itch.io

https://itch.io/t/4120453/game-quarantined-search-or-indexing-problem-read-this

Your game is quarantined. This should clear up in a while. Could be days, could be weeks.

Itch. Release a prototype and put the earnings into whatever needs funding.

Subscribestar. Patreon. All the other content support subscription services.

Kickstarter.

Also look in this sub section. https://itch.io/board/10020/help-wanted-or-offered

I do not understand what exactly you are talking about.

You complain that the sorting of games is not stable? How are other sites displaying items differently, so that it seems easier to you?

You can try changing this option in your settings, maybe the other system suits you better "( ) Disable auto-loading next page when browsing". But all the sortings change their order a little bit, as new games get released or rise in popularity.

The title should only be used to give information about the name of the project.

If you want to give additional info, use the field "Short description or tagline". It appears right under the title in the grid of games.

Search searches the title field literally. So if your game is called "Cool Name (en/ru)" that means that (en/ru) is part of the name of the game. Before, the name relevancy in search was split over "cool" and "name". Now it spreads also over "en" and "ru" and possibly "(/)". This makes your game a little less relevant when people search "cool" or "name" or "cool name".

There is the meta info about languages. One can filter by that. It is not only something displayed in the info box. https://itch.io/games/lang-ru

Oh, and your game seems searchable again.

The intersting bit about games is, that they are more than the sum of their parts. Simplified you have story+gameplay+eye candy. A kinetic novel removes the gameplay. So it is story+eye candy. If you remove the story, you are left with eye candy. Can this work? Of course. Just like pure gameplay or pure story can work. So if your game only has one of those, it better be not only good, but exceptional.

As for my perspective, why should I play a game with eye candy, if I can play another game that has eye candy plus story plus game play. I am here for games and not for a picture set. 

---

After rereading your post, I agree with the advise above. Do not pad out your story, just for it to be longer. A book is not better, just because it has more pages.

I focused on the title of the thread and if you ask how important the story is, I got thinking what happens if you leave the story out.

This is Itch message board. You need to ask on the individual game message board (comment section).

The bug as such might be an accidental rollout of a test version of the site or whatever.

But the thing itself is kinda very specific and done in a way not consistent to the other applications of css on Itch. All the Itch css is in files. That grey thingy is injected in the html itself.

What worries me is lack of official response. For site issues, leafo is often quite quick to say something about it.

If you do nsfw stuff, you might want to advertise at dedicated nsfw places. Neither of your mentioned sites is such a place.

I sure hope this is a prank or a side effect. Like, they wanted to greyscale some part of the page to give those 0% cheapskates a sad smiley face.

Because doing it this way is not not only unprofessional, it creates support issues. In other words: it costs money because people not reading this thread will open a support ticket.

If they want to encourage more money flow by this, as a user I would like to see a tip to Itch button where payments are made. Right next to those buttons.

Support the developer by paying above the minimum price

+$1.00 +$2.00 +$5.00 +$10.00

I feel like on Itch, more people choose cover images that showcase their game graphics

You might be able to test your hypothesis on these and similar lists' top pages.

https://itch.io/games/top-rated/tag-deck-building

https://itch.io/games/top-sellers/tag-deck-building

Most devs here do not have a budget, so no professional cover art. The cheapest way to have such an image is to take a screenshot from the game. So, while I do agree that gameplay pic is often used, I do not feel that this is done, because people think it increases success, but out of necessity.

Of course there could be a feedback loop, if regular users would expect their favorite games to do similar. Hence my suggestion to see if your observation holds true for your target audience.

Personally, I am on the fence about this. I would react to certain key elements. Seeing that this is a card game at first glance would peek my interest more than seeing that it is a horror game. But if I am interested in card games, I probably already would use a tag like deck building which would nullify that benefit.

But I think this is the high art of marketing psychology ;-)

(can't reply bug again.)

I spot some widget.dark_theme for that layout selector or whatever that is. Do you have that <style> element on all pages or only on dashboard? Same for the iframe.

It just feels like some hacky way of trying to do dark mode where dark mode is not possible. I am not versed enough in css to understand what that iframe does. It is just strange that I do not have both elements at all.

Oh, and dark mode from within Itch's settings works just fine on my system.

--

So the iframe might be an inactive icon, as it says on the tin. It might be unrelated to the greyness.

For the greyness, if it is on mobile too and the Itch app, that is very strange. Also, because it is in the body and not in the css file.

In my dashboard is neither that body style segment, nor that hidden iframe.

Do you maybe have an extension that tries to force dark mode or something like that? I ask because <style> elements are not typical for Itch. All the css is in a css file.

