Did you know you can purchase games on Itch that you can give to ANYONE? All you need is access to a burner email address. Here’s how it works:
1. Find an RPG designer you love and pick one of their games on itch. It may even be on sale! Doesn’t matter if you already own the game.
2. Purchase the game—and maybe thrown in a tip!— and click the “Give this [game] as a gift” checkbox. <– Very important
3. Go through the steps of payment, however you’re paying. You’ll be prompted to give an email address for your recipient. Enter your secondary/burner email address. NOTE: Make sure you have access to this email account! Do NOT use the email associated with your Itch account!
4. Click the Send Gift button and an email will be sent to your secondary email account. Go open that email inbox to receive the confirmation email.
5. In the confirmation email, right-click and copy the email address behind the “download page” link.
6. Paste that link somewhere publicly. The first person to click on it will claim the gift and add it to their itch account. Easy!
NOTE: I suspect that you can’t use the same email address twice because all subsequent purchases to that email will go to the person who claimed the first gift… the email is likely now associated with their account. Best practice: use new emails for each public gift
TIP: If you have a Gmail account, you might be able to take advantage of this trick: youremail@gmail.com and youremail+WHATEVER@gmail.com go to the same inbox, but are treated as distinct email addresses in other systems.
Add a + and some new words to your email and you can invent infinite email addresses!