Post by runevision 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?

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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Alienplay90 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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redonihunter90 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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redonihunter90 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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