Five years and 100,000 games later: Itch.io founder Leaf Corcoran tells us about the indie marketplace's evolution

pcgamesinsider.biz:

It's been five years since Leaf Corcoran launched Itch.io, his vision of what a digital storefront for indies should look like.

The platform has been a success in some regards; it boasts 100,000 games, and certainly has real street cred with the indie development scene. But, by Corcoran's own admission, there is a lot of work to do. And, to his credit, Itch.io has already changed a great deal from Corcoran's initial vision in order to make life easier for developers.

"When I launched Itch.io, creators made their page and they could do whatever they want with it," he says.

"We wouldn't even list the games, there'd be no way to browse them, there was no promotion or community or anything like that. Part of the reason I did that is because at the time I was making some small games and I just wanted a landing page that would be up, having downloads, be fast and that was that. I didn't want to build a social network around games or build a huge a platform.

"As time went on, I started to realise that people liked our stance and what we were doing we have a voice in the industry among indies. It's good for us to take that and promote content. As the years go on, I have been developing a lot more features in terms of promoting content and giving people more channels to promote their work, changing how we do curation on the home page, changing how our browser pages work, trying to get as much traffic to the developers as possible.

"Internally, we have two metrics; we have internal refers and external refers. External means a developer posted a link on Twitter and someone clicked on it, which is nice and we get a tonne of that. But I'm trying to think about how we boost internally, how can I get repeat visitors to the Itch