As an end-user, I like Itch.io as a platform and have had generally positive experiences - it occupies a useful place in the market that most of the major competitors underutilise. It allows for independent developers to publish and for me to find, titles with more artistic or unique qualities that larger corporations would forcably remain hidden. They just aren't as profitable or cannot be sufficiently expressed when working in a very large team, it can't be helped.So in this way numerous very talented individuals have been able to both get a foothold to move onto higher places or be able to continue their expression alone.In fact, there are numerous things here I have enjoyed here that were both free of charge and had some qualities which in one or more departments were objectively superior than games I paid good money for.
But it is in the finding where the troubles lies. The majority of posts I have seen typically say something to the effect of "I see lots of this game genre I don't wish to see", there seems to be a many small factors compounding this issue. I don't really have a reasonable solution to the problem, other than that the entire structure of the storefront and such would have to undergo vast, timely, and tedious overhaul for only a small benefit.
Having said that, the platform seems to be under so much strain because:
- The volume of games is becoming greater than it was designed to process
- It has some combination of the following - Low number of sales, low number of reviews (relative to sales), a disproportionate amount of reviews that evaluate too generously, and so on.
- Due to the nature of the platform hosting independent developers, it will always have a inclination to favour the feasible production of visual novels or similar genres, so attracting more users who are interested in them; in the end garnering more attention than elsewhere and appearing higher in search terms.