There’s 50% off all Chaosium games until the end of April at Itch.io to celebrate the Call of Cthulhu publisher setting up store there.
Itch.io is a marketplace for indie games and the COVID-19 lockdown, which is making it impossible to ship physical books has accelerated its adoption by tabletop publishers looking for additional digital coverage.
Geek Native’s “RPG Publisher Spotlight” feature in March was a showdown exclusively fought between Itch.io publishers. 2 Head Turtle won, but remained anonymous (at least; I couldn’t contact them) and so the article introduced Itch.io to Geek Native readers as much as it was able to shine a spotlight on 2 Head Turtle.
The attraction to Itch.io, which doesn’t even have a tabletop RPG section – most publishers make do with the “physical game” section – is that it’s cheaper than the Onebookshelf solutions (like DriveThruRPG). Still, also it reaches different, often incremental audiences.
However, Itch.io does not have the blogger support that Geek Native and other RPG news sites gets from Onebookshelf. Not yet, anyway.
Mostly, though, it costs little extra for publishers to upload completed PDF products to Itch.io and reach additional potential buyers.
Currently, Chaosium’s store includes likes like the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set, S. Petersen’s Field Guide to Lovecraftian Horrors, RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha Quickstart Rules and even the Basic Roleplaying SRD.
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