It could, but only if GOG opened the floodgates a but.

depends on point of view. I think zeroxxx is wrong, and did not think it through, but you are seeing it from the developers POW. gOg (and any store...) do not care about development costs, but the 30% take from each sale. Lets say Shovel Knight sold 75k on gOg for £9 (rounded number...) and Batman: Arkham Asylum sold 75k units at £30 on Steam

Shovel Knight sold 75k units at £9 = 75*9*0.3 = £202.5 for gOg
Batman sold 75k units at £30 = £675 for Valve

So while SK may bring an 250% profit to the developer, and B: AA 75% (due to development cost), the store has still much more income from the AAA.

Not to mention that while the units for SK is quite healthy, AAA can reach a lot higher number.

Also for each SK there are 20 Ethan Meteor Hunter not even reaching sales in the figures of 1k, while AAA do not have that type of flops (and do not forget, that even if an AAA sells 57K units, and do not manage to recoup the cost of development, the store actually do not care.... they get the 30% of those 57K units....)

So the bottom line - indies is a good source of income, but the big monies for stores are also in AAA titles.

I seriously doubt that. I think itch.io might attract more developers now, but I don't see why developers would have preferred Desura to GOG in the past. It's more likely that GOG wasn't interested in the games offered on Desura only.

I like GOG curated approach. I may miss some gems but I don't have to wade through trash. Desura was the opposite: lots of crappy games but if you were digging long/well enough you'd find some hidden gems. Good for those who enjoy digging around, I have no time for that. I do feel it's a pity that Desura, and the option it offered for those users, is gone; but I don't want GOG becaming like Desura.

I... hate to agree with most of what you said . After they didn't put up Hatred despite the massive vote, despite the fact that every other fucking store that wanted to sell it did, despite the fact that it's really not a bad game at all, I've become somewhat disappointed . I still believe they're the best store on the internet , at least from a user's perspective, but they're slowly losing it...
I just checked that itch.io thing, and it's the most amateurish site I've ever seen. The interface is horrible, and their "selection" looks almost entirely like crap made in 20 minutes by some orangutans. If I were an Indie developer, I'd stay away from them and go straight to IGS .

Desura has the widest open doors for devs, next is Steam with their early access and greenlight platforms and the least open is GOG. And frankly I like it that way, I don't need crappy games here. GOG has a good quality control, and doesn't allow 30 minutes presentation type "games" or something totally pointless, or something filled with bugs and glitches. When I buy some game from here I always know it will work, it will be interesting and more or less will justify its price.

What you described here is the extremey good version of one possible scenario. Though I find it fascanating it seems very unlikely, sorry for a bit of scepticism here ;)

Yeah, I forgot about IGS, but we don't know how picky they are, after all they don't sell that many games either. I think as a developer you don't need to bother with itch.io's storefront and what other stuff they're selling, it looks like you can just create your own website for your game, selling it via itch.io, similar to the Humble widget or Bandcamp maybe? Check out our own jefequeso's site for his game The Music Machine. From what I've read he's pretty happy with the service, but he would know more about it than me.

Having your game lost in a sea of crap that can barely be waddled through doesn't strike me as a good start for a developer . Again, I think IGS would be the best choice .

I don't disagree with you, but did you read what I wrote? You don't have to waddle through a sea of crap, you can directly go to the developers' webpages. Of course that requires the developers to promote their game themselves, and I imagine it to be quite hard, so in that regard IGS is probably easier. Then again, as I said, IGS seems to be slow to release stuff, too, so I doubt they'd suddenly accept every indie game fleeing from Desura (and if they'd do that, they'd end up as the next sea of crap soon :P). I think both are valid options for developers; some will go to IGS, some to itch.io, some to both. Anyway, we're both just speculating. I guess it would be more enlightening to see an actual developer offer their opinion.

This is true. I bought a game from a dev's site and it was dl'd through itch.io. Since groupees has thrown itch keys in some recent bundles I went to redeem them, and realized I didn't (and still don't) have an account. So if devs can drive traffic to their own site, their customers don't really even have to deal with itch.io in a very meaningful or crap-wading way.

Then why bother with itch and not just sell it directly from their own site ? What's the point of using it at all ?

Also, itch.io is currently the only DD store where the developer can decide how large cut the store gets, ranging from 0-50%. So selling via itch.io can theoretically give the devs 100% (though as far as I know no one does so). Humble, off course, is next next (95% via widget, 75% via store). But then again, Humble is also curated, even the widgets.

setting up payments and hosting takes $ and time. It is far better to let others deal with it.

How hard can it be ? I mean, so many companies, even tiny ones, do it, so it can't be that costly, or that time-consuming.