Itch.io ditches its revenue cut for Black Friday
The indie storefront is giving 100% of revenue to developers.
It's officially Friday! For the next 24 hours we're giving developers all of our revenue share.To celebrate the occasion hundreds of developers have already put their projects on sale! https://t.co/rezDf8ZOHcNovember 27, 2020
Indie storefront Itch.io is ditching their revenue cut for the next 24 hours, giving 100% of sales directly to developers.
Now, Itch is an unusual platform in that, unlike Steam's flat 30% cut or Epic's more generous 15%, developers can choose exactly how much they want to share with the site—defaulting at 10%, but free to set at anything from zero to 100%. For the next day, however, the site has decided to ditch their cut entirely, with all revenue earned until tomorrow morning going straight into creators' wallets.
It's a similar initiative to one set up by music platform Bandcamp, which started running "Bandcamp Fridays" as an attempt to help artists struggling through the pandemic. Thanks to its timing on Black Friday, Itch's event coincides with a heap of sales currently running on the site.
I do very much love Itch as a platform (and not just because it's where I host my own games). It's a great place for poring through to find games that'd otherwise fly under the radar, be they small jam projects or janky single-developer passion projects that wouldn't otherwise see the light of day. The sale page includes some decent cuts on everything from Among Us to Frog Detective 2 and Kentucky Route Zero—though, as is often the case with Itch, a little digging will often unearth all sorts of hidden gems like Connor Sherlock's Walking Simulator A Month Club or meatcore mech fighter Extreme Meatpunks Forever.
The increased revenue share event kicked off at 3 am ET / 8 am GMT, and runs through 'til the same time tomorrow morning.