Just purchased Spirits of Xanadu, although it had the same confusing text:
https://www.humblebundle.com/store/p/spiritsofxanadu_storefront [External Link]

DRM Free download works just fine though.

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Grim Fandango Remastered lists a DRM free download from Humble under Platforms, but also says the following right above the Summary text:

Grim Fandango Remastered is provided via Steam Key. For key redemption, a free Steam account is required to play.

https://www.humblebundle.com/store/p/grimfandango_storefront [External Link]

So which am I supposed to believe here? Can anybody confirm?

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Quoting: Shaolu

Quoting: ripperSince when is Unreal Tournament an open source game?

The confusion might come in because technically the source is available for the engine, but yeah it's definitely not Freely licensed.

Actually there is an argument to describe Unreal Tournament as an Open Source game, since it uses an Open Source development model. It is certainly not Free Software though, because as you say, it is not freely licensed, which also conflicts with the generally understood meaning of the term Open Source, but not the development model.

Which is why both terms are terribly muddled. Free Software has the gratis connotation in English, while Open Source describes a development model that not all Free Software has to adhere to, as it is perfectly possible to develop a Free Software program in a closed fashion as long as the end result is freely licensed. Or as we see in this case, the opposite is also true.

Semantics are fun. Game of the year fun?

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Sounds like home. No, really.

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Quoting: TheBossItch is staying firmly on my radar due to such open communication. Other stores could learn a lot from them. An open source client is just icing on the cake for me. We really should cover Itch a lot more.

That I think we can all agree on.

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I guess it is also partly a matter of how invested one wants to be - I basically gave up following games before release once it became clear that the vast majority of the games I looked at would never reach completion or see a Linux port. So now I content myself with finished projects that are less likely to get me burnt.

Someone who does want to get involved in the development or emergent side of things would see more value in the prototypes and early releases, and it is a good thing that itch.io caters to them, but for a service that lauds itself for being inclusive it does have a rather bad habit of leaving people looking for polished content feeling out in the cold, with the entire service appearing as nothing more than a staging ground for developers before they move on to bigger and brighter things.

Open development when it comes to games is its own topic though, and one I am sure that we could both go on about at some length, but it does stray a little far from the topic of this particular article. Sorry for turning this into a mere back and forth between me and Cheese flesk.

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Just to make it clear, I do not mean to imply that itch.io is not trustworthy, but that is something I would be worried about if I really was just being faced with a generic storefront. So that is something that having an established brand helps with.

Most of the games I have purchased recently have been because they have appeared for me on GOG.com, although admittedly very few of them were games I was not aware of before. Still, it does help that it is easy for me to browse their catalogue, as well as Humble Stores, and find fully realized games to play. itch.io could still use improvements in this area, and the fact that I find it difficult to find any games that I would want to play is the main reason I have not gotten on the service, even though I really do like what it means for developers.

This is a management barrier and not a financial one, so saying that there are lots of free games to play does not really help with this problem. In fact, they might even help get in the way of my search for polished content, although I do not mean to imply that all free games are not polished. But you do have to admit, there are an awful lot of pre-alphas or basic demonstrations on there.

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I think you both misunderstood my original post - I was not actually arguing for monolithic curation or limiting their selection like you seem to be implying, and I even said that doing so would be a never ending task for the service. What I did say was actually in line with flesk's comment about itch.io making it harder than it needs to be to find games that meet certain users defined thresholds of completeness or quality. This is an area where itch.io badly needs some improvement, as it is hurting their brand unnecessarily.

To say that the service only needs to function as a generic storefront also seems a little misguided in my opinion. I only buy games from a few services now (GOG.com and Humble specifically). While this is admittedly mostly due to the convenience of only having to manage one or two accounts, it is also due to the fact that I am not comfortable with handing out my financial information to too many different groups. In order to purchase games from itch.io I need to have some confidence both in them and the fact that I would be willing to buy more than one game from them. Otherwise the activation energy is simply not there to get onboard.

Some level of discoverability is key in this, especially considering recent moves such as making the Itch client do suggest they want to promote a coherent brand.

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I am planning to try Spirits of Xanadu at some point:
http://allen.itch.io/spirits-of-xanadu [External Link]

It was covered on GoL, but the article only mentioned a Steam release, so I passed over it at the time.

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I really like the potential of itch.io, but it does have a something of an image problem due to the number of half-baked 7DFPS and Ludum Dare games that it hosts, just to name two examples. Obviously the whole point of the service is to promote raw creativity, and these games do deserve their place on the service, but itch.io really does need a way to separate the cream from the crop.

Of course, with features like Early Access and Steam Greenlight, many people also think that Steam is developing the same problem. There really is no end to the game curation rabbit hole.

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