itch.io says you own it, everywhere except the contract

This is itch.io's everyday voice, and it is not shy: this one page reaches for "owner" or "ownership" more than twenty times. Now read the legal terms. A buyer is never granted ownership once, anywhere in them, and the contract's one ownership sentence about content belongs to somebody else: "Publishers retain all ownership rights to the submitted content." Two vocabularies, one transaction. The rest of this page is about which one binds.

The contract's actual grant, and credit first: it is the most generous licence in this report. Perpetual, and written to survive delisting; no other platform on this site puts that in its terms. Now the boundary. The right is to access the content "as permitted through the functionality of the Service", and what that functionality serves is whatever the developer has uploaded today. The download-keys documentation says so plainly: "The currently uploaded set of files to your page will always be available, if you remove, update, or add files that that will be reflected on every owner’s download page" (the doubled word is theirs). Files swapped out are not a breach of the licence. They are the functionality of the Service.

The no-transfer clause, doing the same work as its siblings on every other page of this site: no selling what you have, no handing it on, and termination refunds nothing. The agreement never mentions death, so this is the clause an estate would meet. Gifting at checkout exists, and it is a fresh purchase for someone else, not a transfer of yours.

The perpetual licence is exercised through an account, and this is what happens when the account goes: everything at once, and, as the same page says, "This action is irreversible." itch.io does not hide it; it is in the FAQ under a heading anyone can find. But set it beside exhibit I-02: perpetual described the licence, not the door you reach it through.

Real credit: itch.io has an actual rule against a developer stranding paid buyers, with named consequences (the misspelling is in the original). The founder enforces the page half of it in public: "If it has been purchased or has owners then you can not delete the page. We require you to leave something up for existing owners to learn how to continue to access their purchased product, or an explanation of what happened." And the platform's own moderators name the gap in the file half: "We prevent creators from removing projects. We don't prevent them from removing files. That's the loophole." The page survives your purchase. The files are not required to.

Read it with its own opening: "If possible". The DRM-free reputation is real as a culture and absent as a rule; nothing in the terms or the guidelines promises that the next game you buy ships unprotected. GOG at least makes the storewide claim in its marketing. itch.io leaves it to each developer, which is consistent with everything else here: itch.io is a marketplace of thousands of sellers, not one shop.

July 2025 is what a stress test looks like for a marketplace that means well. An advocacy campaign reached the payment processors, the processors reached itch.io, and itch.io said the quiet part in its own words: it "is a small company, both in team size and in transaction volume, compared to a company like Steam. We have limited ability to “push back.”" Credit for the part that held: "Pages that are “deindexed” are still accessible if you own them." And the part that did not: "Part of this review will see some pages being permanently removed from itch.io." The store wanted none of this. It happened anyway, which is the point of this page.

Read this twice. It is the founder of the store, on the store's own blog, in the middle of the store's worst week, telling you that the durable copy of your games is the one you make yourself. He is right, and it is the most honest sentence any storefront in this report has published. It is also this entire site's thesis, stated by someone who sells games for a living: what you can truly keep is the file in your hands, not the promise in the terms.