Last time I participated in a Game Jam, I fell victim to what I call "lethal averageness of reviews". By that I mean, I was encouraging as many people as possible to rate our game, and that ended up being our downfall.

How ? Well, all we needed were 10 / 20 ratings. We ended up with 100+. What happened was that with this many ratings, it statistically made it so that the raters who marked generously or severely cancelled eachother out, and we had a probably more objective average score, sure, but it usually meant a lower score too.

And guess what ? That time the jam was won by a game which only had received barely over the minimum amount of ratings to qualify. It was a pretty good entry but you could see luck was involved too, because out of the few reviews it got, most seemed generous.

I saw that here, we also only need 20 ratings to qualify for ranking. How does it work beyond that ? Does it use the same system ? Because of it does, I will stop trying to show my game around right after I reach 20 - 25 ratings and cross my fingers !

For those curious, that previous Jam was a while ago : Ludum Dare 39.

It could also make your rating worst. If you keep with only 20-25 rating, maybe you keep with a lot of the severely.

Or maybe it's the last stage of game developement, good marketing, sell the game to the correct target to have a nice meta-critics score.

Well, I'd rather go for 50% chance to end up with an advantage on score than a 100% chance of having an average score which will put my game behind others in some categories even if objectively it might be a lot better. Happened to us to : we were officially ranked behind (in graphics) an extremely ugly game made on paint because those who marked that game on graphics were few and most decided to be "nice" for whatever reason.

Good point. I doubt they are using a different ranking system for games above 20 rates.

Afaik, there is only going to be 1 winner right? If so, to be honest, my game is not even close to being good enough to win. So i want to get as much people as possible to play it and get their review so i can do better next time. I feel like our main priority should be to have fun and learn while making our games and playing others.