The popular site, perhaps best known as a free portal to host game jams, is beefing up its free indie marketplace offerings -- and has broken down its stats in incredible detail.
Leaf Corcoran, the creator of popular indie game distro site itch.io, has broken down a tremendous number of stats for the site -- including revealing that, so far, the site has generated $117,244 from game sales. It doesn't sound like a lot, but there are two important things to consider: A huge number of games on itch.io are free, and the site doesn't take a slice of revenues. Itch.io was created by Corcoran to be a free, web-based hosting and distribution service for games, and also functions as a hub for many game jams. Since it first launched, Corcoran has added new functionality (there's now an external widget you can embed on your own site, and the functionality to create bundles, for example.) And sales have started to pick up in response to that. Interestingly, Corcoran notes that players sometimes pay even for free games, out of appreciation; the fact that most game purchases come via Google traffic, probably from search; and that the Oculus subreddit, of all of them, is sending the most paying customers itch.io's direction. The post covers: - Revenue breakdown by month - Cumulative revenue from game sales (see below) - A wealth of information on payment - Referrers (including search, community, and web publications) - Web games vs. download games - The effects of discounts on game sales - The elasticity of game pricing - Types of games on the service by technology, genre, and platform - Download statistics There's almost too much data in Corcoran's blog post, which you can read here. 
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