You might have missed the "Add External file" option to the right of "Upload files". You can integrate such files directly into the download area.

That is game specific. Ask on that game's comment section not in general community.

Assuming you talk about a paid game and not a free game.

Those are the type of changes that I dislike. I have trouble parsing your page layout. I cannot gather information about the game in the usual manner and decide if I might be interested or not. And some of those changes, in my opinion, break the promise you made, when you asked for custom css. "Confirm that you will not alter itch.io’s built in UI with your CSS"

Your size changes do not fit on my screen, your devlogs are cut of left side. Unity 6 and WebGL! Play in Browser (the strikethrough is not visible on my screen.)

You changed the iconic Itch download button and it's placement. It feels not like an Itch page. In fact at first sight I was not even sure, if a project was uploaded. You made the the download button look like an external button. Bolstered by the fact that you made a custom GooglePlay Button that also links to the purchase dialogue - which feels out of place, since it is no longer a "popup". If I would not know about custom css, I might even suspect, I somehow got redirected to an impostor site.

Also, on a page without custom css you will see pricing and files without the need to click anything.

I am not even sure, if you uploaded screenshots. They are not where they usually are. They seem to be hidden in that auto slider thingy - so that I cannot view them in the pacing that I chose.

The user tools are also collapsed to icons and barely visible for anyone searching for text.

The centered info box and comment buttons are mildly irritating, it is not that bad, but I do not think it enhances the page. But if it does not enhance the page, it does distract from the normal user experience, so why even bother a center instead of the usual left alignment of those elements.

Oh, and I think I understand what you did and why, with the "Play in browser" feature, but it might not work out the way you might think it would work out. The webgame is not where it is expected. If I go to a page that promises me a browser game, and I see no browser game, I go away and play something else. I do not search on that page for some hidden in plain sight button that takes me to the real webgame.

The most bitter part is, I only just realized that I could click on the round portraits after looking at the page and remembering why you opened the thread, so I searched again for that feature. So I knew that something like that should be there, but it stell flew right over my head. See above with the parsing of information. I am not used to see relevant game information being laid out in such a way.

There are some experimental games that use a llm to control an npc, but those I saw used external services for that and did not come with an offline model.

You need to clarify what you mean with AI.

You need to clarify what you mean with development process. If you only talk about the software development process, anyone seriously and professionally creating a video game is doing software development and will hence use the tools of the trade in a similar statistical distribution compared to any other software development.

If you talk about code creation, that is not necessarily part of the development process. A process would be to test each function by an advanced spell checker, that could be powered by a llm ai. But a process could also be to let an llm prototype a part and then refine it.

And if you talk about things like story, dialogues, background images, character images, other graphics and so on, those are also not really part of the development process. They can be made by a single developer, especially in the hobby sector. But professional indie game developers would have someone dedicated to that task. Either in the team or commisioned artist. Those art works can be made with generative ai, but if faces such a huge backlash for various reasons, that there is kind of a limbo between not creating a game at all because you have no art, and having a game so successful that you could just hire an artist. In that limbo you will find all sorts of constellations, but one will notice that sporting ai art is not something to brag about. It does not enhance mediocre game to a top game. It does give some games existence that would have otherwise have not custom art at all.

There is also an outrage in the community about a special type of ai usage and those are ai generated assets. Those are not made by game developers for their own games. They are made by people trying to compete with artists and selling those ai creations. Often in large quantities for cheap prices or even available for free. There is a market for those, obviously, but in my opinion that is rather paradox. If someone has a budget for external art, why spend it on ai assets. It will not enhance the game, it will degrade it in the public eye.

Since Photoshop has inbuilt generative AI tools, you might also study the usage of AI in the creation process by digital artists.

For (indie) games in particualy you should also consider game engines. In an extreme case, "developing a game" can consist of creating bascially a custom level/mission in a level editor. The software development comparision would not hold true here, as you do not have such engines for most types of software. But one can also see the usage of such an engine as a step up in the hierarchy of programming languages and some of those do have special programming languages - that you could ask an ai to give you code for. Some engines are so abstracted from programming that they market it as no programming knowledge needed. You just drag and drop some elements around.

Is it possible for a game publisher to seal themselves off any interaction with players altogether?

Yes. Having an open communication channel of any kind is not a requirement for publishing. If there are issues, you have to talk to Itch. Itch is the storefront. If the developer provided contact info that is not visible on the profile or game page, it might be visible on https://itch.io/support for your purchases.

But this is for support issues with the thing your purchased. If you just want to give feedback, leave a review, should that be possible.

