Inheriting an itch page

Mid-July, I stop Galactic Rogue, my space roguelite. The decision is internal first, then public: the announcement goes out on August 4th. That shutdown has its own story, told elsewhere; this one starts right after, in front of a detail no project plan ever accounts for: there is still an itch page. A page with views, a handful of followers, a rating, buyers. A public container, alive, pointing at a game that will never move again.

At the same moment, EREME, my narrative roguelite of voyages, reaches the exact state where I want to show it: a working version, playable, owned as such. It needs a page. I already have one.

Two options, both honest. The fresh page: clean, unambiguous, with no audience; EREME would be born from nothing, which would be false too, since the project succeeds the other one. The conversion: itch lets you rename everything, the audience stays, and with it everything I do not get to choose.

It is not about audience. The day before the switch, it would have fit in a half-empty meeting room: nobody converts a page for that. The real reason lies elsewhere: the lineage is real, EREME succeeds that game, and I want that to be readable in public. A fresh page would have pretended otherwise.

On August 7th, the page changes skin in a single day: the title, the address, the tagline, the description, the genre, the tags, the price, the screenshots, the files. The old game's three devlogs are deleted, after a full local archive: you do not destroy your history, you store it away from the shop window. The old version's zip is removed: the project is discontinued, nothing of it should be downloadable anymore. The old address no longer answers.

Form-wise, then, the conversion is total. A visitor landing today sees an EREME page, whole, coherent.

The platform, though, keeps three traces, and none of them has a setting.

The rating. The old game had earned the top rating, left by a passing player. That rating now shows on EREME, which has never been rated.

The date. The page says "Published Apr 01, 2026". That is the page's birth date, not the date of the game it shows.

The buyers. A handful of people had paid for the old game, back in April. They now see EREME in their library, in place of what they bought.

I was warned about all three points before deciding, and I decided knowing them. That is the only defensible way to make this choice: discovered after the fact, the same traces would have become embarrassing accidents.

The inheritance only holds if the page's content, for its part, owes nothing to anyone. EREME arrived as a working version, and the page says so everywhere it can: "In development" status, free, playable in the browser with a Windows zip next to it, disclosure of AI use for the graphics, the texts and the code. The release devlog is called "Premier largage", first drop-off: a first gesture, not a launch.

That is the exact counterpart of the three traces. I make EREME carry a rating and a date that are not its own; in exchange, I forbid it any promise that is not already in the build. A working version that calls itself a working version can inherit a shop window. A working version dressed up as a 1.0, inheriting another game's rating on top, would be two lies reinforcing each other.

The order of the moves matters too: the old game's shutdown is announced on August 4th, the page switches on the 7th. Three days during which the information exists before the shop window changes. Nobody had to discover the shutdown by surprise, looking for one game and finding another in its place.

The mechanics reach beyond itch. A repo you repurpose, a newsletter you take over, a channel you recycle: every time, desirable counters welded to indelible traces. Before converting a public container, two questions: what exactly comes with it, and am I ready to say it myself, rather than wait for someone to notice.

EREME rides today with another game's rating, an April date and buyers who never bought anything from it. I prefer this page, dragging a true history behind it, to a clean page pretending to be born from nothing.