"Roulette Buy"

[primaerfunktion]

I read this on Twitter some time ago. This is not my idea and I don't remember whose it was. But I like it, so:

You enter into a textfield how much money you want to spend and some random games will be bought for you for that money.

[quantumproducer]

+1. I think this would be best for new games to give players a way to support fresh launches

[lparkermg]

+1 Maybe have a limit on the timeframe (Like 30 days etc)

[aaronfranke]

-1

Itch is a site that serves video games, often played by children. This would be a system similar to gambling, which is not appropriate for children and developing minds.

The people who do use it will likely be angry if they don't like what they get. At a minimum there would have to be a way to filter by tags, otherwise people would get a lot of visual novels...

[TangentFoxy]

I don't think this is something itch.io should natively support, but should be possible to support through API calls. I do not recall what the state of itch.io's API is off the top of my head but I'm pretty sure this can't be done yet/now..

[aaronfranke]

An API for making purchases sounds scary. But perhaps there should be an API for "pull up a random game", which the user can then manually purchase (or play in the case of free games) if they like it.

[TangentFoxy]

@aaronfranke Such an API, if implemented, would work in a way that requires the user to confirm a purchase, itch.io's developers are not dumb. :P

[quantumproducer]

Randomly buying games is not "gambling".

[leafo]

There's no convenient way to make this work since once you start paying for something you will see what it is. There is a wide range of games on itch.io, and I don't really see buying something truly random to be a good experience. So I can't justify coding an entirely new way to pay for just this feature.

If you want to simulate something like this then I recommend using the game randomizer to find something random, and then you can decide if you want to buy it or not: https://itch.io/randomizer