
Running an indie game store - leafo
http://itch.io/blog/1/running-an-indie-game-store
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scscsc
Very interesting. They seem to have gained some traction. I'm curious how they
solved their chicken and egg problem (not enough buyers versus not enough
sellers).

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Maven911
I adore this kind of data and analytics. I feel that this kind of data is
mainly shared by game companies and a few SaaS -- can anyone proof me wrong or
find other links where they showcase the internals of a company ? (And I won't
count annual reports of big companies as deep insights into a company, even if
they are useful in investment decisions)

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egonschiele
Time for notch to start working at itch.io? :) The most interesting part for
me is how much money free games are making. From what I have heard, open
source projects make almost no money. But I think of free games in the same
bucket (work done for pleasure, not money), and they are still profitable!

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patio11
If you saw the per-SKU numbers I can guarantee you that you would weep.
They're virtually guaranteed to have a power law distribution. The median game
has sales of zero, the median game of those games with sales above zero makes
the creator less than a single dinner worth of contributions per month, and so
forth.

I'm an investor in a company which does a marketplace for commercial OSS. It
is not accurate that OSS makes no money. Many individual OSS projects make no
money, because they're optimized for making no money by people who think,
consciously or otherwise, that making money from software is evil. OSS
projects which are more commercial in nature ROFLstomp over web games with a
donation model.

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lifeisstillgood
Having a brain that thinks "commercial OSS" is an oxymoron (and I can see it
waving a red flag and building barricades in the back of my head) I would be
interested in how people / market places are squaring that circle - could you
point us at your investment?

Also are you saying that OSS projects that use a donation model do better than
indie games (irrespective of the indie game model) or is it both doing
donation models.

I speak as someone who wants to keep developing OSS but also likes getting
paid.

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jasonkester
Open source projects using a donation model tend to do roughly as well as
games using a donation model. And both tend to do roughly as well as the guy
standing next to the offramp using a donation model.

Open source projects using a model where people pay for the software tend to
do nicely, however. The distinction in what you pay for can be as simple as
"you're now officially allowed to use this in a commercial product" or "in
addition to the paid version, we also offer a completely free* version" (where
"free" is defined by some insane guy and his cult from the 70s to mean
something completely orthagonal to "free", in a completely non-standard way
seemingly designed to raise red flags with your company's legal department)

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patio11
Yep.

One very prominent example, which drives most of the sales at Binpress (the
company I invested in, which I mention only to identify them rather than for
promotion): if you GPL a library, that makes the entire app that includes that
library not saleable on the App Store. This doesn't make the library useless,
because you can still use it in internal applications or pre-release versions
of your app, but "We need to ship to the App Store" is a fairly big bullet
point for a lot of potential customers of e.g. a SDK which lets you edit PDF
files on an iDevice in an arbitrary application. That particular feature
occurs in a _lot_ of enterprise apps, because the enterprise runs on PDFs. So
if you say "Totally free for your geeks to use internally, and btw, $2500 if
they want to put it on the App Store", you'll collect more in a single license
sale than 99.99% of donationware apps make in a month.

This is called the dual licensing model. Mechanically, you control the
copyright to the code, release it under GPL, and -- in parallel -- release it
under a commercial license which restricts what people can do with it but
which is "non-viral."

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pa7
What would you suggest if your OS project was bound to MIT and there's no way
of introducing a commercial license?

heatmap.js (my pet project) unfortunately has those constraints and I'm
currently trying a mixed model of high priced premium support and donations.

Donations got me almost nothing, high priced premium support got me a few
hundred dollars within a few weeks after I introduced it- more than I made the
last 4 years with donations.

I'm also trying binpress as a secondary channel to sell support. will see how
it performs over time, but binpress looks promising so far

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patio11
Take two of your most commonly requested features which are only useful for
enterprise users, add them to Heatmap.js Commercial, charge $500 a year for
it, and promote Heatmap.js Commercial along with heatmap.js. I don't know what
those features would be for heatmaps, but I strongly suspect it will sound
like "integrates with ... out of the box."

Basically, wholesale clone sidekiq's model. They're also on MIT, and he does
pretty well for himself.

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Kiro
How do people pay for HTML5 games in the browser?

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jere
>As mentioned above, itch.io utilizes three separate payment providers for all
transactions. [Paypal, Amazon, Stripe]

Though I'm sure you meant to ask a different question.

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NKCSS
You might want to check out TransIP's VPS offering [0]; they have a €50 VPS
with 8GB ram, 4 cores and a 300GB SSD, and the option to add 2TB of storage
for €10 a month... this might save you a bundle of money on the downloads...

[0]: [https://www.transip.nl/vps/](https://www.transip.nl/vps/)

~~~
xeroxmalf
You might want to check out SoYouStart's (OVH) offerings [0]: For €40, you
could get a dedicated server with an Intel Xeon E3 1245v2 (4 core, 8 thread,
3.4ghz), 32GB ram, 3x120gb SSD, 250mbps guaranteed on a gigabit port.

[0][http://www.soyoustart.com/ie/offers/e3-ssd-3.xml](http://www.soyoustart.com/ie/offers/e3-ssd-3.xml)

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NKCSS
I tried OVH in the past; not your most reliable partner; TransIP is a premium
brand and hasn't let me down yet (which is more than I can say about OVH; the
server I had never functioned well, constantly rebooted, after 3 weeks of BS
from support, I just canceled.

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dubcanada
The amazing thing is this website runs entirely on Lapis/Lua.

Very well done leafo!

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antonwinter
thanks for all the great insite into the numbers on your site.

its amazing to see an indie marketplace actually take off. congrats to you and
your hard work.

