About nine months ago, I wrote Running an indie game store, a post
describing some of the analytics I collected while running itch.io for the
first 14 or so months. It was dedicated to all the great post-mortems I had
seen written by game developers.

Luckily, that was not a post-mortem for itch.io; we’re still going strong and
consistently improving the platform. This post is a status update, taking stock
of where things are and speculating a little about the future.

All the graphs in this post are written in R and are
open source.

I launched itch.io two years ago as an open indie game marketplace. Since then,
it’s grown a lot: There’s now a wide range of content types, things like
assets, tools, and comics, in addition to
the ever expanding library of games. Regardless of the content, itch.io has
stayed a place for creators to share their creations, and optionally make money
from them.

Itch.io uses pay what you want above the minimum pricing. The minimum can be
set to 0: it’s free to download and you can also donate any amount you want.

Itch.io integrates with PayPal and Stripe (credit cards and Bitcoin),
to facilitate transactions. Itch.io pioneered Open revenue sharing, a
variable marketplace cut set by the seller. It defaults to 10%, but a
seller can set any amount they want, including 0.

Here’s quick overview itch.io’s library:

There are over 15,000 quality projects on itch.io. And it’s growing fast: our
library size has tripled in the last 9 months! I use the term quality to
denote anything that is an actual project page that is publicly visible. Since
people like to test out the service by creating a page, I’ve filtered them out
to avoid inflating the number.

Note: that’s a cumulative graph. It will be the last one in this post since
they can be misleading.

Over the past two years many have asked about hosting and selling other types
of digital goods. I didn’t see any issues assuming they were properly
classified so I began adding new content types.

None of the other content types make up a significant portion of what’s
available, but I’m excited anyway that people are using itch.io for various
creative projects. In case you’re interested, here are the pages for the
various content types: Games, Tools, Comics,
Assets, Physical & printable games,
Soundtracks, Mods, and Everything else.

In the future I’m hoping to make these content types more first-class on
itch.io, giving many of them the same support that’s available for games.

(For simplicity’s sake, I’ll just refer to itch.io’s content as games for the
rest of this post.)

When I describe itch.io I’ll call it a marketplace, though that’s a bit of a
misnomer. The majority of the content on the site is actually free. Here’s a
graph of the projects uploaded per month, broken down by how the games are
priced.

Games uploaded per month is trending upwards nicely month over month.

Here’s a breakdown of the different pricing options:

• Free – Can be downloaded/played without paying
• Optional – Some files available for free, and some with a minimum price
• Paid – Files have a minimum price

Only 10% of games have a fixed minimum price, and 89% of games can be played for free.

Just because a game doesn’t have a minimum price doesn’t mean the creator can’t
earn anything. As I mentioned above, everything that can receive money is pay
what you want above the minimum, including things priced at 0. Creators can
receive donations to their free work just by enabling payment on their account.

44% of all games are eligible to receive money. One of the original goals
of the site was to give people who wouldn’t ordinarily be charging an easy
way to still make money, so I’m very happy with this percentage.

How much is itch.io paying out?

We just finished our best month yet, paying out $51,489 to creators. Itch.io
supports all the currencies that the payment providers allow (view them
all),
but I’ve truncated all currencies to USD and summed them to make the
visualization simpler.

As of June 2015, we’ve paid in total about $393,000, well over triple where
we were nine months ago. The month over month payouts have also been steadily
increasing so I’m excited to see where things go.

Pay what you want

Since itch.io pay what you want above the minimum, I’ve done some basic
analysis about how people are paying above the minimum.

Here’s a box-plot showing the distribution of payments sent to completely free
content:

The average donation is $3.68. Most people pay between $1 and $5. I’m ecstatic
about this. Most of these creators are people wouldn’t regularly been able to
make money had they uploaded elsewhere. The most generous person has paid $500
for a free game!

For projects that have a minimum price greater than 0 there’s a similar story.
Here’s the distribution of extra money given, the difference between the actual
price of the game and the amount given:

The numbers are (surprisingly) similar, the median is the same, the range is
approximately the same, and the average is $3.67.

The fact that they are so similar is an interesting observation. Here’s what
the purchase dialog looks like:

I have a suspicion that this combination of buttons is encouraging the extra
amounts given to be uniform across both paid and non-paid games, but I’ll have
to do more research another time.

Next I’ve graphed what percentage of all purchases receive extra money, broken
down by month. (Sorry for the shortened time frame, the database was updated to
make this query easy recently.)

About 30% of all purchases to paid content receive extra money. That’s
pretty good considering that most marketplaces don’t offer the option. I’m glad
to see that this rate isn’t significantly decreasing even though the number of
buyers is going up. I was worried that initial users of itch.io were
significantly more generous than the average person, but that doesn’t seem to
be the case.

