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Mediocre on what scale? For your game to be in the middle or elsewhere on that scale, you would have to establish what is an excellent game and what is supposed to be a horrible game.

What is your competition?

You can find an arbitrary set of criteria to select the games and rank them.

https://itch.io/games/genre-platformer/platform-web/tag-arcade/tag-cute/tag-pixe...

Bam. 120+ games in that one. And your game is on page 1 / 4. It must be quite good then. 

On that list below you are even on place #1.

https://itch.io/games/genre-platformer/last-30-days/platform-web/tag-arcade/tag-...

Unfortuantely, those lists only told what itch thinks is "popular" and recently so, not what players thought about those games. One can deduce that, after the games were around for a while and enough people rated them, but as you can tell from experience, that part is hard. Actually it is the topic of the thread here. 

Thanks for your help, but it's a bad idea to start a conversation saying that my game is mediocre just because you didn't like the genre, anyway, I didn't really understand the point of the conversation or what you were getting at with this dialogue, but that's okay, I know my game needs to improve by the end. thank you very much for the feed

Maybe this is a language thing, but I do not remember claiming your game was mediocre.

If I were to rate your game, it would be 1/5. But I do not rate games I would not play. And I believe I made clear, that I dislike platformers and extreme pixel graphics.

For all I know your game is 5/5, but it has to be viewed in comparison to similar titles. 

It started with you claiming this: "Yes, my game is good, you can have fun".

To which I replied: "I did not have fun"

If you blanket advertise your game, you should consider to whom you advertise. If you advertise to the general public, you might encounter people like me, that do not have fun playing such platformer games like your's.

And according to my little research on itch, you will have it extra hard, because if you narrow it down to the tag list I linked, so it is only a few hundred games, most of those games have less than 10 ratings. That part of the genre is not very popular. Half of them have 0 ratings. And if you use less tags, most games drown in obscurity among the 130000 platformer games on itch. Only 30000 of them seem to have more than 0 ratings.

So if you want qualified opinions about your game, you should ask pixel graphic platformer enthusiasts. They will tell you if they think your game is good or mediocre. Those are also the people you should advertise to, if you can.

(+1)

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!


Long story short, platformers sell hard, even amazing platformers sell hard(check out MoonScars).

The Indie Game Dev industry sounds romantic but it's cold and hard most of times.

Well, many games here are more fun to make for the creator than they are fun for players to play. It is nice to have a creative hobby, but the competition is vast and player budget is limited. Indie games excel at genres and topics seldom used in AAA games. A reason why horror is so popular (on itch). The early professional games were often platformers, so there is a plethora of polished and established platformers. New platformers are measured in view of them. And technologically, if a game is basically simpler than early Mario, it is not gonna impress people all that much. You could try story, or appeal to some retro enthusiasts, but that is a small market.