The solution other companies implemented was to not allow a rating without a written review. At least then you know what issue the 1-star people had with the game - if any.
I've also turned off my reviews - but now I can't participate in any of Itch.io bundles because they go solely on who has the most reviews. It's a catch-22.
Without public reviews that would not work.
And I do not understand that with the participation in bundles. What's that got to with ratings? Itch does not create bundles. Users do.
For a catch22 you would have to need to be in a bundle to get ratings and could only have the game in a bundle, if it has ratings. Neither is the case to my knowledge.
I'm referring to the itch.io select bundles. Where staff from itch.io put together a bundle of 10 or 20 items from different developers and share the proceeds among the developers. The last time they did that, they specifically stated they would select games based on their ratings.
The catch is: when we enable ratings, we get low ratings from people who (probably didn't play the game) but felt the need to give it a 1-star rating - so our games won't be picked. If we disable ratings: our games won't be picked.
I am not aware that there are any bundles created by Itch. Was that a thing they did in the past? Can you link to a current bundle? There is winter sale. If such bundles still exist, there should be one right now.
Actually I am not aware of any promotions Itch does, at all, beside the featured and fresh lists on the homepage. And maybe "picks" of bundles. I misread. Those are just featured lists of sales, not lists of bundles. Anyway. Even with coop bundles, there is always "A bundle hosted by" and that by is not Itch, but a developer.
Sorry, but the longer I think about what you wrote, the less sense this makes.
You can create your own bundles. You can coop create bundles. Ratings have nothing to do with this. Only if you have no payments on those items is a reason for a game not to be on a bundle.
And if you create a bundle, the invited devs need to aprove and according to faq they do not even get a message, to prevent spamming.
https://itch.io/docs/creators/bundles
To host a bundle, you would need to be a developer selling a game here. Itch does not sell Itch's games. https://itch.itch.io/ does not exist as a user to host bundles.
(You need to be part of the bundle to host a bundle. So either you misunderstood something or that was something special that I never ever heard of)
If you don't understand what I'm talking about - why don't you just ignore my post?
It was an itch.io select bundle from several months, if not years ago. The thread is no longer there. There used to be a banner on my game that I had submitted it (it wasn't picked) and I deleted the submission to make the banner go away.
This was the only example of a itch.io select bundle I could currently find.
https://itch.io/t/2794600/submit-your-games-for-an-upcoming-itchio-selects-bundl...
Well, I have never seen any Itch Selects bundle nor heard about the concept. Sorry for being flabberhasted about this and asking about things I do not know.
Thank you for the link. I also never ever saw anyone from staff doing a posting in community, except leafo.
I hope your haters got bored and you can have ratings open in peace. Downrating is kinda lame. One should rate what one likes, to get better recommendations. If you downrate games about x, you might get recommendations about other games with topic x - but in truth you did dislike all x.
