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K1T5CHW45T3L4ND
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telltaletypist
@telltaletypist
nadianova
@nadianova

protip: rate itch.io games

me and many other gay itch devs friens have been annoyed by people making accounts for the sole purpose of spamming 1 star reviews on lgbt projects, going through every single submission for a person and giving a bad review (like i had PAID projects that werent even purchased but still got 1 star reviews loll)

so if youre a dev: especially when youve JUST released a project and only have none or a few ratings one unlegimate 1 star review can really tank the visibility and if you happen to see the same person doing the same rating on all your projects something is obviously off

ive reported clear cases like this couple times in the past and probs since ive had proof of this same person doing it for other people at the same time ive gotten them removed
its not something you should obsess about, like its fine if someone hates your game and gives it a bad review but when that same happens for every single lgbt project of yours and your friends lgbt projects from the same account at the exact same time clearly this isnt done in good faith and you can appeal that!

for the gamers: rating games you like on itch io is really valuable. its why every youtuber tells you to like and subscribe and hit the bell icon, because it really does boost their video to more people and same applies with itch io.

i know not everyone even knows about the rating system so when youre playing gay games on itch io i think everyone should get in the habit of liberally rating the games they liked to support the devs whose work you enjoyed

ItsMeLilyV
@ItsMeLilyV

100% i can confirm that devs can get a ton of 1-star reviews with no comments or comments like this

i think in Bossgame's case it happened because a lot of traffic was coming from popular porn games on itch (for a while one of the highest internal site referrals was Tentacle Locker) and those folks were not interested in queer seditious boss fights. Though I can't tell why that happened in the first place... maybe because I tagged Bossgame as "lesbian"?

Anyway, operating within the omnipresent algorithm is exhausting, but leaving a rating does really help. It's pretty depressing seeing 10 lovely, well-written reviews next to 10 people with no avatars leaving 1-star reviews... You don't have to write anything fancy (or anything at all), but if you check out a game and like it, please consider leaving a nice rating! (on itch, on steam, on youtube, whatever)

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in reply to @nadianova's post:

froey
@froey

None of my titles have been bombed yet, but a friend of mine on itch.io has had someone review bombing her stuff. Sucks. Nowadays if I enjoy a game on itch.io, I usually drop 5 stars just so that game can gets the visibility it deserves. :eggbug:

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in reply to @ItsMeLilyV's post:

MOKKA
@MOKKA

I just deactivated ratings for most of my games, because I just got too annoyed by rude randos, who pretended to be the consumer police for a game they got from a charity bundle.

That being said, has there ever been any official communication from itch in regards to what ratings actually do? I feel with how invisible and opaque they are, it's a bit weird if they would then guide a lot of the visibility systems on itch.

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ItsMeLilyV
@ItsMeLilyV

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The two things I know ratings do:

  • Show up on your game page
  • Determine the order of games on the "Top Rated" page on itch

Things I suspect ratings affect in some way:

  • Determine the order of games on the Popular and New & Popular pages on itch

Yea, it would be really nice if algorithmic systems were less opaque. I think the argument against it is that people will try to "game" them, but like... people will always end up reverse-engineering and gaming them anyway, so it just becomes insider baseball.

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GamingVarietyPotato
@GamingVarietyPotato

This is the only old forum post I can find about the topic: https://itch.io/t/719515/how-does-itchio-sort-games-by-these-criteria-popular-newpopular-top-rated-top-sellers-most-recent

I definitely noticed that games with ratings turned off are almost unindexed, placed below everything that does have a rating (even one rating is better than none). This can be tested by going to jam submission page and sort on popularity.

There is/was a lot of criticism towards tying the popularity ranking to the average score, and there's no clarity if that is how the algorithm works, but it's highly suspected to be the case -- if your game is not getting extraordinarily high download numbers already. Unsure if anything has been done towards this feedback. Perhaps? The recent download count does feel more important sometimes.

In my experience, the visual novel playerbase is very generous with 5-stars, so receiving anything less would shake up the score. Such as 4-stars is considered an excellent rating, but there had been suspicions that this also can tank your visibility if you don't have a lot of ratings and your previous rating is higher.

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MOKKA
@MOKKA

I'm curious, are there people out there who get a lot of traffic via itch directly? For me, even when I cared about selling stuff there, the vast majority of it came via external links (mostly my own social media posting).
With Steam, at least there I know that if I manage to set things up correctly, I can get a steady amount of traffic and sales (even if it's still just a tiny amount), but with itch, the visiblity it offered never really seemed to matter anyway.
But it's been a few years since I really looked at itch as a viable commercial platform, so maybe this has changed.

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ItsMeLilyV
@ItsMeLilyV

Bossgame's itch page does get a notable amount of its traffic from within itch. It's probably a bit of an outlier, because Bossgame was included in the "Latest Featured Games" section on the front page of itch (about midway down the page), next to very popular titles like Butterfly Soup 2 and Frog Detective 3. While it was on the front page, a huge portion of all traffic came from there, but also other internal itch traffic (such as recommendations after buying other games).

That said, even now (long after the feature is gone) I get a lot of internal traffic from itch, with only Google results beating internal itch links. It seems like it's mostly people searching for specific tags "transgender" "pixel graphics" "android", etc. and people who find it when browsing "View All Featured Games".

I think it's safe to say that Itch is not a viable platform for garnering new sales, but it is a viable platform for hosting your work if you have outside ways to aim people towards it, and the overhead for setting up itch is a lot easier than Steam (plus itch can host books, comics, whatever). I think this boils down to the "market share" more than anything else, Steam has about a billion users.

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nadianova
@nadianova

i make transgender, lgbt and nsfw visual novels and i get like 90% of my traffic through itch ios tag system. however i credit a big part of that to the fact that when i release a game i have a decent amount of following who will immediately download and rate my game to actually bump my projects high up in the algorithm rankings for a week or two before it starts to normalize. keep in mind this might be just because i make horny porn games

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melinoe
@melinoe

even w/o an 18+ game i've absolutely found a ton of value from the Transgender tag. it's consistently the best vector for downloads on my biggest game.

i'll be releasing 18+ stuff soon in future, though i still worry a little about the like porn games not made by trans people under the tag y'know. it brings in a different audience that aren't necessarily looking for actual trans sexuality.

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nadianova
@nadianova

the transgender tag is great. even my oldest projects consistently see traffic from there and literally when i want to play games that is where i will first go to look so it makes sense.

it is a shame theres no real way to separate from the fetishistic games aimed at non trans audience under the same tag but trust me dont worry about it. those people most likely will not play your game and same way the people who only want to play games made with queer hands will ignore the overly fetishistic ones.

but even then the best we can do is just make more transgender games for the trans gamers and focus on the people we want to make happy. thats what ive been doing and its worked out great for me. esp since the trans tag isnt that active compared to other ones it results in search from combination tags like nsfw/transgender or adult/transgender or porn/transgender bringing in a ton of eyes and people who will be happy to see these games.

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Unangbangkay
@Unangbangkay

This is honestly something i need to be better about, because after some thought, leaving ratings and likes and such, esp. for smaller games and on sites like Itch, should be treated as a due diligence move, i.e. on the level of adding alt text to image uploads when possible.

At this point and with the way storefronts work with recommendation algos etc., they're the "ah but we participate in society" of modern gamedev. It's unfortunate to add yet another hoop for customers to jump through in trying to support devs when the only relationship that should matter is if they enjoyed the work they bought, but the way things are not participating amounts to ceding that ground to jerks.

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