René-Pier Deshaies is making an alternative platform for TTRPGs.
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To be honest, I’m not holding my breath. This all sounds like a legal quagmire, unless you move a lot of that to third party providers which then really spoils the “low cost” part…
Yeah, as I understand it, the hurdle in building an online marketplace is not so much the dev as the money. You have to deal with things like tax and escrow and currency exchange. And that involves a lot of liability. It’s also where a lot of the cost comes in, so unless you’re willing to do less than other sites, making it cost less to creators may be a pretty tall order.
Good luck to him. I’d love to see more options. But it’s probably not the right project to take on if you’re already juggling a lot.
Speaking as someone who’s done software development and product management, I cringed throughout reading this. The dread disease of any software developer is the “how hard can it be?” attitude that means you haven’t thought it through. Yes, of course it’s simple if you discount all the edge cases. These big platforms aren’t clunky because they were all 1x engineers and you’re a “10x engineer,”* they’re clunky because they’re solving hard problems and they ran into every edge case and that is load-bearing cruft. Your POC is simple and shiny and fast because you’ve done the easy 80% and you haven’t even surfaced the other 20%, let alone addressed it.
I wish him luck and I will avoid that platform like the plague until it’s been proven for a few years.
*10x engineers don’t actually exist
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Well, when he raises the funding to support a dedicated team to ironing out all the wrinkles that will occur after launch, then I’ll think it a serious effort. Just paying for all of necessary expertise using freelancers will be costly.
I don’t even think the programming is the problem here. There’s plenty of ecommerce software, even multi-vendor, multi-tenant if you’d want to go for a Shopify look, not a the “we’ll distribute money later” that drivethru/itch seem to be doing.
And it’s not like the number one player is hard to beat when it comes to web design and usability…
But international taxation, billing and copyright? Whoo, boy. If some lawyer would be saying “I’ll just hire a developer to vibe code this”, I’d rate the chances higher than the inverse 
“What do you mean, I sold a product that contains the word ‘explosion’ and the author is in Iran, Mr. NSA Agent?”
I agree with the premise of the author seeing a real need, but man does that post feel naïve. But they are 100% right about needed to figure out the taxes issue, there is no way I as a hobbiest publisher would take on doing the sales tax for myself.
I’m circling the conclusion that the best way to “make it” is to literally make it and sell it at conventions where you’re running “it” and selling signed copies of “it” while dutifully taking down the name and email address of everyone who plays in your game and/or buys one.
The platform you use for your digital sales? Those are like, stage 3 creator problems. I need to get to stage one. I think a lot of us need to get to stage one.
Just sayin.
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I don’t know, getting actual people to play your internet-available creations is stage at-least-3 for a lot of the rest of us
I can see that, but to me that seems like cart-before-the-horse. Who cares what I put up on Drive-Thru or Itch.IO? Who am I to think I can somehow stand out among the amazing volume and variety of offerings on any platform to get people to my content and buy it? For that matter, how would my stuff even stand out above the more-lacking offerings on any of those platforms? No one knows (or dare I say cares) who I am.
That’s my problem: Who cares about what I’m doing? Currently, it’s about 20-30 people here in my immediate vicinity. If I can figure out how to get to 50k, where and how I’m going to sell my own “it” online will be a less complex problem than the former, in my opinion.
And may I also say, one that I very much look forward to having one day.
Cheers for the discussion. You’re giving me a lot to think about.
I hate DrivethruRPG. The backend is so old, it looks like a 90s program, there is no way to organise your library, search is reduced to titles… Just awful usability.
I like itch.io well enough. The design is clear and looks modern. The library gets a while to get used, but you can organise the stuff neatly using collections.
I have sold a couple of things through itch on PWYW. It was weird that I need to declare taxes on the US even though neither I nor the people buying my stuff are in the US. But anyway, at least the process for the forms and such was clear enough in itch. I honestly don’t expect a better and easier alternative to come up anytime soon.
