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Show HN: I made a site for hosting/selling indie games
- gamegoblin 14y agoI and a small team at my university are a month or two away from shipping our game. I think that we will highly consider using this site! The minimum price payment scheme is exactly what we wanted to do. Thanks a lot for posting. Bookmarked.
- MichaelGlass 14y agowhat are tags? Are there plans for in-itch discovery? As a buyer, the front page doesn't really help me at all. as a seller, I can see the use case. Maybe integration with online arcades? kongregate, for example.
- richardv 14y agoHow did you do the recording for the <canvas> demo of the product? You got my upvote just for that.
- nviarnes 14y agoI would guess he recorded his keystrokes and then played them back with a timer? Totally a guess, I did something similar in that manner for a canvas game demo.
- leafo 14y agoI used this cool project: https://github.com/rprichard/x11-canvas-screencast https://github.com/rprichard/x11-canvas-screencast It definitely deserves some stars. It's based off of https://github.com/sublimehq/anim_encoder https://github.com/sublimehq/anim_encoder
- rtopto 14y ago"Off of"? Are you retarded or just american?
- jjrumi 14y agoHopefully though, not more retarded than you. Man...
- obviouslygreen 14y agoRetarded or just American? Are you retarded or just retarded?
- opzionale 14y ago"Off of"? Are you retarded or just american? (Reposted to bypass censorship.)
- Mahn 14y ago> Reposted to bypass censorship There's (usually) no censorship in HN, you are just getting downvoted, most likely because folks think your comment is impolite, uncalled for, and brings nothing to the conversation.
- matthuggins 14y agoI wish I had more karma so I could downvote him too. :(
- Mahn 14y agoEdited, sorry for that :)
- philh 14y agoTo be precise, there is some censorship on HN. Nevertheless, so far ve is just getting downvoted.
- JoshTriplett 14y agoHandy! Consider adding some kind of video-like control on the page to restart the screencast; I opened the tab in the background, and by the time I saw it it had already gone halfway through the screencast. I eneded up refreshing the page to see it from the beginning.
- lucaspiller 14y agoI was about to ask that :)
- TylerE 14y agoWhat is your use case for why this has a reason to exist, in a market that all ready feels over-saturated (Steam/Desura/GOG, etc)
- hbien 14y agoNot sure about Desura/GOG, but Steam has a vetting process. If you're not a game developer with a following, or if your first game doesn't meet their standards, you can't get onto their marketplace. You're also required to use their SDK and integrate some functionality into your game. Looks like with itch.io you can just upload your binaries. Also DRM. Some (small percentage of?) players would love to play games without launching Steam. I love the no-DRM games on humble bundle.
- binarycrusader 14y agoSteam has Greenlight now, so you don't have to be "vetted" by Valve anymore. There are many other services already though that provide similar functionality, such as indie game stand, desura, etc. that have none of the restrictions you've mentioned as being a reason to not use Steam. So again, what makes this service compelling?
- alanfalcon 14y agoGreenlight is still a vetting process, just with a different mechanism. Suggesting that anyone can just get their game on Steam is flat out wrong. Really well made and polished games (see: Midnight Mansion from ActionSoft) fail to get noticed through either process all the time. I have nothing to do with this service but I find it definitely compelling. Indie Game Stand only features one new game every four days (so even if you're accepted you likely have to wait to launch.) As for Desura, that looks like another good option, but is still quite a bit more involved. If I made a game (a 48 Lundum Dare game like in the example page, for instance) and just wanted a way to put it out there immediately with little effort and no need to join a community or anything, itchio provides that option. That's what is compelling.
- lucb1e 14y agoThe video is a real eye-catcher, nicely done!
- leafo 14y agoThe technology stack of the site is pretty interesting. I wrote a little about it here: http://leafo.net/posts/introducing_itchio.html#technology http://leafo.net/posts/introducing_itchio.html#technology Essentially the web app runs directly inside of nginx (but a special build of nginx from the project OpenResty[0]). The entire site is coded in MoonScript[1], which is my language that compiles to Lua. I developed a web framework called Lapis while making this site, it doesn't have documentation yet but you can find the source here: https://github.com/leafo/lapis https://github.com/leafo/lapis I you want to see another sample Lapis webapp you can check out my MoonRocks project. The source is here: https://github.com/leafo/moonrocks-site https://github.com/leafo/moonrocks-site [0]: http://openresty.org/ http://openresty.org/ [1]: http://moonscript.org http://moonscript.org
- goldfeld 14y agoCongratulations on launching leafo, this is a great endeavor. And thanks for moonscript, I have some plans for it myself. The striking similarity to CoffeeScript allows for easy translation, which enables some nifty things if you think about it (in the same way Clojure leverages the Java ecosystem, I would say.)
- lucaspiller 14y agoI like it, and went to create a page for one of my games (free, but I'd like a nice landing page), however you only support downloadable games. I guess it makes sense to begin with, however if you add support for browser games, let me know!
- codegeek 14y agoAre you using redactor.js for the WYSIWYG editor ?
- radq 14y agoThat's definitely Redactor.
- dmils4 14y agoThe video actually threw me off. My cursor was right there, very confused for a sec - imo it's not separated enough from the rest of the experience for it to be entirely helpful, felt like more of a distraction. Just my $.02, cool site outside of that one small thing!
- leafo 14y agoYeah I thought about that. I figured a small percentage of people would be using linux so not that many people would get confused.
