I don't use their platform and I'm not much of a gamer, but one criticism I read online is that they intend to police their platform more heavily than Steam. The creator criticized Steam's game policy on Twitter [0]. Of course, it's their platform and they can do as they please, and if you share their views then you might view this in a positive light. If I were involved in that community I'd have some concerns of rules being selectively enforced, although I don't know if that has ever been an issue with them.
Personally, I've been favoring gog.com over Steam as of late; they have a decent amount of DRM-free indie games available. I think anyone can submit their game, although I'm uncertain of their content policy, and I wasn't able to find any information on it after a quick search.
It's also worth noting that the actual Internet Archive [1] has a large amount of games freely available. It's mostly retro games, but I don't think there's any restrictions against modern games. Of course you'd probably only upload your game there if you were making it freely available, since it's meant as an actual archive.
Good on them! Steam used to be -the- platform where you'd find quality games. Now it's rampant with games like this[0] that would fare better in the naughty section of addictinggames.com
And itch.io's policy is essentially no hate-speech, which I think is totally reasonable to help harbor a healthy dev community. It's otherwise much, much easier to get your game up on itch.io than Steam or Good Old Games. It's completely free to upload even the earliest prototype of your game, without needing to wait for someone to approve the submission.
We don't "intend to police," our moderation policies have never changed.There's a lot of weird stuff on itch.io that will always have a place. We don't want hate speech on the platform.
It's easy to have a gut reaction of supporting free speech without understanding the implications of what that entails. Many of the people clamoring for free speech on gaming platforms still want games to be removed ('asset flips', things they deem low quality, etc.). With my tweet, people conjured up an idea of a morality police force which is secretly making decisions about things people are allowed to say. That image is easy to attack, but it's not even close to how itch.io works, or will ever work.
The reason why I criticized Steam's stance is because they're trying to avoid responsibility. I'm sure you're familiar with how discourse goes on the internet: people with strong negative opinions are going to put in significantly more energy into spreading their message than an average person who just wants to read around. Their amplified message does not represent everyone as a whole though. Sure Steam can ban 'trolling,' but that's too vague. I have a pretty strong feeling that their 'trolling' ban is going to end up policing the morality of message as well. And, their process is probably going to be even more secretive.
Hi leafo, thank you for taking the time to write a response to my comment, I genuinely appreciate it. I received a couple downvotes for my comments and I was a bit down about that, but I think your response is very reasonable.
Like I said, I'm not much of a gamer, but your response makes me want to give your platform a try. I think if you're willing to have an open discussion about something for which the outcome might be unknown, things are going well. I certainly wouldn't make any claim to know what the kinds of barriers and limits we should have might be. And I totally understand that it can be very challenging to manage and weight all factors. Realistically, you might get some stuff right and wrong at times. We're only human, after all.
Having been in the tech industry for a few years, my big piece of advice would be to try and be as open as possible. I always find it incredibly frustrating when companies try to cover things up (not accusing you of doing this in the slightest). I think as long as you communicate openly with the community, everyone sensible will see that and be willing to take the time to dig into things.
Personally, I've been favoring gog.com over Steam as of late; they have a decent amount of DRM-free indie games available. I think anyone can submit their game, although I'm uncertain of their content policy, and I wasn't able to find any information on it after a quick search.
It's also worth noting that the actual Internet Archive [1] has a large amount of games freely available. It's mostly retro games, but I don't think there's any restrictions against modern games. Of course you'd probably only upload your game there if you were making it freely available, since it's meant as an actual archive.
[0] https://twitter.com/moonscript/status/1004448157776793600
[1] https://archive.org/