Itchfunding Setup — Some Thoughts

Itch is a great website, but it isn’t really built for Crowdfunding like Kickstarter, Gamefound and others. This article is looking at some of the things we did to set up Itchfunding to act similarly to other crowdfunding platforms.

Before we get into it, it is important to understand that Itchfunding excels at the lower-stress long-burn of funding campaigns. There’s no time limit, no deadline. However, I wanted to have a strong ‘release day’ and build hype around the game I’m working on. As such, I want to emulate several KS features.

A Pre-launch Page

On Itch.io there is no good way to set up a page ahead of time for people to ask to be notified when the campaign starts. There’s two important things a pre-launch page does:

• Give you a clean landing page to present summary information.
• Get people to sign up to be notified!

If you launch your main page to do this, you will have a hard time setting up the go-live page with images, tiers, rewards and new verbiage all in well fell swoop. Give yourself time to play with the features and tweak rewards while it is in draft leading up to the campaign.

Carrd.Co — A Clean Landing Page

Instead, we set up a carrd.co website with a custom domain. They have a free tier, but we opted for the Pro plan to get some additional features like URL redirection and embeds.

This costs $50/year + $12/yr for the domain. But this allows us to have a clean, branded landing page, present game information, and ask people to sign up to be notified. You can see https://www.bandasgrove.com as an example.

We also use the redirect feature instead of a URL Shortener. bandasgrove.com/presskit for example takes you to the itch.io hosted press kit page, /notifyme takes people to the newsletter sign up, and /groove takes you to our curated soundtrack on Spotify.

Revue — Collect and Notify

We decided to go with Revue for our newsletter / notification platform. TinyLetter was too simple and I kind of hated the setup involved with MailChimp. Revue is easy, has integrations with both Twitter and Carrd, and the emails are beautiful, easy to write, and use simple drop-in modules.

Lets talk about those integrations. Revue can drop a sign up card directly into your Twitter profile and supports clean looking cards when you link them in tweets.

They also have an API and integrations with Facebook, Pocket, Instagram, Medium (to post your emails as articles), and more.

So Carrd is our landing site, which has a sign up form module which we link to Revue via an API key***. Done. Cool. So far we haven’t touched Itch yet. Lets fix that.

• ***and the API integration [is fixed now]. Update: It works now! Looks like Revue needs time to ensure you’re a valid, non-spam customer before using things like the API. So make sure you sign up early so that has time to filter through.

Setting up the itch page and tiers

Setting up our press kit to be hosted on itch took a lot of work out of setting up the game’s page. You have a lot more design control on itch so really push your marketing chops here to get the vibe of your game presented with backgrounds, fonts, and color pallets. We like having the sidebar of images, but others opt to remove that completely and go with in-line images. Up to you.

People have started using the #itchfunding tag in the game setup. We’re going to use it. You should use it too!

Tiers — Rewards System

This is where we had trouble getting things configured, but itch also has some nice features for data collection, so it’s a balance. For Tiers, we use their Reward system which is found under More -> Rewards.

First and foremost itch sucks at add-on content and their pricing works on a ‘how much have you paid to unlock this file?’ system. You do not tie rewards to uploaded files, but purchase prices. An example:

$10 — Game PDF
$15 — Game PDF + Extra
$5 — Extra ADD-ON

If your idea is to allow people to come back after buying the $10 game to purchase the $5 add on, that’s not how itch works. Itch will see that they paid $10 and unlock all files up to the $10 level. Which now includes the $5 Extra automatically.

And they cannot increase their purchase price later so if they buy the $10 game, there is no way (that I have found) for them to pay another $5 to ‘bump up’ to the $15 tier.

So be aware of that. Tiers should be increasing increments of value.

You CAN offer Community Copies at no cost. They will get whatever files you have not explicitly set a price on — usually your base tier content.

Collecting Data from Backers

We wanted to offer a tier that allows people to contribute an idea directly to the game (like ‘make a creature’!) Rewards have the ability to collect values at the time of purchase, such as email addresses, postal addresses, names, etc. This makes organizing these tiers much easier!

More Benefits of using Rewards

In the Rewards tab is the Claimed and Fulfillment tab. This allows some cool stuff such as seeing who purchased at what reward tier, email people by rewards tier, a CSV export, and a Fulfilled checkbox!

Setting a License at the Game Level

In the Metadata Tab -> Release Info you can set a game-page-wide license.

External Links and Promo Images

Another game page feature I’d highly recommend checking out. External links allow you to add your carrd.co homepage, twitter, etc.

You can also set what image appears when you link the page in social media in Promo Images. This and external links will be used by itch.io during their own promotions of your game.

Discussion Board

Finally, we decided to create a Discussion Board for the Community section to emulate the Updates and Questions section on KS.

The Sale Banner

The Sales Banner displays how close you are to your funding goal and also drops you into the Sales page on itchio. It is similar to Kickstarter’s counter. There’s four schools of thought on how to do this:

• Have a 1% off sale. Some customers seem to complain about this.
• Have no sale and use your own graphic that you update. Doesn’t have the nice updating bar, but it’s easy to control and provide periodic updates when you hit funding goals.
• Have a sale + graphic. Best of both worlds!
• Decide on the final post-funding price, and then put it on sale down to the backer / itchfunding price. (Example: Final price will be $25, itchfunding price is $15, run a 40% off sale). However, this does back you into corner on final pricing as you have promised the final product at $25 already, but rising costs made it so you now need the final product at $30.

Final Thoughts

The hardest part of all this is going to be driving traffic to the page after go-live. Kickstarter is neigh unbeatable in that respect. Make sure you have good tags set up and itch.io will help a little bit, but you need to really prepare your marketing engine to consider getting bigger numbers.