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(I will add that I am a fan of René-Pier Deshaies and some of his games have been licensed here in Spain to moderate success, but I this issue is very different from game design)
Speaking as a publisher, my big question is whether a new platform will bring a new audience or not. If I have to aim my marketing resources towards a platform for it to be successful, I’d rather aim it to my own store instead where I have much greater control over the whole experience.
Those are the competing factors to me. How much is the cut taken by the platform and how much of its own audience can it bring to my work?
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I think it’s an admirable goal, but yeah, I don’t think it will get adoption from creators at scale if it still essentially requires them to run their own webshop - the audience won’t come if the creators aren’t there, and the better library management doesn’t really matter if 90% of people’s libraries are still going to be on itch or DriveThru.
To me, as a customer, there’s a good point in having a library external to the publisher’s store. There’s a reason why people love Steam and hate Battlenet. Having everything in the same library is just convenient to use, not having to remember what was the publisher, login on multiple websites, etc. Of course for publishers it’s bad giving up a portion of their earnings to the store, but it’s also a centralised service that customers appreciate (Oh no, am I defending the D&D Beyond model? 
)
For me one advantage of buying online is not having to have my disks full of PDFs. If the external library is popular enough, it’s a resilient way to maintain access to your stuff if a publisher closes its doors (and website), just like Steam users have access to games no longer in sale. I know licensing doesn’t work like that (for example here on Spain our Adventure Time d6 pool ttrpg has been discontinued and the digital downloads have been deleted as the license has lapsed). But this is the idea behind a “perfect 3rd-party store” that is impervious to those issues.
I think it’s important that we as customers recognize that it’s up to us to preserve our online purchases. A DriveThru library is great but we can’t trust it. They’ve pulled down products previously purchased in the past. Alchemy, the VTT, recently pulled down purchased PDFs for one of their publishers. Online centralized platforms aren’t resilient. Big ones can get swallowed up by even bigger corporations. Small ones can simply go out of business.
Downloading and storing our own RPG PDFs, I think, is important along with backing them up (set up that 3-2-1 backup strategy!). Otherwise we’re dependent on a storefront that may go out of business, change their policies, pull or change products, or engage in other anti-consumer behaviors we can’t even think of. Even Steam can die or enshittify.
Putting my publisher hat back on, I’m happy to support DTRPG because it is very commonly used and it drives their own customers to my products. Itch doesn’t so I don’t use them. Whether or not customers prefer itch because it has a centralized library doesn’t matter if no one is buying my stuff there anyway.
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I agree with this, but also Itch itself runs on a built-from-scratch web framework (Lapis) written in a built-from-mostly-scratch programming language (Moonscript, “mostly” because it transpiles to Lua). And if you asked me if someone doing this would ultimately be as successful as Itch I’d think you were crazy.
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It’s not impossible, but I’ll also wager that the original Itch PoC and the current storefront are only tenuously related, as the devs found and fixed edge case after edge case after edge case.
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At the time of writing it, that would’ve seemed quite in line with the not-quite-mainstream. Lua was considered a performance powerhouse due to things like LuaJIT and OpenResty, and transpiled languages were still in their hype cycle (MoonScript being heavily inspired by CoffeeScript, and lotsa games being done with Haxe).
There’s an argument to be made whether someone who likes to fiddle around with this more interesting stuff can have the stick-to-it-ness required for a commercial enterprise
Technically speaking, this forum is probably more complicated than 90% of storefronts (needlessly so, and not considering scaling, of course). The business and legal side of things is the harder stuff, I’d have more hopes for “I’m a retired business guy™ who did some Perl/CGI while at college in the 90s” than for a random tech guy like me…
I think direct access to the creator, and self-managed digital libraries is the way to go.
I say remove the man-in-the-middle. We have the Internet, and technology.
Consortiums of like-minded creators seem to be the emergent alternative. Merry Mushmen, OSE, etc. A co-op model might work well for a group of creators, if one or more aren’t already using that structure.
I’m pretty sure forums like this are a good start to creating alternatives to things. 