Post by Outsider Artisan in How does the popular section work? (are we delisted?)

Viewing post in How does the popular section work? (are we delisted?)

I can’t speak to Airell, but I’m sure it’s the same for him. I find the idea that I don’t promote my game elsewhere and don’t work my ass off pounding the pavement and that’s why I deserve to have my traffic arbitrarily cut off is offensive. I worked hard for more than three years of consistent quality updates, constant promotion on social media, spent thousands of dollars on artwork for cover and promotional images (in addition to the assets used in my game). But now that the algorithm kicked us off the cliff, everyone ust dismisses the hard work and blood, sweat, and tears as like some type of undeserved snowball effect. Luck has something to do with it, but if success isn’t arbitrary now, and these less popular games deserve more traffic, well it wasn’t arbitrary before either.

The fact is, just looking at the top adult games (my game is an adult game, so that’s the tag I’m familiar with looking through), the top twenty or so games have like six authors. The giga-popular games that have managed to achieve massive notoriety haven’t gone anywhere. What has happened, is games on the second through fifth or so pages got kicked down 100 pages. The pain was not evenly spread.

And sure, we shouldn’t rely on Itch.io to promote our games. But losing 50% of your traffic is losing 50% of your traffic. How is that not supposed to effect devs? It’s like, you can say YouTubers shouldn’t depend on the algorithm, but what does that even mean? Assume all success can be taken? Never try to pour any of the money you’re making back into ongoing development because you may arbitrarily lose hundreds of pages of relevance?

This was a huge change from one day to the next, with non warning, and no apparent way to recover. I’m glad you are able to be flippant and insensitive about it, since that means it didn’t hurt you as bad as it’s gonna hurt some of us, but this is quite serious. Even if logically it means some people are gonna have their games surfaced, leveraging something like a better featured games system that can be curated and used to surface the types of games Itch wants to promote would spread the pain more evenly and avoid these massive drops in traffic many of us are seeing. Likewise, defaulting and refining the New and Popular sorting tab into a “trending” type tab could allow for less extreme changes and less devastating losses.

The fact is, there was almost certainly a way to do this without devastating existing devs. Small drops in engagement spread more evenly across a wider group of devs to lessen the impact individual devs have to bear. I think that would be totally reasonable.

Like Reply

hechelion1 year ago (1 edit) (+1)

Hello.

My response goes to @Airell's comment, so don't consider those words directed at you.

I don't deny that this affects you, but the fact is that it is impossible to please everyone.

Every day there are people uploading games and asking how they can gain exposure on Itch. These people have also worked on their game and they also have bills to pay and that is not talked about.

My question is, why should the algorithm give priority to you and not them?

You say that I don't care what happens to you, but you don't care what happens to those other developers, that's the point I criticize.

In itch there are many things that could be done better, but in the vast majority of the comments I don't read that, for example you say that on the first page there are only 6 developers, that seems unfair to me, but except for your comment, I don't read anyone else talking about that or how to make the algorithm fairer.

Most of what I read (I clarify that it is a generality, I am not pointing at anyone in particular) is a "this harms me and because it harms me (and the rest of the developers who benefit are not interested) it is bad, unfair and Itch is the only one to blame"

That is the attitude I cannot sympathize with.

Advice, do not depend on Itch's algorithm, if you appear popular, take advantage of that boots to create a community, but do not depend or believe that because Itch had you on the first page it will always be that way.

Like Reply

redonihunter1 year ago

My current theory is, that they lost access numbers, possibly somewhat related to this announcement https://itch.io/t/3099694/notice-for-html-game-devs-upcoming-change-to-cdn-domai...

There are 29 games in the popular nsfw text based for 30 days sort. Your's not in it. And there are only 5 games in the 7 day sort. This looks very strange. But I cannot say if it always looks so strange, since I never checked like this. ( The game is around place 110 of 725 for no time constraint.)

Like Reply

Outsider Artisan1 year ago

I mean they changed the algorithm, I used to be in a number of lists and relatively high up, too. I was in the top five overall Twine tagged games (usually floating around number two to number five) for a long time. My other game, Hex, was usually in the top ten or twenty of that list. In “text based + adult” I was also gnerally on the first page/first load, often both games were. They changed the algorithm on the 8th. The list of popular games in the last X days is still informed by the new algorithm, it’s not like a stored historical snapshot or something.

I mean even if you don’t believe me that my game dropped off a cliff, it did. I can see the metrics. I’m not sure why you’d doubt me.

That HTML hosting change has nothing to do with this issue at all, that might just make some players lose their saved games when it happens (and it hasn’t yet), but it won’t effect metrics AFAIK. Even if it does effect metrics, it hasn’t happened yet.

Like Reply

hechelion1 year ago

I thought I saw something strange.

If I search for Tool&Engine "twine" and TAG "Female Female Protagonist" your games appear on the first page.

But if I search by TAG "Twine" and "Female Female Protagonist" your game does not appear.

If I search for "Female Female Protagonist" + "Test based", your two games appear on the first page.

PS: It's not related, but I'm trying your game and it has very good quality, congratulations.

Like Reply

Outsider Artisan1 year ago

Yeah, I actually didn’t tag either of my games with Twine, but it’s listed as the engine. I wanted to use those tags for other stuff. But yeah, with sufficiently specific combinations of tags, my game still shows up high in some lists. And thank you for the kind words, I’m glad you think so.

Like Reply

redonihunter1 year ago

A normal change would not make your games drop so much. However the algorithm now and some time ago worked, it still is supposed to do some ranking based on interactions.

Since there are still games on top of the list, it obviously still sorts them somehow. But there are some massive problems behind the scenes. Servers are changing and I believe somehwere in Asia a whole section was cut off from parts of the hosting servers. There are threads about that.

The algorithm is also supposed to have some methods of preventing cheating. Maybe it is over sensitive to those behind the scenes problems. If they rerouted traffic it might have looked like artificial overinflation of view counts and was ignored, resulting in a lower ranking for some games.

Maybe it is some obscure bug, where only games hosted on a certain load distribution server were affected.

Other than that, a runaway self re-inforcing viral downward trend might be possible due to a small change in the algorithm. Like, you were on edge of page 1 and next day it was sligtly less visits so the algo puts you still further down. Rinse, repeat.

I thought it might have to do with updates, but then I saw a game on page 2 with no updates in a year.

What irks me the most, how the game of OP was apparantly at the bottom of some list. That is why I thought, and still suspect, access numbers were lost or counted as 0 for some time frame.

Like Reply