I am all-in on itch.io - their platform stats are really useful. I’m not sure if I want to learn a whole new website as I’d rather spy on my game activity in one place!
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Personally, I’ve discovered many cool things I wouldn’t have otherwise solely because they were crossposted. I think I only became interested in your games because I saw and played Cannery Vale on textadventures.co.uk, for instance. I would never have found your games on Itch, which has awful search features, and even though I might’ve seen them on IFDB, in my recollection it was textadventures.co.uk that got me to play them.
I wish more people would crosspost, but also understand if people think it’s not worth the effort or want to finish a polished version before they put their work somewhere else. That last part is what I’ve told myself many times, though it usually ends with the polished version never getting finished and made.
I think the main advantage is portability. I’m often away from home, and play IF sometimes in places where I couldn’t bring my own personal computer with me, or take it out. But a phone is compact. I can bring out and use my phone while standing or doing chores like making food. And, of course, a great deal of people can only afford to have a phone and not a computer. Most people who have to get either a phone or a computer would likely choose the phone, since it’s far easier to make calls with it and take it with you wherever you go. It sucks that the state of accessible smartphones is so shitty, though.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the share of people who use phones versus computers to access the Internet. This random statistics site said that there’s about twice as much mobile internet traffic as desktop internet traffic. In the US and Japan, the ratio is relatively balanced, while in Nigeria and India, there’s about four times more mobile traffic compared to desktop traffic. I don’t know where these statistics are coming from, as a caveat.
The ideal, I think, is to create a website that works on all browsers on both computers and phones, adjusting for every possible screen width. Unfortunately, that comes with a lot of work and aesthetic compromises, and takes time. Accessibility issues are like this in general. The devs either don’t think about it, don’t have the time and energy to do all of it, don’t care enough, or any combination of the above. Many sites, apps, and games aren’t accessible to one or more of these groups: people who use screenreaders, people who don’t know the app’s main language, people who use phones, people who use computers… This is before we even get into geoblocking and censorship.
There’s also an imbalance to this, where larger organizations like big companies are more likely to be able to address all these issues, which means they get more of the traffic, which means the small apps and sites have even less of an incentive to work on accessibility issues. Google’s sites, like Youtube, automatically change languages depending on the region of the world you’re accessing them from, but IFDB is only available in English.
At the risk of digressing, there’s also another standpoint on phones that I feel deserves mention, which is the governmental standpoint. Governments love phones because they make people infinitely more easy to track. A world where people do almost everything through their phones is a world where almost every action is legible and traceable. A population where everyone brings their internet-connected phones with them, everywhere they go, is easier to control. But then, in today’s high-tech societies, mass surveillance is everywhere and the average person’s privacy is essentially dead. So maybe I should give up griping.
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Makes sense the mobile:desktop ratio would be even more skewed in less developed countries… Once mobile technology exists, it’s easier to build cell towers than lay miles of cable… Also, I suspect phones consume less power than desktops or laptops on average, so easier to keep a phone charged off a portable solar panel in the absence of a robust power grid.
Though, there are plenty of blind people using both android and iOS, I just never got the hang of using Talkback and I have no interest in Apple’s Walled Garden, so have never tried Voiceover. Granted, during the time frame I gave Talkback a try, I had no pressing need for a computing device I can use on the go, and if I did, I could just use a Raspberry Pi with a USB power pack. If I needed to learn to use Talkback, I might have been able to fight past the rustrations.