Indies for Ukraine: How a Niche Internet Community Raised Almost $5M for Crisis Intervention
Necrosoft Games has contributed millions toward the crisis efforts in Ukraine
I began publishing games on Itch.io in February of 2017. It had only been a few months since I started making them in the first place. At the time, as now, Itch was a fantastic place for indie devs to share their work with the world without the overhead of platform or publishing fees. This has caused the platform to become the source of an explosion of creativity and an important pillar in the indie game dev community.
The only consistent complaint I’ve seen levied against Itch is that the vast majority of the audience for the platform are the other developers publishing their own games. It’s not uncommon for me to mention the platform to someone that isn’t involved in the scene only to be met with “I’ve never heard of that”. For better or worse, Itch has been fairly constrained to indie developers and the handful of indie games devotees.
All this is to say, I was a little bit shocked when I discovered that an enterprising developer, Necrosoft Games, had organized a bundle featuring nearly 1000 projects from over 700 individual developers in an effort to raise money for crisis response groups in Ukraine.
More shocking than the size of the bundle was the response; by the time I kicked in my 10 dollars, the campaign had raised over 200,000 USD. The number was mind-boggling to me. What’s more, people were so eager to contribute that they crashed the Itch servers for a few hours that day.
As stunned as I was at the time, an incredible thing happened. People kept giving. It didn’t take long for the bundle to hit its first million. After that, every day or two would see another million added to that figure. The bundle has earned over $4.8M USD at the time of writing. With four days left on the campaign, I have no problem believing it will break the $5M mark, and maybe then some.
This niche community that I counted myself a rare member of managed to raise millions for a humanitarian cause over the course of a week. As far as I’m aware, this move has been unprecedented in our community and helps to illustrate how strong and compassionate the indie games community really is.
While the conditions in Ukraine will continue to be difficult for those living through the crisis, it makes me proud to think our little community has come together to provide what help we can. The fact that the level of help we find ourselves able to provide is so substantial will remain a humbling moment for the rest of my life.