It does not only connect to your bank account, but also to the recipient's. This means you can only send money to people you could send a regular money transfer. What this system does, is to ensure that the payment was done and verifies it to the shop. The reason being that the shop cannot access the shop's banking system in real time and check for incoming money.

This system will probably be completely obsolete in a year or two. Because what currently is not possible, will be possible in Europe. We shall see if that costs extra money or whatever, but the verification time benefit that systems like iDeal and even Paypal or Creditcard offer will just not be there, if you can check after 10 seconds, if the money was transferred. Almost like they show money transfers in the movies like since forever.

Credit cards and even Paypal offer other benefits. In this context mostly, that you can send money from Europe to the US for cheap. An international money transfer from bank to bank costs like 20 € minimum. Depends a bit on the bank. But you will not find a bank where you could send money to Itch's bank for a 5 $ game and be comfortable with the fee of the money transfer. And that is only from Europe to US. Who knows about all the other parts of the world.

Who knows, maybe they expand their service to be more usefull worldwide. Paying internationally with your bank account in different currencies and low fees would be handy. But I assume scammers would be also very happy about this. With credit cards you often can transfer the money back. With bank to bank this is usually not possible.

It basically only was that step. From what I see there are already some discussions in your comments.

The reason for that specific advice is the report button. People do report suspicious games now and then. And from my experience, a missing reference where there could be one raises suspicion. Though I often see that link missing. Maybe Patreon had or has some policies against linking to other sites at some time? I do not know.

And one can assume that games can be put into quarantine after a report, after all, that's what that button is for.

As a user, my advice:

Ignore the quarantine in regards to updates. Just do whatever you would normally do.

Put up a link from your patreon to your Itch. ( I mean, Itch even quarantines the link from Itch to Patreon. It is laughable)

Temporary put up some disclaimer, (or something in the comment section), how your games are currently quarantined and this should clear up shortly, and if people are suspicous they should google your games and follow the official links (which are patreon and itch).

As you might have noticed I saw a lot of bad things. So, how to recognise if something is bad? Do what I just wrote. Follow the official links. Your Patreon does not link to your Itch. This is very suspicous. I could not say, if it is an impostor account or not by that alone. I also saw no link to your public/demo versions on your patreon on the quick. If they are there, I did miss them. So I could also not check, if your archives look the same as on Itch. If I could verify that it is not a fake account, but the real deal, there is a only a small remaining risk that either your account was hacked or your development machine was infected by a virus, thus infecting the files you upload. And for your information, I saw malware that did not even trigger any scanners on virustotal. And lots of legit games that do trigger false positives there.

I do not know if something was done on publisher side. It cleared after a few days. Maybe a week. People were making jokes about it in the comments. I do not know how long it took. It was one of the bigger accounts. 10k+ followers. It is rumored that the indexing waiting lists might be prioritised by traffic. 

I added something to my reply above. There are cases where there is a waiting time that is unholy. I do not know what is going wrong. But I reported actual malware two months ago and it is still indexed. So if that has either a waiting time of that length or the staff clicked the wrong button. I would assume that it does not look any better for false positives that got put on quarantine.

wouldn't itch.io really have better measures in place for this?

Disclaimer: I only see the cases that are not caught. So the caught cases might be 10x 100x 1000x times higher. I do not know.

But the cases I do see, the measures are not performing well. When I regularly was checking out games, I collected malware games. My collection grew over 500 in a few months. Most of them on hacked accounts. So the measures are unsufficient to detect a hack. And the scanners were unsufficient to detect the malware. Itch is under attack every day by evil people abusing the system. Long waiting times for indexing or false positives are a symptom of that fight, in my opinion.

Maybe it got better the last few months. I sure hope so. 

Sorry, my mistake. I thought the quarantine message appears earlier. It appears at the latest possible moment - after you decided how much money to give and when pressing the red download button on the actual file.

But if you were not formally notified about a quarantine, I would still just ignore it and operate the page normally. I have seen that happen to another established account some time ago. Half the games were suddenly quarantined. I believe in that case accessing the games with a vpn might have been the cause: Itch might have thought the account was hacked.

I suggest to complain to Paypal about this BS. But I am afraid they will ask you to create an account as a reply ;-)

To speculate, maybe the email did create a placeholder account and they reserve this account, should you decide to create an account later. Or they need to reserve it for a grace period for the transaction to complete to the point when it no longer can be reversed. But it still is a screw up. At least in the interface. They should at least pop up a message that you cannot do this as a guest with that mail adress. Or give the option to stay a guest, but use the mail again.

Those games are not  still quarantined.

Just ignore the delisting and update as you would normally do.

