So I can somewhat understand where you’re coming from on this, however:
- Adding a dedicated hosting site that is integrated means that it’s viewed as the “correct” place to host games made in GDevelop. This leads to newer people not attempting to publish elsewhere, and actually reduces the spread of GDevelop. (If you want examples of this, for many years game developers stuck to Kongregate only. Armor Games didn’t move past Kongregate for years and didn’t see financial success until they did.)
- Indie game marketplaces is already an exceptionally matured market. Itch.io, Gamejolt, and even Lutris basically supply all of the needs here.
- Hosting cost are not cheap. Maintaining a separate codebase for the site is not easy (the contributors are already experiencing issues trying to update the main site here alone).
- How do you deal with server bloat? What is considered fair?
- If the GDevelop project hosts it, and costs raises, how do they decide what to keep?
- Do they keep everything forever and just let costs continually inflate?
- Do they cull off older games even if they’re highly popular? Or just cull off unpopular games?
Now, alllllll of the above in mind, I do think it would be far more beneficial for someone to integrate publishing directly to your Itch.io or Gamejolt account for HTML export as an option. Link up your Itch/Gamejolt account, publish to HTML (or compiled/zip/etc), and have the option to update an existing HTML project or create a new one on your account.
You could then have an “in-editor” method of publishing a game to a store, have an easy way to pre-populate items such as editor/programming language (GDevelop/Javascript), and still have one of the most commonly used storefronts in games.