Post by redonihunter in Games released well after page creation never get on "Most Recent"; it sorts by page publish date rather than "actually indexed" date

Viewing post in Games released well after page creation never get on "Most Recent"; it sorts by page publish date rather than "actually indexed" date

Why do you publish a page "in development" but disable it?

This is not how "in development" works on Itch.

If you just want an internet presence on Itch informing the world about a project being in the making, make an unattached blog post.

As soon as you have anything to show and download/play, publish it as in development, or even as prototype. Restricting a page is only good for timing a release on multiple platforms or anything of the sorts, imho.

There is no promotion on Itch, like Steam does it. It takes like 3 months to appear in related games. There is no curator input in the algorithm. It takes time to evaluate your project and that seems to be heavilty influenced by tags.

Itch's stance is to not rely on being indexed in the first place. So it follows, that they also do not care, if you have 5 minutes exposure from being on recent. Games can also be temporarily be deindexed. Updating can do that. Being indexed is just that. Being on the index. It has no bearing on the ordering.

But they do mix recent, by sorting some games as new again, when a major update devlog is made.

There are people trying to abuse the system. Some even by deleting their project and publishing it again. It is not helping, imho. It screws over any collection the game is on, and removes ratings and so on. It also makes the project and the developer look less trustworthy. Itch might ban accounts from index, that try to game the system.

Oh, and new&popular is just regular popular with different weighting in ranking. It is the same number of games in both lists.

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runevision36 days ago(+3)

Why do you publish a page "in development" but disable it?

For multiple reasons. One of them is to do closed playtesting, and still have a page where people potentially interested in playtesting can read about the page. See Itch's own documentation on using the restriction options to do closed playtesting. The option to disable downloads is there for a reason:
https://itch.io/docs/creators/limited-releases#the-toolset/closed-playtesting

Another is to just have a page where people can learn about the upcoming game. In an ideal world, people could add the game to their wishlists from here, but Itch doesn't have wishlists, only confusing multi-purpose "collections". but I digress, it's still nice to have a page where the game can be properly described in detail, that I can point people to who want to learn about it.

So, Itch has built-in options to have a public page before the game itself is publicly available. The logic for how the Most Recent list works should naturally make sense also for this scenario.

And saying that the "most recent" (and other lists that use recency as a partial metric) don't matter anyway is unhelpful. The pages are there, so clearly they have a function, and that function should work in a sensible way.

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Alienplay36 days ago(+1)

Agreed! Every feature has it's purpose and should follow that purpose regardless of how ineffective it seams to many people.

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redonihunter36 days ago(+1)

Now if only we knew the purpose of those features. ;-)

It seems, like it is a list of newest games, based on new-ness. But what is the age of a game? What makes it newer than any other? There are many answers to that.

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redonihunter36 days ago(+1)

The function of most recent is to have an ordering of games based on their publication date, instead of their popularity ranking.

That they do change the ordering by major update devlogs, instead of update date or publication date is a questionable pratice. But people are people and trying to game a system is just too easy, if you only need to update your game daily to appear on a list again on top. Or to change release / in development status repeatedly.

There are rankings like this. https://itch.io/games/year-2024

They could do a better system, like only allow an update to trigger this every two months or so. This way, developers updating their game woudl benefit from it, even if they do not publish a devlog. A devlog itself is already a promotion, since it appears in the devlog list.

I for one would prefer an update ranking with non-spammed updates, like I just described, to the so called most recent. Or "newest" as is internally called.

You might want to read my comments this way: yeah, it works mysteriously or not how some people expect it, but Itch does not care anyways, since they do tell people to not rely on it.

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