GoG is also heavily curated, and you basically have to have a name for yourself before they allow your game. Same with Epic, though Epic is even more strict. Yes, if your first game is really good, or has press, let's say from a Kickstarter or you have a publisher, then you can get on those platforms. But if you aren't established, you have very little chance of getting your game accepted. Steam allows everyone, but requires a review process, while Itch allows everything, similar to YouTube, you just upload whatever you want.

Lethn GOG have been caught doing censorship and being dodgy about handling money so I'm definitely advocating for itch really

By " this list" I meant Epic and Steam. I should have been clearer. itch.io is out of the competition.

Not bad at distributing games on Patreon.

Unfortunately, my thinking is purely theoretical — I can't really test them in reality at the moment. I cannot withdraw money to my country via the payment services they work with.

    I've been looking into crypto payments (please don't discuss your opinion on NFTs, or whatever, I am talking about in respect to a game development business). However, not many people actually use crypto aside from investors. I think the businesses that have offered it as an option only get around 10% from crypto, and 90% from credit card and PayPal. So it would be very difficult to make enough money without standard forms of payment.

      cybereality I've been looking into crypto payments

      I don't know about other countries, but in ours, you have to pay a very high percentage to cash in crypto. It is extremely unprofitable to get involved with it.

      So it would be very difficult to make enough money without standard forms of payment.

      Strictly speaking, "standard forms of payment" is a transfer to a bank card number. Now everyone is used to services like PayPal and has already forgotten that they were originally designed not to publish their card number publicly. Developments in bank security and the issue of virtual cards have made these services irrelevant, but the force of habit and mindset inertia is too strong.

      But the option of having their own website and a virtual card number for transfers should seem to work. Although, of course, not as successful as the already familiar services.

        Well, direct bank transfer is complex and unsafe. You need to know additional information (aside from the number) and it's not protected, like credit cards are. So if you do a wire, and the other person never gives you the product, or disappears, you legally can't get the money back (at least in the US). With a credit card there are many protections for bogus transfers, and you can dispute even a transfer you did make and usually get the money back. Sadly PayPal, and other popular forms of digital currency, are just way easier and more convenient, if you can use them. Crypto was supposed to be the answer, but it doesn't work like it's supposed to. You could also easily lose money on conversion fees or market fluctuations.

        Anyhow, this is maybe too off-topic. I guess my point was that, if you want to make money, it's much easier to be on a platform like Steam or Itch. In fact, I see that Itch recently lost PayPal payments (maybe due to the adult content they host) so it's not like anything is guaranteed. But it's a lot more work to sell a game from your own website, then it is to let Steam (or whoever) handle everything for you. And this is why they take the 30%, because there is a lot of business work they are doing for you that would cost you a lot more if you did it yourself.

          By the way, this might seem unrelated, but it is related to how much traffic and interaction one might get depending on which site you sign up to. Some recent news dropped regarding twitter and apparently a whistleblower has come forward confirming what a lot of people have suspected about big tech sites and that is that they fake a lot of their user growth for the sake of appearing bigger than they really are.

          This would definitely explain CyberReality's experience of noticing that on Itch there seem to be a greater amount of user interaction on itch compared to other sites. I've had my own suspicions about steam itself for some time now as well and it will be very interesting when the inevitable advertiser lawsuits roll in after the twitter court case concludes what information will find out about big tech sites in general because people are going to ask "If twitter is faking user growth, how many other sites are doing the same to get my ad money?" the answer will be a lot.

          For those who have no idea what I am talking about, look up 'dead internet theory'. Do not be fooled by steam and other platforms' shiny claims about user numbers. It's more important for less experienced devs to get real interaction and feedback from their users anyway but I can tell you now on a personal level I have been regularly posting my work on alt-tech and I am getting interaction from randoms I never got on big tech which is confirming a lot of my suspicions about big tech in general. People make the mistake of looking at a site and going "WE'VE GOT 8 MILLION USERS!" and thinking if they get even 1% of that they're going to be millionaires, but how many of those users even post or interact with the site? That is the big question, if they don't then that amount of users may as well not exist and be a lie.

            Lethn dead internet theory

            Read a similar text on a German news outlet. The gist there is only a few humongous players dominate the internet and its information flow.

            Was it initially meant to enable users to exchange information, and part of it outside of what the mass stares at all day long on their mobile phones is certainly used for such applications, much of it has become a swamp of dumb messaging and misinformation.

              cybereality Well, direct bank transfer is complex and unsafe.

              Yes, there may be problems with direct transfers.

              And this is why they take the 30%, because there is a lot of business work they are doing for you that would cost you a lot more if you did it yourself.

              But 30% is clearly too much, three times more than it should be at most. The easy money is corrupting, as we can see from their example.

              I see that Itch recently lost PayPal payments

              But the documentation says they work with PayPal. Stripe looks quite acceptable, but it's not available here either. Otherwise itch.io would suit me completely.

