With Rewards, creators can offer limited-quantity access to their projects ifcustomers purchase the project at a specific price point or claim it before thequantity runs out. Adding reward tiers to a project serves as an excellentmethod for providing exclusive perks to early buyers.

itch.io does not guarantee the fulfillment of rewards, it is the seller’sresponsibility to coordinate with the buyer to deliver the reward whennecessary. If the reward can not be fulfilled itch.io will processes a refundat the buyer’s request.

How you can use rewards

Giving limited quantity perks

A limited quantity perk is anything you might want to provide that has alimited amount.

For example, you might give buyers the opportunity to have a character in yourgame named after them, but you only have a dozen slots. You can create a rewardand set the quantity to how many slots you have. Once the reward is sold out itcan not be purchased anymore. You're free to adjust the quantity remaining ifyou discover you can support more.

The reward editor lets you specify a custom field to collect from the buyer,you can use this to collect the name the buyer wants to use.

Selling Physical Goods

Another use case for rewards involves selling physical goods alongside yourdigital content. For instance, you might create a reward above your minimumprice that includes a t-shirt. As more shirts become available, you canincrease the quantity. You can specify on the reward that you need to collect ashipping address and provide a custom field to determine the size of the shirt.

Note: Currently, itch.io does not offer any mechanisms for the fulfillmentof physical goods. If you choose to sell items that require shipping, you willbear full responsibility for their fulfillment.

Limiting the total number of copies you sell

It’s possible to make a reward a requirement for purchasing your project. Withthis you can restrict how many people buy your game in total. This makes for agreat way to slowly roll our your game for testing when using ourrefinerytoolset.

Providing “early-bird” discounts

You can set a reward price lower than your project’s price. Combined with alimited quantity on the reward, you can give your first visitors a discount onyour project as a way to say thanks. Rewards come with any files and externalkeys that would be included in a regular purchase.

Giving away a limited number free copies or perks

It’s also possible to set the reward price to0. Anyone with an itch.ioaccount will be able to claim the reward while there’s quantity available.Because claiming a reward also grants access to all the project files, they'llbe owners after they grab the reward.

Setting up your rewards

Once you've enabled payments on your account, any project you control can haverewards. On the project’s edit page, in the top navigation, find theExclusivecontent menu item.

On this page you can customize all of your rewards, along with anyconfiguration options. The two configuration options are:

• Custom noun — If you don’t like the nameexclusive content you can give your reward program a custom name. You're free to call it whatever you want, just make sure you use a name that’s clear to someone viewing your page, otherwise there might be some confusion.
• New purchases & downloads require a reward — Someone must choose a reward when buying or claiming your project. This will make it so that the total number of copies of your project that can be bought is limited. If you'd ever like to remove the limit, you can disable this option at any time.

Describing your reward

Every reward requires a few fields before you can save it. All of these willshow up on the reward listing of your project page.

• Name — What should itch.io call the reward?
• Description — What does the reward include?
• Quantity — How many, in total, are there available?
• Minimum price — What’s the minimum purchase price to get the reward?

Collecting Information with Custom Fields

If you require additional information from the buyer, you can add a customfield. Currently, there are two types of custom fields available: a shippingaddress and a free-form text field. You can assign a name to each field toclarify what information is required.

Once a buyer purchases a reward, they will be prompted to fill out the fieldson their purchase download page.

Please note, we currently do not support the addition of an extra shippingfee to a purchase. We recommend incorporating the shipping costs into theprice of the reward for the time being.

Fulfilling rewards

Once you've sold some rewards you'll need tofulfill them. This meansdelivering the reward to the person who bought it. From theRewardspanel in your dashboard you can see a list of all the unfulfilled rewards. Fromhere you can also see any custom field responses the buyer provided.

Once you've done what you need to do you can check the reward off as fulfilledto dismiss it.

Archiving rewards

If you decide to remove a reward that no one has bought then you can just clickthe delete button to get rid of it. Rewards that have been bought are adifferent story: they must remain in our database so we can track fulfillment.Instead of deleting the reward you'll archive it.

An archived reward is no longer purchasable, and it won’t show up on yourproject’s page. It will only appear in theRewards panel in yourdashboard so you can track fulfillment.

Running a limited release with rewards

You can soft-launch your project to a limited number of people by creating areward (or set of rewards) with a limited quantity and selecting theNewpurchases & downloads require a reward option on the rewards edit page.

This option will force any new downloaders or buyers to claim a reward beforethey can access the project’s files. Each time someone claims a reward thequantity will decrease, when the quantity hits 0 no new people will be ableto access your project’s files.

If you'd like to open up your project to everyone then you can unselect theoption.