Lemma Soft Forums

It has been a while since I last visited the forum and boy, things have changed...
especially if you are like me and don't keep up with the "trends"
I used to use BMT Micro, also for affiliates - but I guess because of Steam and other similar platforms that has decreased a lot and there isn't really a replacement - at least not when it comes to affiliates, or is there?

Oh... and I noticed my signature image doesn't really work anymore either )-:

I think a few people still use BMT Micro. I'm pretty sure Sake Visual does. Though I could be wrong.
Right know Itch.io is really popular. Steam is as well. And some people are making great use of Patreon to release VNs.

As for affiliate programs, I'm not sure that any are commonly used, but I would love to see one become popular.

Morhighan wrote: ↑Sat Mar 10, 2018 1:20 pm I think a few people still use BMT Micro. I'm pretty sure Sake Visual does.

Yes, you are right, she does... including for her latest game... but you kinda made my point because she released her latest game 4 years ago

Der Tor wrote: ↑Sat Mar 10, 2018 10:12 pm

Morhighan wrote: ↑Sat Mar 10, 2018 1:20 pm I think a few people still use BMT Micro. I'm pretty sure Sake Visual does.

Yes, you are right, she does... including for her latest game... but you kinda made my point because she released her latest game 4 years ago

Backstage Pass only came out two years ago. Was it a Steam-only release?

Zelan wrote: ↑Tue Mar 13, 2018 5:12 pmBackstage Pass only came out two years ago. Was it a Steam-only release?

http://www.sakevisual.com/backstagepass/

The "buy now" button on this page is part of a itch.io widget.

Yeah, I still do use BMT at the moment, specifically because I like affiliate sales. Will probably not drop it entirely, but I will also be using itch.io+Steam moving forward, especially for free games. I've found some people are just happier to have a single place to store all their games.

To any devs who use both BMT Micro and other venues (ie, Steam and/or itchi.o), what are the benefits and drawbacks of each? Which would you personally recommend?

BMTMicro Pros - Small service fee, very responsive support team, affiliate sales (very nice), no extra steps - just pay and game is delivered
BMTMicro Cons - No auto-update options for users, must do all your own marketing

itch.io Pros - Set your own service fee, people can follow your account, easy to upload/update files, responsive to dev requests, nice community
itch.io Cons - Must do most of your own marketing, default homepage doesn't have much customization, people have to sign up for an account to use it (not everyone likes this)

Steam Pros - $$$
Steam Cons - Only if you're lucky

For anyone starting out, I would recommend itch.io. For ease of use, it's top tier, and they're very friendly towards indies. Both BMT and itch.io allow you to distribute keys to your users, so using that can be integrated into Steam later if you eventually want to spring for it.

I still use it, but I'm sliding away from it. The affiliate sales were the main thing keeping me there, but after winter wolves jumped off the platform, suddenly there's a lot less there. I don't intend to remove it as a payment option and obviously I have a lot of old customer records in there, but I'm slowly working on setting up itch pages as well.

Somehow this feel nostalgic. I'm still using it too (and open to affiliate), though I notice recently nearly no one buy through bmt, as most of people likes itch io and steam more.

Saw this thread only now
I was sort of FORCED to move from BMT to itch.io. I must thank the various MS and Apple for making their OSes require codesign. Direct sales were dropping insanely during past years, and I discovered the reason... unless you codesign your app, the OSes will display various FAKE warnings like Apple "this app is corrupt" (in reality it's NOT corrupted!!!!! Simply it isn't codesigned).
As you can imagine no users would buy if they can't even run the demo
Then I discovered that if you launch your exe from another client, like Steam or Itch.io client, it works! No error messages whatsoever.
Result, I gave up making installers and codesign (I was doing it but was a pain) and just moved to Steam/itch.io

Recently had some issues with itch.io payment but now are resolved. If I wasn't using itch.io, I would just use Steam since there's no point in even trying to sell direct anymore, because of the reasons above. Yes, people like to have a place to keep all the games, but the major issue is with this codesign madness.

I made a blog post about it a while ago if you want more details: https://www.winterwolves.net/blog/2017/ ... amenities/

Nowadays having a vendor/portal that doesn't have a client or at least diff uploading/patching system is really antiquate (that's why I don't use Humble either, they don't have it).