- nwhitehead 14y agoNice looking site! I'm a professional programmer just getting started with indie game development (it's so much fun!). The biggest thing I want out of a game hosting site apart from actual sales is insight into the potential players/customers. I want to know which categories are popular, whether free demos are increasing paid sales, which platforms are selling, where are viewers coming from. I want to see what people are saying about my game, what they are rating it and why. It's not hard for me to put up a quick page with a paypal link to a file download, but you can add lots of value with good analytics and things like comments and ratings.
- km3k 14y agoJust for fun, I tried to pay $0.00 for X-Moon. I got a fun message that said: "Name your own price to get download access to X-Moon. There is no minimum price, pay what you want. Due to processing fees the minimum amount is 50 cents." I realize it can still be downloaded for free, but it's not really "no minimum, pay what you want".
- namuol 14y agoAs an alternative I would recommend showing a "+0.50$" bit when the amount entered is $0 or the difference if it is below $0.50. A tool tip could explain the "fee" - it'd be much friendlier than a pop up message.
- Mahn 14y agoIf he could afford it, it would probably be best to either drop the fees altogether for prices of <= $1, so free games can honor their price, or otherwise set the minimum price to $1, so that the store at least doesn't collect more money than the dev himself.
- jiggy2011 14y agoIs there an ability to upload a demo of the game? Will there be some kind of discovery system for buyers?
- jmduke 14y agoWhy confine this to games? I think the layout and format of the site is great, but I dont see anything about it that necessitates that particular vertical. Why can't I use this to sell my OSX app?
- namuol 14y agoI think it makes sense to target one niche because you can optimize for those specific users' needs without trying to please everyone.
- egonschiele 14y agoThere's nothing stopping you from uploading an app. From the readme: > Can I upload/sell other stuff besides a game? > Sure. Got a game soundtrack or art book you also want to sell/distribute? Feel free to upload it as well.
- BHSPitMonkey 14y agoThose examples they listed are strictly things that would accompany a game...
- niggler 14y agoI'd change the default displayed price, even on a free game, to be something other than $0.00 (and for those people who type 0.00, it should directly take you to the link).
- opzionale 14y ago"I’m a 24 year old male living in San Francisco." Really? You're "a male"? Not a man? You disgust me.
- leafo 14y agoGood to know, thanks.
- egonschiele 14y agoIt's easy to troll behind a fake account. Use your real account next time.
- leafygreens 14y agoI'm an indie game dev who has used Indievania for a previous release -- it's same kind of PayPal-powered setup, only they ask customers to tip them at time of purchase instead of taking a cut of every sale. Could you explain why I should consider using you instead of Indievania?
- spoiledtechie 14y agoLove the idea. But I would consider one thing. Changing your domain name. It doesn't ring and the .io will be confusing..
- Mahn 14y agoIt's not that bad. It's short, a real word and memorable. I've never seen a product with an .io domain catch on and become mainstream though, but I guess that's not really relevant.
- tlarkworthy 14y agoWhy no directory? I uploaded a game to this when it was advertised on gamedev.net Only subsequently did I realised this site does no marketing, or even a directory on the front page. So you take 10% just to filehost and not even put up a link? 10% for 1 type of payment processing is not all that competitive without some game discovery. I could just put my game on my own random webpage for much the same effect. (http://t_larkworthy.itch.io/runesketch http://t_larkworthy.itch.io/runesketch) OK my game is a free to play so I have no idea how you are supposed to charge me. You can gladly have 10% of subsequent revenue for any conversion originating at itch.io but there is not gonna be any unless you actually market the games on your site
- pyre 14y agoHow does the underscore in the hostname work? I thought that they weren't allowed[1]. Just a non-compliant DNS server + a protocol that is flexible enough to allow it? Is it not disallowed in CNAMEs? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostname#Restrictions_on_valid_host_names http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostname#Restrictions_on_valid_...
- spoiler 14y agoI am guessing that *.itch.io points to some IP and that subdomains are resolved on the app level. Many services do that (my god forgotten app does, Tumblr does, I am sure others must, too)
- pyre 14y agoIt's a CNAME for itch.io, but the application doesn't resolve DNS. DNS does. If the DNS spec says that underscore isn't valid, then presumably we would never even get to the application level because the hostname wouldn't resolve to itch.io.
- reidrac 14y agoI guess it depends on how the DNS server deals with the wildcard domain. I can tell you that djbdns doesn't care about the part covered by the wildcard, it will happily resolve _!test.domain (although it is an invalid name according to the RFC).
- shurcooL 14y agoThis is pretty cool. It might just reduce the friction enough for me to post my unfinished 2D Counter-Strike -like game that I worked on for 5+ years, that otherwise the world would likely never see (I have a lot more important things to complete before I can afford to get back to working on it).
- basicallydan 14y agoI really like this. I do want to see a directory though. Just a little detail I really like the way you show how much money will go to each party involved in the sale: http://itch.io/about/faq#someone-buys-my-game-for-10-how-much-do-i-get http://itch.io/about/faq#someone-buys-my-game-for-10-how-muc... I know it's just a sum, but I like the way you formatted it :)
- braco_alva 14y agoThis looks good, but one of the things that could stop us from using it, is Paypal, we can't withdraw money from Paypal where we are located.
- sodafountan 14y agoYou should accept Bitcoins, this could solve the issue of Paypal and foreign countries.