itch.io vs Steam for your first release

Your first game is close enough to done that you have to decide where it goes. The two names that come up are itch.io and Steam, usually framed as a competition, and usually decided on the one variable people can find quickly: the fee.

That framing makes the decision harder than it is. These are not two versions of the same thing with different prices. One is a storefront with a discovery machine attached, the other is a publishing space you control, and they answer different questions about what a first release is for.

What follows compares them on the things that actually differ for a first-time release — cost and lead time, who is browsing, how far each one carries you beyond your own language, and how to use both — so you can pick based on your goal rather than on the sticker.

They are not the same kind of place

Steam is a store with machinery around it. People arrive already shopping, they browse a catalog, they add things to a wishlist and get notified when those things launch or go on sale, they read and write reviews that stay attached to your page permanently, and they are pushed toward games by recommendation surfaces and seasonal events. When you release there, you are entering a system that will either show your game to people or not.

itch.io is closer to a place to publish. Putting a page up is free and takes an afternoon, the page is yours to lay out, game jams are built into the site, devlogs live alongside the game, pay-what-you-want pricing is normal rather than exotic, and browser-playable builds run directly on the page — which for a small first project can mean the difference between someone trying it and someone not bothering.

The practical consequence is about traffic. On Steam, a portion of your audience can come from the platform itself if the game connects with the systems that surface it. On itch, you have a URL, and your traffic is mostly whatever you bring to it — from a jam, a social post, a stream, a community — plus a modest amount of browsing from the site's own visitors.

So the question is not which platform is better. It is what your first release is for: learning and feedback, serving an audience you already have, or finding out whether the game can earn money.

Cost, review, and how long until you are live

Steam has a one-time fee per title that becomes recoupable once the game earns past a revenue threshold, plus a percentage cut of each sale with tiers that improve at high revenue. Check the current amounts in the official documentation rather than a blog post, since both have changed over the years. What costs more than the money is the lead time: your store page is reviewed, your build is reviewed, a tax interview has to be completed before you can be paid, and the store page has to be public for a minimum period before you are allowed to release.

That last requirement catches first-timers constantly. Discovering a mandatory waiting period a week before the launch date you already announced is an avoidable and very common way to lose your launch. Read the release checklist early — not when you think you are ready to ship, but when you first pick a date.

itch.io is free to publish on, and the platform's share of your revenue is something you set yourself, including setting it to nothing. You can create a page and have it live the same day. Payments have more than one arrangement, and it is worth reading the current documentation on who is the merchant of record, because that determines how sales tax is handled and when money reaches you.

The low bar on itch is both the feature and the catch. Nothing stops you from publishing something unfinished, and nothing pushes you to finish it either. Steam's process is not difficult, but it does force a set of decisions — pricing, languages, capsule art, tags, a release date — that a first-time developer benefits from being forced to make.

Who is on the other side

The audiences overlap but behave differently, and expectations set from the wrong one lead to bad conclusions about your game.

People browsing itch are often looking for jam entries, experiments, free games, and things they have not seen elsewhere. Paid sales happen, and some games do very well, but for a small first release the realistic return is feedback, players, and a few people who now know your name. Treat revenue there as a bonus rather than a measurement of the game's commercial potential.

People browsing Steam are shopping. They compare prices, they use wishlists, they have a refund window, and they leave reviews that shape how everyone afterwards reads your page. That review system is the sharpest difference for a first release: on Steam a rough launch is publicly and permanently visible in a way it is not on itch, where ratings and comments carry far less weight.

Neither of those is a reason to avoid Steam. It is a reason to not use Steam as the place you learn what your game is. Games that arrive on Steam having already been played, patched, and revised based on real players tend to launch better than games whose first contact with players is also their commercial launch.

How far each one carries you outside your own language

This is the difference developers most often fail to look at before choosing, and for a game with any international ambition it is the biggest one.

Steam does a lot of the international work for you, provided you fill in the fields. The store page can be authored per language and shown to each player in theirs. The supported-languages declaration feeds the filters people browse with, so a player who filters by their own language either sees you or does not, entirely based on those checkboxes. Prices are set per region in local currency, local payment methods are handled, and the whole interface around your page is already in the player's language, which means your page does not have to carry the entire burden of feeling native.

itch.io gives you one page that you author. You can absolutely write it in two languages, and nobody stops you — but as far as the current platform goes, there is no per-language variant of the listing, no language filter routing players to you, and the site's own surfaces are English-dominant. Plan on doing multilingual presentation by hand, and check the current documentation before assuming anything more.

The conclusion is not that itch is worse. It is that the value Steam adds internationally is conditional: it only materializes if you actually fill in the language fields, translate the page, and declare supported languages honestly. A Steam page in one language with every language box left empty gets you very little of that machinery. If reaching players who do not read your language matters for this release, that work is the price of admission, and it is small — a store page is a few hundred words.

Getting paid across borders is part of this too. Steam runs a tax interview and handles buyer-side taxes as part of the sale; on itch it depends on which payment arrangement you use. Read how each one pays out before you build a plan on top of it.

Using both, and in what order

Most developers eventually use both, and there is a common sequence that works well: put jam builds, prototypes, and early versions on itch where publishing is free and feedback is the point; get a Steam page up early to start collecting wishlists while you keep working; launch on Steam, where the launch machinery lives; and keep the itch page afterwards for players who prefer buying there, for bundles, and for the audience that found you in the first place.

A few practical cautions if you sell in both places. Keep your pricing consistent across stores, and read Steam's current rules about Steam keys before planning any cross-store discount or bundle that includes them, because the constraints there are real and specific. Note also that a demo on itch does not build Steam wishlists — the wishlist button only exists on Steam — so if wishlists are the goal, the demo has to be where the button is.

And be honest about maintenance. Two stores means two upload paths, two changelogs, two comment sections, and two places to answer the same question. That is a small cost, but for one person shipping their first game it competes directly with the time available to fix bugs.

Choosing, and why the choice is less permanent than it feels

It is worth saying plainly first, because this decision generates far more anxiety than it deserves: releasing on itch does not disqualify you from Steam later. Plenty of games have gone from a jam build to an itch page to a full Steam release, and the earlier versions are usually an asset rather than an embarrassment — evidence of a real audience and a public record of the game improving.

What is genuinely hard to undo is a Steam launch that happens before the build, the store page, or the language coverage were ready. The visibility a game gets around its launch comes around once, reviews written that week stay on the page, and the fixes you ship afterwards are read by a smaller audience than the problems were.

So pick based on what this release is supposed to accomplish, and when in doubt take the reversible option:

• Learning, feedback, or a small, free, experimental game — itch first, without hesitation; the cost of being wrong is nearly zero
• You already have an audience and want to find out whether the game earns — Steam, with the process lead time taken seriously and a date chosen after reading the release requirements
• Reaching players outside your own language matters from day one — Steam, with the store page translated and the supported-languages fields filled in properly
• Content that sits near a platform's policy boundaries — read both content policies before you build a plan, since they differ meaningfully
• You are unsure — release on itch, gather real players, and put up a Steam page while you use what they tell you