Hear, hear!
4 Likes
I think the point is that itās an archive, not a discovery tool. The IFDB is designed as a discovery tool, and can link direct to the archive which is happy to host IF (up to a certain size). The two work in tandem, with the archive a way to make sure games doesnāt disappear forever.
Hosting on Itch is fine, but we have seen other hosting sites collapse. Anything from a commercial company has an inherent uncertainty to it. The company has raised millions in venture capital, and could at any time in the future enter the freefall that other venture platforms have if new owners become more extractive with it.
Take Vine for example: after it was bought out by Twitter, it was discontinued as a service and the existing videos were archived, but the archive was only maintained for two years before it too was discontinued, losing all videos that had not been saved.
10 Likes
As did the Single Choice Jam, thank you very much Manon 
4 Likes
itch.io has?
2 Likes
The only place I found that suggest it has is this website, though it does not let you see any information unless you sign up. The Venture Capital listed does not even list itch on their website, nor is it mentioned on Wikipedia. In 2018 there was a thread on Twitter that indicated itch had been running for 6 years without VCs.
AFIAK itch is funded through the sales commissions.
4 Likes
My mistake! I misread this:
Overall, Itch and its competitors have raised over $20.4M in funding across 17 funding rounds involving 35 investors.
So itās a little less precarious than some other platforms (which is great!) but still subject to the normal vulnerabilities of operating in a marketplace. At any point it might be sold off to whomever who might do whatever to the existing setup.
2 Likes
Given that Leafās whole reason for founding Itch was to have a place for indies to distribute and sell their games that wouldnāt go away, that wouldnāt be sold off to some big corporation, that would be sustainable in both financial and labor termsā¦ that seems unlikely to me. Personally Iād back Leaf Corcoran as being just as competent and reliable as the IFTF, but hey, if you want to make up and promote reasons out of thin air why heās not, just because Itch isnāt a non-profit, you do you, I guess.
5 Likes
Lot of things about corporations get less unlikely over a span of years. The founder leaves or retires or takes a back seat while working on something else. On average, the next person in charge is more concerned with money than the founder, because thatās how for-profit corporations are structured.
7 Likes
I should add:
I remember when Sourceforge was the best place to host open-source software projects. It was free, good, and reliable. Then they drifted into being ad-encrusted garbage, and everybody shifted over to using Github, which was free (up to a point), good, and reliable.
Now Github is Microsoft. I think theyāre still good and reliable, but Microsoftās priorities arenāt the same as what Github was founded on. (E.g. Microsoft has been pushing heavily on AI tools, starting with adding Copilot to Github in 2021.) I see some people muttering and shifting over to other hosting platforms. Dunno whether that will be a long-term trend; the point is, watch the horizon.
(This all goes for nonprofits too. The difference is that the non-profit is not based on assumptions about money. This minimizes many of the long-term pressures to become garbage.)
14 Likes
Letās just say thereās a deficit of trust in for-profit concerns. Not that negligence, incompetence, and even intentional wrongdoing arenāt possible with non-profits, but they are at least, in theory, structured in a way that makes intentional exploitation difficult at best.
ETA: Ope, stepped on Zarf. My bad.
6 Likes
Just popping into say that Iām not applying this retroactively, so Iām going to review some one-choice games.
6 Likes
How do you think youād approach this for Itch-based comps/jams that donāt declare in advance which games allow archival?
For example, for ParserComp, it turns out that the winners opted out of the IF Archive, but youād have had no way of knowing that until the competition was over, right?
3 Likes
I donāt know! I might just wait till the competition is over and play the games then, Iāve done that in the past. I canāt make any commitments that depend on other people doing exactly what I want, because the world doesnāt work that way and Iāll just end up frustrated for no reason. So maybe Iāll play after, and maybe Iāll just play the games anywhere. Iām more looking for a heuristic than a hard and fast rule. If comps started offering a zipped-up file of the whole comp (for people that opted in) Iād play all the games that were in there.
Some games wouldnāt make sense to archive, though; one of the parsercomp games was pretty short but had a big memory size because it had a bunch of jumping jack roblox characters in 3d, which would have taken up a lot of online memory. So in situations like that Iād lean towards maybe playing anyway.
3 Likes
I totally see the logic of tending to review games for people that deposit games in the IFArchive (or opt-in by participating in a comp that uploads the games). Those authors are taking part in a particular culture that wants to see its games survive, and to in part keep those games alive through ongoing play and ongoing discourse about them.
To play devilās advocate, I could imagine taking the opposite tact, of consciously reviewing precarious games as a means of documentation ā like the example that Joey gives of a game that basically lives on only through a walkthrough and a review. This is a story that isnāt unique to digital games, of course, as evidence of many things lives on only through oblique mentions in some bit of documentation or other.
As others have mentioned, there seems to be another culture, or at least attitude, thatās more protective and private about games, not really wanting them shared beyond perhaps a small circle. But many authors may just be releasing games in the way they best know how and not have the awareness or resources to keep things going. Thatās also an argument to spread greater awareness of the IFArchive, I suppose!
13 Likes
I was thinking of this today, that it would be cool to have someone do the opposite, like āThe Ephemeral Reviewerā. Iād definitely support anyone who wanted to focus on that!
3 Likes
Count me out. I want to decrease my ephemerality, not increase it!
-Wade
2 Likes
Thereās a lot to chew in this great thread.
Even I think it deserves its own thread about archiving games.
6 Likes
Is there a distinction to be made between archiving games and linking to said archive from IFDB? Iāve considered redirecting people to itch.io because I like knowing when people visit my page or download my content. This would be in addition to keeping an updated zip at IF Archive.
8 Likes
Here on the Forum I have already seen some feats of persistent archaeological digging for games or documentation that seemed lost to the ages. Perhaps in a decade or three, some unwitting IF-enthusiast will read one of those reviews of a long gone game and unearth all kinds of cool finds on the search for more information.
8 Likes
I made a new thread if people would like to discuss the nature of IF archive et al there! I think Mathbrush has the right to make the decision he wants to make re: game reviews ^^
8 Likes