Purchase sources

In July 2014 all sellers on itch.io got the ability to see where their
purchases are originating
from.
I further classify the purchase sources as either internal or external:

Although any kind of purchase is good, I like to see more internal purchases.
They suggest people are discovering games on itch.io instead of being linked to
a game from elsewhere.

I’ve graphed the percentage of external versus internal purchases over time:

About 80% of all purchases come from external sites. It looks like the
average rate of internal purchases is trending slightly up. I’m hoping to
increase the internal purchase rate even more by releasing new features for
game discovery.

There are a few different places a payment can be made on itch.io. The most
common is the game page, but purchases also happen on
widgets, bundle
pages, mobile game
pages
, and the popup API.

Here’s a graph of the distribution of purchase initiator locations:

The game page facilitates 83% of all purchases. Some of the other locations
haven’t been around as long (bundles, mobile), so they are at a disadvantage.

The mobile game page is just the responsive version of the regular game
page. Anyone on a mobile device is put into that bucket.

Internal purchases

So what pages on itch.io are people actually finding games and buying them
from? Here are the pages of itch.io that contribute to all the internal
purchases:

38% of internal purchases are from the profile page. To me, the profile
page is likely an indirect external purchase. Most likely the buyer was
linked from a external site to a profile, where they saw what they wanted and
bought it. I’ll have to improve this tracking in the future to take into
account more than just the preceding page before purchase.

The browse page is second, making up 24% of internal
purchases. I’m curious if the homepage, at third with 16%, will ever be able to
beat the browse page. The homepage is curated, so the percentage of sales
generated by it is directly related to our ability to curate content for it.

External purchases

External purchases are called external because they originate from another
website. I’ve graphed the top websites that refer purchases on itch.io:

If you’re a developer marketing your game then I recommend considering all of
these sites as potential places to find a new audience.

Twitter is the most popular source of purchases on itch.io, accounting for
about 13% of all external referrals. Itch.io has a very active Twitter
account, posting many games per day. On top of
that, many game developers are constantly promoting their work on Twitter. I
highly recommend focusing on Twitter when trying to build your audience to self
market your game. Feel free to shout at @itchio
and we’ll retweet if you’re sharing something interesting.

Google is the second highest source for generating purchases. Sadly I don’t
have access to the search queries that led to the purchases because the traffic
comes from HTTPS. It’s most likely these purchases are coming from title
searches, as opposed to searching something generic like “games.” Itch.io makes
game pages easily crawlable by Google, so they perform well in search results.

Reddit is the third highest source of purchases. Here is the distribution of
purchases coming from Reddit broken apart by subreddit.

/r/GameDeals/ dominates the list by a
huge margin. If you’re hosting a promotion for your game then you should
definitely consider posting there, just make sure to check with the rules.
Itch.io games even get their own icon there.

Itch.io supports a variety of ways to distribute your game, from downloads to
web embeds using Unity, Flash, Java and HTML. Here’s a breakdown of the game types:

This graph represents the primary game type. It’s possible to have a Flash or
HTML game with downloads, but that’s not represented here. A little over half
of all games on itch.io are downloadable only. The other half are
browser-embedded games.

I was curious if the game types being uploaded were changing over time I so
graphed the percentage of each type for all games created per month:

There haven’t been any significant changes in the distribution over the past
few months. I’m curious what will happen to Unity since Chrome recently blocked
the Unity plugin by
default. The latest
version of Unity exports to HTML so we’ll likely see the Unity share transfer
to HTML over the coming months.

When uploading a game you can pick what genre it is. Here’s the genre
distribution across all games on itch.io:

Action is the most popular genre, followed by other. The relative
popularity of genres is the same as it was nine months ago. I made the
observation that since other is the second most frequent genre it probably
makes sense to spend some time improving the options. I still haven’t had a
chance to do that yet, but suggestions are welcome!

Here’s the distribution of platforms downloadable games are available for. No
surprises here, Windows is first, OSX is second, and Linux is third. The
Windows/OSX gap did close slightly though.

Payouts

Itch.io supports two ways of paying sellers: direct and payout. In direct
mode a seller is paid immediately on each purchase. The payouts system, which
was added January 2015, groups purchases together so a seller can request a
single payment for all their sales. It was added to facilitate things like
bundles and help with handling VAT.

26% percent of sellers have adopted the payouts system. 53% of recent purchases
are paid through a payout. This means that active sellers tend to choose the
payout system. This number might be slightly skewed since all multi-developer
bundles must
go through the payout system, but those only accounted for a few percent of all
the purchases over the past few months.

Thanks

That’s it for this post, thanks for taking the time to read through it. Itch.io
is a major part of my life and I hope the data presented is as interesting to
you as it is me. If you have any other ideas for analysis feel free to get in
touch.

If you’re interested in more updates like these please considering following me
on Twitter: @moonscript

Special thanks to Justin K for helping edit this post.