                  Okay, so that is definitely a conspiracy theory. However, conspiracies can be real, being a conspiracy does not make it false. For example, Facebook was alleged to be inflating their ad numbers, and actually got sued for it:

                  https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/18/tech/facebook-ad-reach-lawsuit/index.html

                  Twitter is likely doing the same thing. When I look at "trending" topics (which might be manually placed there) I can see somewhere around half the accounts are fake. I don't check all of them, but doing like a spot check of 20 or 30 users, you can see maybe half of them just joined, have only a few posts (or none) and have little to no followers. Usually they post on controversial topics, on both sides, but can also be used for advertisement. This is likely what Twitter is hiding from Musk.

                  In terms of my own experience, I have around 3,000 followers on Twitter. But I actually only get around the same 50 people interacting with my posts. I also follow around 5,000 people, but always see posts from the same maybe 100 accounts, or see posts from people I don't even follow. I know these people are still active, cause I can search for them and see they post like every day. But I haven't seen a post for them in years, even though we are friends in real life. So the algorithm is carefully curating what I see, and also who sees what I post. Why they are doing this is anyone's guess, and you kind of go into a rabbit hole if you think too long about it.

                  In terms of Steam lying, it's possible, but it doesn't account for sales. Yes, they could inflate traffic numbers, but I can also see download count, time played, etc. which would be crazy if they were faking all of it. I also doubt bots are buying games, but that is not totally fantasy. For example, Amazon has a huge issue with fake reviews or bot reviews, and it says verified purchase. I know how to spot bots, and it's huge on Amazon. Or they will have real people (like from a competitor) buy a product and give it a bad review, break it and say it's cheap quality and post a picture, etc. I've read some articles that estimate fake reviews on Amazon are anywhere from 25% to 50%, and I would believe that.

                  I think YouTube is probably a safe website though. Because you can see the people's faces, hear their voice, see how many subs they have, when they joined, how many videos uploaded, etc. There are fake videos, but it is much much harder to fake that. So if you have game reviews on YouTube, Twitch streamers, etc. that is most likely real.

                  But real people can also have agendas. Like the new Matrix movie got trashed, by the press and by the community. However, the movie was great. One of the best movies ever, and even better than the first one possibly. However, I noticed that there was so much bad press, like unreasonably so. Even if the movie was bad, people were on a vendetta. So I started reading all the reviews on big tech sites. And, sure, I'm not saying everyone has to like the movie. People have different tastes, sure. But there were verifiable lies in the article. One about a voice dubbing mistake that wasn't there (I watched the scene like 10 times, and it didn't happen). Others saying how there were no guns in the movie, which didn't make sense, the whole movie is action packed for 2 hours. Just stuff that was factually wrong. To the point where I thought there was something else going on. I even posted a positive comment about the movie on the official Facebook page and got harassed. People claimed I was actually Lana Wachowski with an alt account. That Warner Bros had paid me to make the comment, and other total nonsense. Like, I understand not everyone likes the same things. But the movie was great, and because I said I liked it, I must have been bribed by Warner Bros? What the hell is going on, I think it's more likely they were paid to attack me, or make the movie look bad. Usually when people make false accusations, it's really them that are the ones that did it.

                    Tomcat But the documentation says they work with PayPal.

                    Yes, it seems to be back now. Last time I tried a purchase (a few weeks ago) the button was missing, but maybe it was a temporary issue or they worked it out.

                      I agree it's a bit of a conspiracy theory right now, but how often have conspiracy theories ended up being proven right a couple of months down the line? A surprising amount, everyone's buzzing about nonsense around Trump right now as per usual to distract from what I feel is the real news story and that's the lawsuit around twitter's fakery.

                      If twitter loses the court case, it's going to blow them and all the other big tech sites wide open, this will then lead to advertiser lawsuits and further investigations into other companies. While I don't think that all the traffic is fake on steam and other places, I think there is going to be a greater percentage than even paranoid people like me think potentially. I was very surprised for example when there was a fake account wiping happening on twitter that even Taylor Swift's account lost about 10,000 followers, that's more than I was expecting on a fairly innocuous brand name. If this is the case then perhaps it wouldn't even be a stretch to say that music labels were somehow paying for these fake followers to boost themselves onto the trending pages.

                      Even if the big tech sites aren't all directly involved in bot follower shenanigans and fakery, they certainly don't clamp down on it as they should to make sure their traffic is legitimate.

                        Lethn If twitter loses the court case, it's going to blow them and all the other big tech sites wide open, this will then lead to advertiser lawsuits and further investigations into other companies.

                        Well, shaking up the swamp would be useful.

                        cybereality In terms of my own experience, I have around 3,000 followers on Twitter. But I actually only get around the same 50 people interacting with my posts

                        In reality, if very roughly and approximately: 1000 people browse, 100 comment from time to time, 10 actively discuss, 1 can really help. Well yes, it looks like it.

                            5 months later

                            Who says you can't make a fortune in game development and become a trillionaire?