The thing is, any update (including the first upload) can get a game on a waiting list for manual review. And that includes a temporary delisting. Unfortunately, the waiting time on that waiting list can be long. Over a month sometimes. So you would typically wait a minute, a few days or several weeks. It is said, that this list is not first in first out.

And some random things can also get a game quarantined and for obvious reasons, Itch will keep those random things secret. There are real hacked accounts and malware out there. Based on my observations, there is about one hacked account with malware on the index every day. And if they take several weeks to remove reported malware, I have doubts that removing games from quarantine is any faster. R-107312 is now 8 weeks reported and still indexed. :-( 

If a game is quarantined it is also delisted, but there will be a quarantine message if you try to download it. (On the download page where to select the file)

For publishers the frustrating bit is, that Itch usually does not tell you anything about the status of a game. Is it intentionally delisted or is it still in the waiting queue? Was it "overlooked"? In combination of a waiting time of several weeks, much misunderstandings happen there. And Itch's stance about indexing is, you should not rely on it to begin with. There are reasons for doing it this way, but it still is frustrating for the publishers and at the places they would look for information (the faq), it states a waiting time of a few days, so people get nervous when nothing happens after two weeks.

Sounds more like a screw up on Paypal's side. Neither Itch nor the Seller will be able to help here is my guess. 

It feels like there is a button missing. Right above "Create an account to get Paypal benefits". Or a check box to actually create an account and show more options - like a password.

Exactly as the label describes.

I do not understand what the label describes. Is no one ticking the second box, or what am I missing? The second box is greyed out and it's function is redundant, once the first tick box is selected.

Game A has first box ticked.

Game B has both boxes ticked.

My account has previously viewed adult games and confirmed to be 18+. In my settings adult content is enabled.

What is the expected outcome when visiting Game A vs Game B?

so what should i do to stay in the top

Don't search global assets. Search your nieche. You are on page 1 in this one.

https://itch.io/game-assets/tag-controller

You can't compare assets for gamepads with assets for rpg maker tiles or whatever is popular in assets overall. There are 200 controller assets and 20000 pixel art assets.

You might influence how easy people find the asset, but how to be better than your direct competion would be your expertise.

That's a feature they should copy from Steam!

I am not even sure how I purge my suggested games. The site features to suggest new games could be heaps better. The way I see it, because it is not so prominent, people use browse to search games and then complain about lack of exclusion of tags and that they always see the same games on page one and that there is so much horror and visual novels and such. This does just not happen on Steam. I never even used a tag search on Steam for years - I did not even know it existed.

Horny Eyeballs. Hah. ;-)

But seriously, the way the ai disclosure currently works for users to filter with, is with tags. Read the announcement. https://itch.io/t/4309690/generative-ai-disclosure-tagging

This here is an automatic tag: https://itch.io/games/tag-ai-generated-graphics It does not appear on the tag list on such games. Unless someone chose it manually.

So yes, no-ai was used before and very likely currently by developers. But it is also given automatically by the disclosure. And the way I understand it, it should only be visible if manually chosen.

The problem is, that the new meta tag is not a true meta tag. The ai tags existed before as regular tags.

What I call meta tag is everything not added to the tag list by selecting tags and genres. You can have 1 main genre and 10 freely chosen tags.

The ai disclosure should not appear in tags at all in that info box. There should be a separate entry. Like "made with". And that should appear only when there is information available. Like "made with". You do not inform players that a game was not made with Unity. For assets that might be different, but it was said that assets without disclosure would be delisted after a grace period.

We shall see how this works out and gets changed over time to be a usefull feature. You currently cannot filter for no-ai-assets, only positive for graphics, sound, story, code. Some people would like a general no-ai, but others's might want a no-ai-assets filter, since there is mandatory ai disclosure for assets. Story and code are not assets. And code is not content. And some people might want to avoid ai narrative, but would not care for the other things either way.

Like the ignore function in Steam. Itch does not have that.

I made a client side tool that can do that. https://itch.io/t/3477347/add-an-option-to-exclude-owned-games-when-searching

You need a browser extension that can run tampermonkey scripts. Read here for an explanation how it works https://itch.io/post/10216613

Please do not misrepresent what I wrote. Because you did that. A lot. I did not argue for gen ai. I also did not argue against it - which might have mislead you to the belief that everyhing I wrote must somehow be an argument for gen ai. 

It is also extremely doubtful that theft-based AI use is as ubiquitous as you are suggestion.

New software code by google is 25% ai generated to put out a known number of the industry. And for your tained touch thinking it does not take that much. A single function would be enough.

Your rhetoric about theft-based AI merely being "progress" akin to photography is complete disingenuous sophistry

You accuse me of a fallacy by constructing a strawman. 

