primarily a homestuck artist, currently working on @burningdownthehouse and vast error.
hello gamer. you claim to want "shorter games with worse graphics that are made by people who are paid more to do less". in front of you is itch dot io, which has a "pay what you want" feature,
staring all gamers directly in the eye while setting my "suggested prices" to $50
The secret is that people want short games with worse graphics by properly-paid developers that are also actually good, and the unfortunate truth of any form of art is that 99.99% is absolute garbage.
There are lots of very good games on itch.io and also a lot of extremely not good ones.
It is a sad truth that for every Fear & Hunger/Vintage Story/Void Strangers there are 10,000,000 Five Nights At Shrek's 2.
my secret weapon is that there is a form of negative search, it's just hidden and limited. https://itch.io/games?exclude=tg.horror excludes horror games, and that does a lot to make it easier to find things I'll actually like.
I have my browser set to redirect itch.io pages to the equivalent page but excluding horror! Extremely jerry-rigged version of Steam's excluded tags but it works and I genuinely have no trouble finding good stuff on itch.
I feel like having community curators in a similar way to Steam could go a long way with Itch. There's a roundabout form of this with the feed showing people's collections, but it's not as robust as I would like.
this is what keeps me away from itch tbh, its so wild trying to sift through the shitpost games
I can't say that I do that, but I do frequently make use of the "buy more games than I can reasonably play" feature
Next time i get spare cash i should do a dive thru itch
