this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2021
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Itch.io

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Itch.io is a website for users to host, sell and download indie games. Here you can share games, make reviews, upload updates of your games or even share them!

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I love the cool DIY vibes on itch, but it's troubling how much commercial closed-source tech you see on there. Also itch itself is not a free-software platform. They encourage gamedevs to share their games, but themselves don't share their software... just as hypocrit as evil Github!

My questions are:

  • is there a free-software itch-like platform? maybe even a federated one where you don't need a centralized server?
  • is there an itch-like platform dedicated to free-software games?

I remember there were a few projects like that YEARS AGO in the early days of Steam but i don't remember the names and i don't know how successful they were.

Anyway, are folks from this community interested in this?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

I actually once started doing a front-end for a web app store but never finished. Since idk how to use git I never published it on Github/gitea/gitlab so its just sitting on my computer. I guess if anyone wants to use it they can just contact me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Actually, I'd like. How can I contact you??

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

The GitHub repo is here: https://github.com/Zoe8338/retrosquare.github.io If you got any questions or just wanna talk about anything you can email me at [email protected] with the Subject as "Contact for RetroSquare Repo"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

https://github.com/itchio/itch

itch is libre, if you don't like it for whatever reason there is also GameJolt but they aren't that much different.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 years ago (1 children)

O wait, so you are looking that hosts exclusively FOSS games, not something that is a FOSS platform?

Good question. However I believe that it would be very very small niche if you were to exclusively target the FOSS gamedev community.

Good first step towards what you want to see would probably be to develop an aggregator that shows FOSS games that are already available on existing platforms (Steam, Humble, GOG, Itch.io, GitHub, GitLab, etc)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 years ago

O wait, so you are looking that hosts exclusively FOSS games, not something that is a FOSS platform?

Ideally, both :)

it would be very very small niche

Indeed. But it could grow. I mean i'm asking on /c/itch_io because there's a lot of non-profit development taking place on itch. In my view all these developments should be free-software and should encourage cooperation between artists/projects. Like a tiny ecosystem growing horizontally :)