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DarkBloodbane145 days ago

TBH you should ask the same if the games were made by big and famous companies also. The devs are people and they work hard to make those games.

That aside, IMO having a game rated 3 stars is better than no rating at all. At least someone consider the game good enough.

I'm fully aware that there might be trolls and fakers giving fake ratings + reviews but until I have proof, I'll consider ratings and reviews genuine.

OTOH how do you pick a game to play from a list of multiple games with no rating no review etc?

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redonihunter145 days ago
OTOH how do you pick a game to play from a list of multiple games with no rating no review etc?

Quality of game description and topics of interest.

There is no such thing as an indie genre. But what many games have in common is that they cater to a rather narrow subgroup of any topic. Like, things not considered mainstream. Stuff that the big studios do not bother or do not like to develop.

In other words, since I already have those multiple games in my watch list, I will probably try them all or at least look very closely at the screenshots and try to guess if I would like it, based on description and tags and maybe comments.

As it was said, ratings are basically meaningless. If people do not like a thing, they do not rate at all. And some do not even rate the stuff they do like. So to be more precise, the rating average is to be taken with a grain of salt. The number of ratings is not. A game that managed to get 200 ratings and have an average of 2.0 ... how could that happen? Or even 3.0. And anything with less than 10 ratings is probably rated by the dev's brother and his mom or by the odd hater on any game topic or the dev. AI games get this hard.

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Maidelen145 days ago

I was referring to the fact that big games, although you can leave a low score, it's still big so it will barely affect. Contrary to small games where some negative scores can make a difference in the entire reception on it, in the case that the game was actually good.

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redonihunter145 days ago

You measure the size of a game by the number of ratings? I know a Steam game with several thousand reviews that has a single digit review number on Itch and not a single comment.

But should we upvote games just because they are small? Would that not skew the ratings even further? A game with 3 pity 5star votes looking "good" but is actually crap? Or at least crap for the special interest group it tries to appeal to. Like a horror game not being horrible (pun intended).

Based on my observations people downvote for two reasons. They hate a topic. Like AI as a prominent example. Or they were disappointed. The game promised something and built up expectations that were not fulfilled. Occasionally you might have one of those regular raters who really rate just everything according to their own rulebook. But most people do not rate at all. Or they only rate positive like you recommend.

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Maidelen144 days ago

I measure the size of a game by the studio/people behind it. There's a difference between a game made by one person trying to push their game, to studios of ten or more people, to Sony. Also, what you have discussed in this threat has make me thing a lot of the rating of itch. Several good stuff to take in account.

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redonihunter144 days ago(+1)


You might want to compare by relative popularity. I like to use the follower count as a measure for that. There are accounts with 5 digit followers. But also the 4 and upper 3 digit follwers are "big". Many of those are individual game developers or amateurs. To the contrary I see actual game studios with less followers.

This is of course relative to itch and says little about success of the game developer or studio elsewhere.

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DarkBloodbane144 days ago(+1)
that the game was actually good

How do you know it was good? have you tried it? maybe that's your opinion only. The negative scores OTOH could be right cause the game did have issues which make it deserved those scores.

So if you disagree with certain game ratings (positive or negative), just give your own rating and add your review+comment to counter them.

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Maidelen144 days ago

I was talking hypothetically, in general, not a game in particular. I guess the second thing you say can work.

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