                            It's a very lucrative field:

                            Funding from backers exceeded $300 million in June 2020, [117] surpassed $400 million in November 2021,[118] and $500 million in September 2022.[119]

                            cybereality Lol I tried giving Star Citizen the benefit of the doubt because it was Chris Roberts being involved and everything ( He made Freelancer ) but something very shady is going on over at RSI and I would not be surprised if some scandals finally start surfacing. They're keeping the gravy train going though by constantly introducing ships rather than doing any real coding. You know it's bad when even the die hard fanbois on their own forums are getting really tired of it.

                              cybereality That's gotta be the biggest scam of all time.

                              Well, I guess the "biggest scam of all time" is probably doubtful. 😃 But if you only consider gamedev, it's quite possible.

                              It doesn't take that much money to make a game.

                              If they actually did what they promise, then maybe the development cost would be justified, but… here's The Sims series — the total cost is probably close, but a lot of games in that series have been released, and SC hasn't seen much progress. So — yes, most likely a scam.

                              But! They raised the money. Which means that they have practically proved that it is possible to make money quite real.

                                Interesting post, thanks to Tomcat to get it up 🙂.

                                I guess problem with popular platforms/websites is... people ! There is mostly two kind of people on this Earth: "builders" and "destroyers", can be seen as positive & negative, Yin & Yang, some create thing, see good things, feel good, act well, push other up, others are just bitter, lazy, have achieve nothing, have no dream or passion, they just like to destroy what others built, drag others down with them, it may probably make them feel less lame as they are. We see those two opposite forces fighting together everyday everywhere.
                                It reminds me Populous series from Bullfrog. Quite an awesome game design, anyone who don't know about these games could (should ?) play Populous 2 which was released on many platforms and can be played with WinUAE & Dosbox for instance.

                                To get back to the topic, making money is not that easy and sometime, some creator get lucky, but it doesn't last forever, I've read Candy Crush's author make a lot's of money for a while (about 50K$ a day), then the best game of the day become shadowed by another which is trending and so on. And the market is also very tough and players unforgiving. Anyway, whatever we could do, there will always be fans & non-fans.

                                Finally, 30% as fee may not be as an excess as it look considering all the costs of making a distributing platform avail 24/7, secure, safe with payments, etc try to set up on of these and gather enough traffic to get self sustained, I bet you'll like to pay "only" 30% !

                                  cybereality That's gotta be the biggest scam of all time.

                                  We'll see, if they actually release pyro this year then there is hope for it not being a scam, just over ambitious.

                                  cybereality It doesn't take that much money to make a game.

                                  It does if you have armies of studios working on crafting custom made planets and star systems. They do make some use of pcg or procedural content generation, but it's still highly artist/manually controlled pipeline.

                                  yes I'm a star citizen pledge-r, only ever got the cheapest starter ship tho, even that only in 2020 once I saw some progress being made

                                      JusTiCe8 I guess problem with popular platforms/websites is... people !

                                      Yeah, people on Earth are a big problem, but they're being worked on right now.

                                      There is mostly two kind of people on this Earth: "builders" and "destroyers", can be seen as positive & negative, Yin & Yang, some create thing, see good things, feel good, act well, push other up, others are just bitter, lazy, have achieve nothing, have no dream or passion, they just like to destroy what others built, drag others down with them, it may probably make them feel less lame as they are. We see those two opposite forces fighting together everyday everywhere.

                                      There are actually three types of people. You left out the "indifferent. Evil ("destroyers") could not triumph if it were not for the "being out of politics" position that became popular. I mentioned this a bit in my scenario.

                                      Finally, 30% as fee may not be as an excess as it look considering all the costs of making a distributing platform avail 24/7, secure, safe with payments, etc try to set up on of these and gather enough traffic to get self sustained, I bet you'll like to pay "only" 30% !

                                      Within the framework of the created system, yep. But it is possible to try to go beyond it. The risk is great, but so is the reward.

                                          Tomcat
                                          🙂

                                          Yeah, people on Earth are a big problem, but they're being worked on right now.

                                          You think ? I won't go too far off-topic off-Godot, just that Idiocracy author(s) was/were very optimistic in their forecast ! Just need to look at the "clown world" we are in now, it's a worldwide (at least in western part of the world) catastrophy, or maybe a global pandemic of ridiculousness.

                                          There are actually three types of people. You left out the "indifferent"

                                          maybe, maybe not. Is there actually any of neutral people ? Someone could think I'm neutral but deep down inside, mind/soul is tipping to one side or another. Anyway, Tuco is always right:

                                          You see, in this world, there is two kinds of people, my friend: those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.
                                          😛

                                          But it is possible to try to go beyond it. The risk is great, but so is the reward.

                                          As for wannabe gamedevs willing to create their own engine... energy doesn't last enough to get to the game itself after for those who get there.
                                          Spending time recreating existing, reliable enough, working solution may not worth it most of the time.