Voyage of the Marigold, my StarTrek-esque game of commanding a starship on a dangerous mission, is now available on Itch.io. There are no updates to the game itself, and the version on Sheep.Horse is still the preferred version.
Play Voyage of the Marigold on Itch.io
I have very mixed feelings about services like Itch.io. Itch.io seems like a well run site - not too much advertising and fairly user friendly. That said, I am always very leery of "free" services that host content for you. As soon as you hand over your game, or posts, or pictures to an other company, they effectively become at least part owners of your ideas.
Itch.io seems fine now, but sooner or later they will be squeezed for cash or be bought out and things will change. This usually takes the form of plastering advertising over everything and ruining the user experience. Itch has been around for a while, long enough to outlast several more annoying competitors, so hopefully they will manage to resist the lure of advertising for a few more years.
The one real issue I have with Itch is that they really want to host the game themselves rather than let you just have a page with links to your external site. I can completely understand why they do this but I would prefer to have the option.
If I am so against these kinds of services, why am I uploading my game there now?
Itch.io has a massive reach into the demographic that plays browser games, as well as some nifty tools like forums and ratings. I have been advised that games on Itch see more traffic that self-hosted games. In craven terms - Itch promises engagement. Feel free to click on the above link and smash that Rate This Game button. Or not.
So far I haven't seen a huge crowd of players, but its been less than 24 hours.
The other thing that Itch provides is a nice community of developers - there is a game jam next month that I want to enter that is run entirely on Itch's platform. Uploading my old game is somewhat of a trial balloon to see what is involved before I have to do it while time limited.
Sheep.Horse will still be the primary host for all my projects but if Itch.io seems to really generate increased interest then I will start copying future games there as well.