Leaving itch.io

I decided to leave itch.io behing and eventually delete my account there.
If you purchased any of my products there, please make sure to backup a copy yourself.
If the respective app is also available on Steam, feel free to contact me about a key for it.
You could also try to issue a refund on itch, but I’m not sure whether that’ll work.
I’ll keep my account active for a while to give you enough time to react to these news.
I have a list of emails that purchased my products, but won’t keep it forever. So please make sure to contact me in a timely manner, if you’d like a Steam key instead.

Why?

At the start of 2019 I began using itch.io to sell some of my applications.
Up until now I sold roughly 100 copies and ‘made’ a total of 500 dollars.

Once I also offer an application on Steam, the itch.io sales drop to roughly 0-10 per year. It quite often happened that a version of a game or application is not even downloaded a single time.
In 2024 I sold a total of 8 copies for just above 40 dollars.

From a financial perspective it made zero sense to still offer my applications on itch.io,
yet I decided against closing my account to still offer updates to previous customers.
I kept all applications I sold in the past up-to-date and also published the latest builds to itch.io.

So why am I closing the account now, what has changed?

Since I made so little on itch.io I didn’t bother actually setting up payout methods and never tried to actually access the money I made there.

End of 2024 I decided to start the payout process on itch.io to actually get paid for the first time.

The payout was stuck ‘in review’ for many days, itch’s tooltip reads:

All payouts are human reviewed. Please allow around 10 to 14 days for our team to review the payout

After waiting for 24 days, I decided to contact their support via email asking about the status of my payout.
To this day I still have NOT received a response to above email.

At day 26 I created the following thread in their support forum https://itch.io/t/4400512/payout-stuck-in-review-for-over-26-days .

I also contacted support regarding a too high tax withhold rate on my payout.
For this email I got a response after 22 days, informing me that I should contact their tax provider instead.

After 44 days of waiting, my payout got cancelled due to ‘invalid tax information’ and that I should re-take their tax interview.
(I later noticed an email that I received before or at the very start of the payout process reminding me that I should update my information. So there’s certainly some fault on my end as well)

I once more contacted support to figure out what exactly was wrong with my information, so I wouldn’t make the same mistake again.
I also haven’t got a response to this email.

At the same time I re-took the tax interview and issued a new payout, hoping this would speed things up.
Now the tax withholding rate was correctly updated from 30% to 0% (Otherwise I would have been taxed twice).

As I’m writing this blog entry I’ve now been waiting for 46 days on the second payout and 90 days in total (NINETY).
As you’ll also see in the post I mentioned above https://itch.io/t/4400512/payout-stuck-in-review-for-over-26-days I also contacted them via their forums, provided tickets / payout information and the ‘admins were informed’ about it.

As you’ll see via this search I’m also not the only one affected by this https://itch.io/community/search?query=payout&category_id=10023&search_field=post&post_type=topic&query_format=phrase&sort=newest

At this point I now spent 90 days checking on my payout, contacting support and using their forums, having notifications about others with the same problems posting in my threads etc. .
All of this is nothing but frustrating and a waste of time and makes me want to never have to deal with itch.io ever again.
After all of this I’d be a fool to stay on the platform and try to sell applications there. Whether I’ll eventually be paid or not won’t change that.
Also consider this a warning if you plan on using itch.io .

Note that I also tried to figure out what happens to my customers in case of an account deletion, with no response either: https://itch.io/t/4595678/apps-still-accessible-after-account-deletion

Links and more

Below some links to other support forums entries and screenshots of them. Note that all of those a fairly recent and I didn’t have to search for long.

Also note that the forum’s rules actively discourage the creation of such threads:

Please do not create topics asking how long it will take for support to reply to you.  
Different questions may take different amount of time to respond,  
typically we will respond within a 1-3 days but it may take longer depending on the type of issue.  
If you haven't already, search for existing topics or check to FAQ to ensure that your question has not been answered elsewhere.  
To ensure that you request is tied to your account and prioritized appropriately,  
please contact us using the email address you have connected to your account.  
If you still need to make a topic about a Support Request, you must include your ticket ID with your message.

Me asking regarding my payout https://itch.io/t/4400512/payout-stuck-in-review-for-over-26-days
and account deletion https://itch.io/t/4595678/apps-still-accessible-after-account-deletion

NinStar waiting for over 40 days https://itch.io/t/4594179/no-updates-about-tax-information-payouts-under-review-for-over-40-days

Taifun Riders 40 days as well https://itch.io/t/4593629/payment-in-review-for-40-days

Alb_pixel Store with 23 days, others commenting as well https://itch.io/t/4589042/my-payment-has-been-under-review-for-23-days

Laura Hunt had the same problem, but it got resolved after weeks. Note all the other commentators there https://itch.io/t/4516375/tax-information-renewal-still-pending-ticket-id-below

Harsh Naidu waiting for 3-4 weeks https://itch.io/t/4589429/no-response-received-from-the-support

Leaving itch.io

Why?

Links and more

Screenshots of above pages