Usage of a term like "theft ai" begs questions about "non-theft-ai". So I described a scenario where gen ai would be trained ethical - the non-theft-ai -  and the consequences. Namely that the advantage of that tech would still exist.

Your whole argument amounts to nothing but excuse-making and rationalization and red herrings and strawman fallacies

My what?! What argument are you even talking about? I like semantics and to talk about fallacies. So kindly point out what you think the fallacies are. I am especially interested in the strawman fallacy you claim I used.

I was giving you my opinion about the matter. My point of view, my observations. I made a lot of claims, not arguments. And the whole post itself was also not an argument. I mostly wanted to point out to you how impractical your tainted touch approach is and how shortsighted your theft rhetoric is.

I did not even give my stance about gen ai! If you wanna know, I see it very critical, but also pragmatical. Without a Butlerian Jihad ai will stay. And I care more about the usage of ai then how it was made. Struggling artists will still be out of work when ethical ais do their job. We need future proof solutions. Not shortsighted method based solutions, like banning "theft" ai.

I don't want even one single grain of sand of the games and assets I support and buy to have ever been touched by any generative AI

If this is about supporting human artists and their craft, very nice of you. Thumbs up.

Unfortunately, there is a high chance for every game engine and library, that it contains code that was made with help of a gen ai. 

There is also a high chance for images created by professional digital artists to contain some gen ai pixels. There are photoshop filters that use gen ai for filler and probably filter effects and there are even outright prompt modifications possible.

Meanwhile, actual professional coders and artists use the state of the art tools of their trade. If there are ethical problems by the training set used, those can be overcome. Artists could even train a model exclusivly on their own data. What cannot be overcome is the seemingly unfair advantage of using tech to do what might be done by hand.

One of the best examples in history is usage of photography to do a portrait in seconds, instead of having a painter paint it for days. But from an art perspective, both are different and customers usually notice the difference. And my impression is, that gen ai games are not really popular, and I suspect this is not because of any ethics aspects. As with photography, it is not enough to push a button, you need to be good at using the tech to create good results. In other words: most gen ai games look not really good.

For assets

https://itch.io/game-assets/tag-no-ai

For games, ai tagging is not required, so the various ai tags will be not be accurate - like all tags. Especially for older games.

But I think disclosure of ai was in the guidelines before all that new gen ai tagging. "If your project involves automatic or AI generation, make sure it’s clearly stated in your project description". But there is much confusion about terminology. Maybe it meant live gen ai and not ai generated assets.

I would wish the formal disclosure to be a bit more elaborate then a yes/no filter. Or visibility of a yes/no tag.

What would users expect?

I would not expect games with ai translations to appear in ai generated.

AI Generated

Featuring content created or edited through generative AI, such as AI-driven narratives, character interactions, and generated assets.

No AI

Projects that have advertised as not using generative AI their creative process.

While a good translation can involve creativity, it mostly requires an understanding of what is said and how to say that in another language. So translations are not a creative process in the same sense as creating a narrative, writing a story, creating 3d models or images, animations, music and so on. Nor is translation a form of editing.

Oh, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Translate is not actually what is called ai generated these days. 

Also read here for the difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_machine_translation#Translation_by_prompt_e...

The short of it: if there is no prompt, it most likely is not a generative ai system with a large language model doing the translation. Chatgpt uses llm and not nmt for translations.

But I also would not consider llm translations to fall under creative process.

After the url. Like this. 

https://itch.io/games?exclude=tg.lgbt

You can put it in a bookmark. You must be logged in for this filter to work.

I think so.

https://itch.io/docs/creators/download-keys#download-keys-and-urls

https://itch.io/docs/creators/kickstarter

Restricted games do not appear on collections.

Try accessing the link again and see, if you can claim the game. If they sent you a download key, you should be able to claim it. But if they only sent you a link to the game + password, that does not sound like a claimable game.

Thanks for the clarification. This was unexpected, as regular users usually do not have the capacity to do such a thing.

You might have understood my initial posting to be specific about your project. It was not. 

I do hope that this is a language thing (btw, English is not my native language). You accuse me of things I did not do. Being of a different opinion is neither gatekeeping nor creating a hostile environment. Nor would asking for reasoning be a discouragement. And voicing an opinion is not telling you, that you are incorrectly doing something. Also, hoping for further arguments, is not a demand.

I really do look forward for any arguments, from you or other people, in favor for your suggestion. Or against it, for that matter. 

Your argument seems to be, better discoverability.

And I agree!

My main argument was, that this is not what I expect from the filter "Play in browser". You also seemed fine with that.

So let's leave it at that.