Guide · Buy Direct
Buying Indie Games Direct from Developers
How to buy indie games straight from developers — why it matters, where to find Buy Direct stores, Humble Widgets, and itch.io pages, and the trade-offs.
Why buying direct matters
When you buy an indie game on Steam, roughly 30% of the price goes to the storefront before taxes. Buying from a developer's own site — or through a Humble Widget they embed — pushes that share back to 85–100%. For a small studio, the difference between 70% and 95% of a sale is the difference between covering rent and not.
Direct purchases usually come DRM-free as well: a plain installer or zip you own and can back up. No client, no online check, no account lock-in. If you care about DRM-free gaming, buying direct is the cleanest path.
Where to find direct sales
itch.io
The biggest hub for direct indie sales. Devs set their own revenue split (default 90% to creator) and can sell DRM-free builds with one click.
Humble Widget on dev sites
Lets a developer embed a checkout on their own site (Steam keys + DRM-free builds) while Humble handles payment, taxes, and downloads.
Zoggoth's direct-from-dev list
Community-maintained Reddit thread listing games sold directly by their developers — a good starting point for DRM-free hunting.
GOG Direct (publisher pages)
Not strictly developer-direct, but every GOG sale is DRM-free and many indie devs self-publish here without a middleman.
Developers who sell direct
A small starter list — every one of these has a real storefront on the studio's own domain:
- ConcernedApe (Stardew Valley) — concernedape.com
- Re-Logic (Terraria) — terraria.org
- Daniel Mullins (Inscryption) — dmullinsgames.com
- Locomalito — locomalito.com
- Toby Fox (Undertale) — undertale.com
Trade-offs to know
Direct purchases skip storefront features: no automatic updates, no cloud saves, no friends-list achievements. Most devs ship patches as a fresh download — keep an eye on their changelog. Refunds vary by seller, so check the policy before paying. And if a small studio shuts down, their store may go with it — back up your installers.