itch.io The best thing in the whole world ever!!

Kobusvdwalt9

Hey all, I just wanted to let you know about itch.io if you dont already know about it.
Its a game hosting site and payment provider almost like humble bundle that lets you embed a payment widget into your webiste. And then takes care of all the mess dealing with payments.

This is the widget http://itchio.tumblr.com/post/66207042166/introducing-the-itch-io-widget
And there is also a button api that you can use http://itch.io/api

It allows you to give out preview keys and stuff like that and at the moment it its cut is only 3% but later on I think it will be 10%
I am asking that you guys that are planning to sell a game in the future please consider this as I dont want it to be another indievania.

// Just a side not I am in no way associated with itch.io but I am a massive fan of what they are doing.

iPixelPierre

I like the idea but payments to PayPal then into an SA bank are expensive.

Kobusvdwalt9

@IPixelPierre Is there any better alternatives ?

iPixelPierre

You could open a merchant account with a local bank and accept credit card payments.

dislekcia

iPixelPierre said:

You could open a merchant account with a local bank and accept credit card payments.

Only if you've been operating for a year as a retail outlet, unless they've changed their rules on issuing merchant accounts. Also, merchant accounts are expensive to run each month and have minimum thresholds that you have to reach in order to drive costs down. Plus banks take percentage cuts on incoming authorised payments, which they often don't tell you about up front - anywhere from 4-6%. Then there are the fraud protection costs...

The merchant account stuff isn't useful for a small games business. Especially when you start looking at the APIs the various credit card authorisers use locally and see how shit they really are. Use something that will get you paid with the lowest amount of effort - itch.io is pretty damn good at that, as is Humble. Rolling your own PayPal-driven system isn't too hard if you want to do things that itch.io or Humble don't give you out of the box.

You can always look at optimising your percentage costs when those percentages turn into useful amounts of cash, anything else is just premature optimisation and a waste of time.

Kobusvdwalt9

@dislekcia Back when I first saw the humble widget I got pretty excited and then I learned that you have to contact them and ask. But with itch.io its open to everyone. Granted its probably not that hard to get the humble widget but still.