Thank you for the reply! I'm not sure about itch.io crowd, but in Ludum Dare there are Twitter superstars, which will of course collect 100 ratings, and since the ratings are from followers, I'd assume they're slightly in favor of the developer. I have no way to compete with them, so they are already "adjusted" higher, why also adjust me lower?
Viewing post in Calculated ratings for jams vs raw scores?
The adjustment is based on median number of ratings. Superstars typically don’t represent the majority of the entries collecting votes. As an example, the largest jam we’ve hosted collecting over 160k total ratings, with many entries collecting hundreds and even over a thousand ratings, has a median number of ratings of 16.
https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2023/results/top-marks
I’d assume they’re slightly in favor of the developer
This is debatable, the increase attention of a page may skew the voting bias of a rater to lower. In my experience, once a population size increases outside a core set of fans into general audience, you attract people who are more likely to casually rate things very low.
Ahhh. The dangerous assumption that all followers on social media are fans and wish the account followed all the best.
Sometimes fans are the harshest critiques. After all, they know you could do better. Just look at those Marvel movie fans attacking some of their beloved Marvel movies.
The opposite is also true. There is a certain indie bias. I am searching for words here. If you see a nice game from an unknown dev that has not much ratings or none at all, some people are more inclined to give a slightly better rating than they would have given the same game from an extablished "superstar". Or they would feel bad to give a 1-2 star rating while not having such qualms concerning an established developer with a game that is "overrated" in their opinion.