My son wants a game off of here and was wondering if its safe. Any quality control?

It's safe. A number of GOG members buy games from them as well.

I've got a few game there too.

It's safe, but they don't QA games like GOG. Devs can upload games/updates without any intervention from itch.io's side so it's kinda full of shovelware and it's hard to find the real gems. Other than that it's ok.

yes, it is safe. no there are no quality control.

itch.io is the most developer friendly store we have today

Alright thanks everyone for the help!

Depends. Did he beat the throw?

Oh wait, I'm thinking of Ichiro.

This. It's virtually the opposite of GOG in some ways. There's no curation, but also basically no promotion.

It's almost just an infrastructure for payment processing and file hosting, to the extent developers can even control the appearance of their game's page. Not all games there are DRM-free as far as I know, but the pages are pretty clear on what you get for buying whether it's a zip file, a Steam key or whatever.

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I understand you write that way with purpose, but the name of that website is a bit easier for me than sounding out most of what you write in your posts. For me your typographical alternatives are too puzzling (and too numerous) compared to an occasional mistyping, much more so than a website name that is basically the word "itch". (Listening to accents has been easier than reading them.)

EDIT: Though, this post of yours is not the best example, it's actually very easy for me to read because it's closer to just mistyping (like when typing fast). And short.

I find I've actually seen enough of Fairfox's posts that I can usually read them fairly fluently. Does take some practice though. :P

I have actually gone both in and out of proficiency with Fairfox's posts. Lately, I've been "out", so maybe it'll get easier again. Though, I think I've also gotten into the mood of ditching books that write accented dialog, or at least the thickly accented dialog.

Written accent will likely always be much less familiar to me than spoken, hence always less comfortable. That's not the same as juxtaposed phrases or words, that's fine written or spoken, but extra letters or different letters is work because is always new and unrelated to anything.

I’m a big fan of itch.io and didn’t know the answer myself, so I looked it up:

"Why did you pick the name itch.io?

I bought the domain itch.io a year or so before I actually had the idea for the site. I'm not sure why I purchased it. It seemed nice and short. When I started building the site I had an extra domain sitting around so I used it."

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TimWw/20141201/231247/QA_itchio_Interview_with_Leaf_Corcoran.php

So the reason for the name is... convenience. Fair play to them.

3+ beers help... As others wrote, it's "safe" in terms of business conduction but there is no quality control. In fact many games there are "in-dev".
Be warned that itch.io also has a fair number of pornographic content so depending on your stance on this and the age of your son I maybe wouldn't let him browse it alone.

If you tell us which game he wants, maybe someone can help with advice if it's good and stable or not.