Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

“More Is Better” Game Jam – and More (is better?) at Itch.io

Posted by Rampant Coyote on May 4, 2015

Okay – first things first, there’s a game jam this week hosted by Sophie Houlden, the “More is Better” jam. It’s basically about cranking out as many games as possible, quality be damned. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that, but if the goal is to work on your rapid prototyping skills, maybe this is the jam for you. Emphasis on the rapid basic development skills rather than the iteration / refinement stuff. It’s all about quantity.

But this throws some of itch.io‘s changes lately. And I’m impressed. It is no secret that I’ve been a fan of underdog Desura for a long time. For the longest time, that was my go-to site for discovering weird, off-beat, and often rough indie games. Now that the massive backlog in Steam’s greenlight process is finally cleared, a lot of decent indie games are now available just as easily on Steam, making Desura a little less relevant.

Itch.io is doing some really interesting things, however, to take aim at not just being an alternative distribution source for indie games, but actually a major node of indie activity. They started as more of a “pay what you want” site, but continue to expand. Whether or not it succeeds remains to be seen, but they have some interesting opportunities available, besides handling payment processing and distribution.

First of all – as mentioned above – they now facilitate game jam hosting. There’s a calendar of game jams and everything. Just looking at this month, it looks like there are about a half-dozen jams happening at any time during the month of May.

They’ve got more standard and pay-what-you-want models available (that’s been true for a while), and support multiple platforms. What’s really interesting is that they’ve got a “pay what you want” model for revenue sharing with the site. So not only is “pay what you want” supported for customers, but sellers can set their own terms for how much itch.io takes in as a percentage of sales revenue.

A big recent development is bundling options – developers can band together to offer their games as part of a lower-priced bundle with a revenue split. That’s a pretty cool possibility right there.

I’m curious if they’ll support things like microtransactions or DLC. It’s not super-important because you can always do that in-game with your own payment processing, and you can work within what they’ve got for DLC (kinda), but it’d be interesting if they do go more in that direction. (Handling DLC for games is historically a weakness in Desura as well).

So while itch.io is still a tiny player in the big scheme of things (then again, in the indie game world, even Amazon is a tiny player), it may be worth keeping an eye on them.

 


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