Moving from FastSpring to Itch.io as a Payment Provider

Doug Binks - Juliette Foucaut - 22 Dec 2023 - edited 23 Dec 2023      # Avoyd   # Web Technology

We've been selling Avoyd -our game and increasingly game development tool- on the internet since 2001 using payment providers (merchants of records) WorldPay, followed, after a decade-long break, by FastSpring. A recent event with FastSpring has pushed us to investigate store front Itch.io. In this post we describe how we've moved from FastSpring to Itch.io and what we think about it. Avoyd has now been selling through Itch.io since 15 Dec.

Why we Moved to Itch.io Now and Not Sooner

Our plans to put Avoyd on Itch.io were brought forward by our previous payment provider of six years, FastSpring, trying to charge us hidden fees for "Risk Screening". We were not alone to receive FastSpring's request as it turns out. And like others when we received the email we immediately reported it to FastSpring as a phishing attempt (it wasn't).

Although the $150 fee (potentially yearly) isn't a huge amount, it's enough to justify spending a bit of time investigating alternatives.

• In part because it lowers our trust that FastSpring won't hit us with more charges in the future, especially as they advertise as having 'All-in-One Pricing. No Additional Fees'. We were also concerned by the short notice: three weeks to pay up, failing which they would simply shut down our store. This is a risk we are not prepared to take.

• In part because we'd been considering creating an Itch.io page for a long time but had put it on hold for a couple of years because of four issues:

  1. The 30% US withholding tax despite having filled the tax info. We're a UK limited company which should have resulted in 0% withholding tax. (As an aside, should that 30% rate even apply to US businesses since selling one-off downloadable software isn't subject to that rate on other platforms?)
     Increasing our concern, once we started making sales over 30% was charged on each payment. Thankfully Itch fixed this after we contacted support. Indeed Itch does explain that the tax withholding status won't be updated until your first payout request, however we were unsure if this would be applied on top of the payout amount we could see.

  2. We generate our own keys and handle our own downloads. Integrating with Itch is not easily to automate. For instance with FastSpring the key could be automatically generated for each purchase.
     We decided for now to simply upload pre-generated keys in batches. But this means we have to monitor how many keys may be activated before we run out.

  3. From our understanding and previous experience Itch.io didn't provide VAT receipts. Since some of our customers are professionals working in the EU, that would be useful as Avoyd Voxel Editor is a tool more than a game.
     However we found out there are VAT receipts since we can now see they are generated for people who bought Avoyd through Itch. We don't know whether they receive them but we now know we can provide them on request.

  4. Itch.io's default charge is 10% of sales which, on top of the Stripe/Paypal fee is more than we would be paying per transaction with our previous payment provider. However if needs be we can lower the Itch percentage. We currently left it as default whilst we wait to see whether being listed on the Itch.io store has a positive effect on sales and other benefits.

Pros and Cons of Itch.io

So far we are reasonably pleased with Itch.io. However after only one week it's not been long enough to decide whether Itch will be a decent outlet for our software.

Things we've Liked about Itch.io

• Very easy to set up the Itch widget and buy button on both our dynamic enkisoftware.com and our static website avoyd.com.
• The customisable Itch page looks nice and is easy to set up.
• Announcements are easy to make with the devlog functionality. We appreciated the prompt after uploading a file update and the markdown editor.
• Not relevant for us since we have our own website, but we think Itch.io is a great way to present a project for download.
• Low fee compared to other online stores. Whilst the default fee is higher than what one would pay with a payment provider, one can lower the Itch percentage to match. We think the 10% default charge is fair if Itch.io is hosting the download, and if their store generates extra revenue.
• The pay above minimum price (tip) option.

Things we Wish Itch.io Could Do

• The workflow is awkward when only selling a key. When buying Avoyd, people have to go through a non-obvious process to claim their key on Itch. It would be nice if they could receive it directly.
• Can't automate the key generation as there are no webhooks (e.g. for getting a key or for purchase complete).
• Can't customise purchase receipt email nor automate sending our own emails to purchasers (with the key and instructions on how to activate it to download).
• Itch has their own app and build update system called Butler. Butler and the app don't appear to be built around the idea of distributing apps that have their own installer, or at least there is no documentation about how to do so.
  We want to keep using our installer because:
  • It adds an extra layer of security: both the installer and the executable are signed.
  • It enables running functions such as:
    • Detecting 32bit vs 64bit operating system and changing the default version of Avoyd to run accordingly.
    • Setting registry entries for Avoyd on install (we couldn't find any documentation stating that Butler can do that).
  • At ~10Mb our installer is sufficiently small that patch updating isn't really necessary.
    There are workarounds for these but it would be duplicate work for us since we have our own installer already.
• Making it easier to browse and find apps on Itch. The default listing is overwhelming visually and not easily searchable by text and combinations of including and excluding tags. Being able to see a long text list of apps and tags would perhaps help. Likewise being able to add more than 10 tags for an application would be useful. In our case Avoyd can do a lot but we had to restrict the number of tags.
• Minor gripe: The file download counter on Itch restarts every time we upload a new executable. We update the Avoyd demo often and our installers have unique names which include the version number. This doesn't work well with the Itch analytics as it treats these files as new downloads. We're also unsure how this would work with the Itch app or Butler. It would be nice if the documentation clarified it.

Conclusion

Overall the barriers to using Itch.io are really low. If you're starting out in digital sales, it's an obvious place to go. If Itch.io had existed when we started we would have used it. For now we're happy to use Itch.io and plan to stay on the store in future.

Having had an issue with one payment provider, we've learned our lesson and will ensure we always have an alternative storefront. We're currently investigating Paddle. We do intend to use Steam and perhaps the Epic Store in the future but we want to develop Avoyd further beforehand.

[ Edit 23 Dec 2023 - clarified the point about the file download counter.]