Skip to main content

Browse GamesGame JamsUpload GameDeveloper LogsCommunity
Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
MOKKA7 years ago (2 edits) (+1)

Thanks for your clarification. I have some more thoughts on this, but to be honest most of them are incredibly speculative right now, because I have no idea what criteria you're using to dertimine the ranking. I'm going to mention them anyway, because I currently don't have much else to do.

Basically this is what I'm afraid of:

Ranking systems create competition, even if you don't intend it. Competition leads to people trying to game the system. If for example a certain type of game, or certain page layout generally leads to a higher rank, more and more people will just end using these things, which then will dissolve the game's individuality. Kind of like what happened to YouTube, where you now have this infinite parade of the same type of video, with the same composition, the same title, the same thumbnail. 

So you then have to either obscure the paremeters that determine your rank, which makes it less useful, or you end up with people possibly exploiting the shit out of it.

Maybe there's a way to provide the same kind of feedback, but without attaching a number and hierarchy to it? This way folks could still gauge how much they improved their visibility, without all the icky competition stuff (or at least with less of it).

Reply
leafoAdmin7 years ago(+1)

I think that the issue you're describing already exists regardless of whether or not we show the number on the analytics page. This number has existed in our backend for a long time since it's how we sort things on any browse page by default. We want to make it more transparent because we think that the average developer is going to see it an an opportunity to have an impact on how more exposure we are giving them.

We have a policy cheating your ranking on the listings, your game gets de-ranked. We will continue to identify any suspicious pages and take appropriate moderation action if necessary.

Regarding the destruction of the culture because of people trying to optimize their rank. It's interesting idea but probably too speculative at this point. We still do a lot of curation on many parts of the site and we try to keep things fresh there. Popularity is already a loaded metric since something doesn't have to be good to be popular. Maybe in the future we'll change our algorithm for ranking games in order to combat this.

I'm interested in the idea of having another metric as a replacement. Some more stats that we plan on introducing in the future are impressions and clicks. Impressions being the number of times your game's thumbnail has appeared on our browse pages, and clicks being the number of time someone clicked on it. With that you can get an idea of how much exposure you're getting from us, and what your click through rate is. I'm not sure if it fulfills the same information as a rank number, but it's useful information to have

Reply
MOKKA7 years ago (2 edits) (+1)

The thing is that the homogenisation of a platform's aesthetic is something that has happened over and over again in the past, so I don't think it's not completely speculative to point out that this also might happen to itchio, if there's a system that people can exploit. I don't even mean "cheating". Folks on YouTube who are using the same type of thumbnail layout aren't cheating, they're exploiting the system that YouTube has in place.
Now obviously I don't know how the rank is determined here, but the moment you start prioritising certain content over other's is the moment where you're making a statement about which type of content you generally prefer. The moment you do that, is the moment where people will start to build their things accordingly. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't provide people with information, but I just want you to keep in mind that this stuff has consequences that might not be all that obvious right now.

I do like Fenreliania's suggestion of changing the rank into a general assesement of how your visibility on the platform has changed over a set period of time. But also give people a way to opt out of analytics stuff. There are folks that don't want and don't need these information and it would be nice to have some say in that matter.

Reply
AboutFAQBlogContact us
Copyright © 2025 itch corp · Directory · Terms · Privacy · Cookies