to go to the front page after I've logged in. It's not that interesting to see my own profile page.
Have you also thought about adding a search function?

[leafo]

Yeah, I think there's a lot I can do for discovering content that I haven't done yet just because the database of games is completely empty. Pages for users are next on my list (along with subdomains).

I plan to enhance the logged in homepage with some statistics, so hopefully it won't be so empty for long.

[Davidobot]

Looks neat! I'll try it as soon as I finish my game!

[mickeyjm]

Looks nice, if i ever finish a game to a good enough standard (Read: If i ever finish anything that isnt a test, Proof of Concept or library) I will upload my creations there.

Unfortunately I can't actually legally sell my games via paypal for 2 more years :S (Im only 16).

Planned features look nice though, keep it up!

[Davidobot]

Can you view other pages created by the people or do they need to give you the link to visit them? Made my own page: http://itch.io/g/davidobot/quest-of-dan ... s-gemstone

[Roland_Yonaba]

I love the design. It is simple yet effective. Great work on this.
I think you should have mentionned this blogpost explaining in tech. details how this website was born: Introducing itch.io

I have a some questions/suggestions. Even though I am pretty sure you already thought about most of them. Anyway, i'll just throw them on the table:
Would it be possible, to have a list of all the games hosted displayed somewhere ?
And be able to browse, by category/tags ?
A search module would be a lot helpful too, when the number of hosted games will grow.
Actually, are you providing some stats for each projects ? Number of views, downloads count ?
I can see that when creating a porject page, the game archive is uploaded ? Actually, are there some file size limits ?

[Lafolie]

Hi leafo, as ever this project of yours is inspiring. I'd like to address an issue here though. I think that the images of the index page should link to larger versions, or - ideally - link to the page they depict. It really needs an example page.

[veethree]

I'm itching to try this once i get a game finished...(pun intended)

[monsieur_h]

Looks clean and dead simple. Exactly what I was looking for my next game.