Game store itch seems to have a problem with people selling pirated games

Here's a sad one, some low-life's have been using the game store itch.io to sell cheap copies of other people's games for cheap.

This has caused a stir recently, as the sales aggregator 'IsThereAnyDeal' picked up on Rimworld being 75% off, but Rimworld is not actually for sale on itch. Turns out, a similar problem cropped up only a week ago as well.

More people are noticing these issues too, the creator of Mount Your Friends and Baby Maker Extreme tweeted out this picture as an example of the problem:

For those that don't know: Rimworld, Factorio, Stardew Valley, Undertale and so on are not actually sold by the original developer on itch.

It turns out the people doing this were using an older feature for payments on itch. The old way enabled developers to get paid directly, by linking a paypal account instead of the payments going through itch first. That older way has now been disabled "indefinitely" for new accounts―good!

I'm a big fan of the store and their open approach to a lot of things, but it will obviously increase the amount of people who try to do things like this. As they grow, it's only going to be a bigger problem.

I've personally caught a few myself on itch, since I regularly browse their store for interesting smaller titles to cover. When I report them, they're usually dealt with in less than an hour which is pretty reasonable. I report them and fire off a quick tweet and next time I check they're gone.

I'm a big fan of itch.io and this doesn't change my mind about them. They're doing good work, but teething issues will happen, as they will for any growing business. The key point to take away is that they're not shying away from the issues, they are responding when it comes up and promptly removing the people doing it.

Even with the itch crew responding promptly, they're going to need to make more steps to tackle it. This is the type of thing that could end up killing their business. They can't lock it down too much, otherwise their whole business model goes out the window, but they have to do a bit more otherwise more developers might become wary about being on a store with a piracy problem.

Tricky times, but hopefully they will find more ways to combat it. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.