there is a recent controversy of steam taking money from game creators. 30% of sales to be exact. At first, I thought that was normal since every other companies do this. then I realize I was getting to used to them, people are dependent on them and the trend is becoming normal.
So what we need now especially with people being banned left and right is becoming independent.
What it is (?)
A self-hosted. Social. and Digital-only webstore. similar to itch.io. but because It’s federated, the social aspect of it unlocks the possibility to create a patreon-like replacement.
Examples of digital things you can sell;
- Games.
- Game assets (3D models, BGMs, images, etc.)
- Books.
- Movies.
- Art
- Digital Commissions/Micro-jobs
Why federated?
the whole internet will become that way and secondly It’s a way to have a patreon-like platform replacement.
But how do you sell it?
uhh, work. and upload it to your platform. you don’t need to do much as It’s digital-only.
How it’ll handle payments?
You can rely on Stripe and CoinPayments to cover the payment processing. also the developers will just focus on creating the platform. both Fiat and Crypto so most people can buy it around the world.
maybe later there will support selling physical items. but for simplicity’s sake because this hasn’t even existed in the first place, just do digital.This if ever launched, will be the first project to solely focus on monetization.
Hubzilla has a marketplace extension that more or less does what you want. But a dedicated option might be better.
The problem is a bit that people have come to expect a sort of build in backup function where they can download a version of their digital asset any time instead of storing it on their own hard drive all the time.
Furthermore a central store, or one that allows external sellers like Amazon still acts as a sort of trust worthy intermediary, while on a purely federated store fraud might become rampant very quickly.