Hi,
I'd say "Yes", horror games might enjoy a small boost.
When I released a science fiction type game with horror elements, it did better in terms of traffic to the page, than the pages to some of my other releases.
(Although - it's harder to go by statistics about it now, since I released a lot of my stuff into one collection at this point.)
Edited to add: The boost I'm talking about is a community-given boost (in my opinion) - not a site based one.
Do you think it’s the platform boosting horror games, or more of a community thing? I feel like it might be because there are lots of small streamers and YouTubers on Itch. and horror games are great for reactions and tension, so they’re perfect for streaming. Maybe that’s why they get more attention?
Itch does not boost arbitrarily any games, except the ones in the featured and maybe the fresh list. At least that is what I understood from several threads in community.
You will notice that many comments on the popular games have links to youtube videos. So there certainly is a connection. An influx of popularity by secondary content creators. In other words, game play videos that are popular on youtube will result in games being popular on Itch. But the other direction is also true. Games popular on Itch will be streamed more often.
And since usually 90% of page one in popular on Itch have some horror theme, that is quite telling. It does not mean that horror is popular as such, but the popular horror games sure are more popular than most other genres.
Also, what you said. Who is gonna watch someone play the millionst iteration of a child friendly platformer game that suspicously looks like you already have played it. But for that matter, sometimes I think every second game here is a fnaf clone.
Oh, they do boost games, but this is not tag specific. They boost new games. The popular ranking inlcudes a little boost for new games. But I do not know how much or how long. They want to mix up the ranking a bit, so people would not always just click on the top games and thus the ranking never changes, imho. So popular is actually new & popular, but with a lot less emphasis on new.
And of course, the featured list. Those are hand picked. But I do not know how big that boost would be, by having a game on that list. Someone on that list would have to disclose analytics. It should show, if people visit the game from that list or from a regular tag list.
Likewise for the horror games mentioned here. The analytics should tell, if the link was from youtube, should it not? Or are those referals hidden? At least it should show, if the visit was from a horror-tag listing.
