The program lets developers limit their number of sales, use secret URLs or password protection for game pages, and add tiered purchases and rewards. The pinnacle of this approach is Itch.io’s early access program for unfinished games, dubbed Refinery. “Do things that’ll let developers do weird stuff and interesting stuff.” Jared Newman/ PCWorldĬustomizable game pages are one of Itch.io’s defining features. “The mentality of the store was, do what the other people aren’t doing,” Corcoran says. Corcoran also allowed for alternate descriptors on the site’s buy button, confirmation emails, and other site elements, so for instance a shopper might find they’ve purchased a “ game art album” or a “psychedelic experience” instead of just a “game.” Another wanted a game page that slowly shrank over time. One developer wanted limited-time pricing that was more expensive than normal. Why do we need this? Why do we care?’”īut he also started fielding requests for unusual features that didn’t exist on other stores like Steam. The sentiment from people that did reply, on Twitter and stuff, was like, ‘Oh, another store. “I had a hard time getting people interested. The first version of Itch.io-the name comes from a cheap domain Corcoran bought years ago-launched in early 2013, to practically no fanfare. Shoppers would be able to pay any price above a minimum as a show of appreciation, and the whole marketplace would be decentralized, with no way to browse the entire catalog or comment on any of the games. Developers would get to list their games for free and customize their game pages. He wanted to create something more open, inspired by the online music marketplace Bandcamp. Taking flightĬorcoran started working on Itch.io in late 2012 as a response to Valve’s Steam Greenlight program, which used a community voting system to let indie games into the store. With the support of Axolot Games, the team founded the studio Redbeet Interactive, moved to Skövde and continued the development of Raft.“I don’t want to fall in that trap of just trying to rebuild Steam, and then I lose because I don’t have the engineering resources that they do,” he says. With their common passion for survival games both parties felt this was a perfect match and soon after decided to work together. With their sights set on a Steam Early Access release in 2018 they met with Scrap Mechanic developers Axolot Games in search for an investor and publisher. They quickly decided to keep developing Raft into something bigger and better. This type of response came as quite the shock to the developers. While the group was home on Christmas break, Raft was starting to get noticed by more and more youtubers and gained a lot of traction on Itch.io.īy the end of May the prototype had been downloaded over 7 million times and was covered by several major youtubers such as Jacksepticeye, Markiplier and FGTeeV. Said prototype was released for free on Itch.io December 19th, 2016, right before christmas. A group of three students spent around 15 weeks half-time to create a prototype for a survival game set on an endless ocean. Raft started as a student project at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland fall 2016. The studio is currently developing Raft, which is its first project. It is based in Skövde, Sweden and consists of two graphics artists and one programmer who all attended the game design program at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland. Redbeet Interactive is a very small studio of three people founded in 2017. Brief history of Redbeet Interactive and how Raft came to be:
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