itch.io

The rules should get an update.

"typically we will respond within a 1-3 days" is not quite accurate and build up expectations.

Upload your old exe to virustotal to see, if it triggers anything. And maybe the other two as well.

That it is the exe packing is just speculation. No one will tell you what it is or what it was  - if it is a false positive at all. It could be any other reason. Including real scammers sharing your ip-range or mistaken identity. Whatever it is, staff will deal with it, but there is a waiting time.

But a hypothetical and plausible scenario would be that any or all of the three files triggered a scanner and a user reported your page as suspicious. What should itch do? Un-quarantine you, just because you made a community thread? I saw a thread once where a scammer actually did that. No kidding. Also, this is community message board and not itch support. The expected waiting time is anything between 3 and 30 days and you opened your request.

When I check with a non-logged in browser, no warning. So apparently there is an IP-based filter

You ip does not change by using a non-logged in browser. But if you are logged in, why should the system quarantine the stuff you uploaded yourself from you.

Support will not answer within hours, most of the time. They typically do not answer at all.

When the mod, who is not itch staff, talks about categories, the message board categories of this very community are meant. The subsections have a rule section what to post and what not and how to post certain things.

There is nothing you can do but wait, while itch staff investigates whatever caused the flagging of your page. If it were infringement, it probably would not be quarantine, but file suspension or mere deindexing, while it were investigated.

You might know or not know, but there are many accounts hacked each week. Very likely hacked by downloading things from itch. It was evident from those hacked accounts posting more malware each day. There is this psa thread about try my game on discord scams explaining part of the problems. Anyways, itch does fight those scammers, but it is hard, since it is free to upload things on itch. So their automated systems either have some false positives or the number of visible malware increases a lot.

So a likely scenario might be, that your game executeables triggered a false positive on a malware scanner. There are game engines that notoriously give false positives now and then. Including godot and renpy and I believe gamemaker and likely many others. Especially exe packing is very bad in that regard. I see your windows file is an exe and not an archieve. I am too lazy to try it, but I would bet that this exe triggers several scanners. Godot packed exes are utter garbage in my opinion, because they trigger scanners so very often.

You should also distinguish between someone testing the game and someone playing the game and giving feedback. It might look the same in some cases. But there is a fundamentally different approach and different expectations.

This also overlaps, when people play games they know are still in development.

The game is indexed. You have not been added the same way for Rootopia as you have been added for This Game is 99% Finished. Look in the more info box under authors.

The account searching now shows games from that account by display name. But not the account itself.

So if I search op's name, I find 6 of 7 games.

In the case that you made and finish something just for making it, how did you feel about that?

It is the feeling of finishing unfinished business.

But this is hobby we are talking about. If it is not fun to you, you should change something. Overcoming the challenge of finishing it, can be fun of it's own kind, of course.

Apart from reading https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines there are no definite things to do or not do.

Itch will not tell how to avoid inspection.

But what can be observed, if you do get flagged for inspection, there is a queue that might take a week or three. And if I were itch, I would put some games randomly on that queue ;-)

It is not about not finding the page when looking for it. It is about forgetting about this thing if you are already in the itch bubble. There just is no incentive to go there. If you look at the header there is Browse advertised when you want to go looking for games. Why would I go to the front page? It is a thing for first time visitors where the itch app is promoted at top.

It would not be such an issue, if the things on the front page would be duplicated and advertised elsewhere. But "fresh" is not even in the Directory. https://itch.io/directory And if you click it, it gets displayed as an unchoseable option in misc. "featured" is only buried as the last option in "misc". The last thing of the last thing. Or in other words, nothing that one would suspect is being promoted on the front page.

Why is fresh and featured not on top of the browse section above platform? Or the randomizer? This is also not in the Directory. Is a link to it anywhere but the very bottom of the front page?

The header on itch pages.

It looks different when you are logged in. Open a window without being logged in. The itch logo has a little text. When logged in, there is no text.

The different sections in the header are written in a certain style. It is Browse Developer Logs Jams and so on. It is different sections of itch to visit. But the landing page or home page is hidden behind the site logo. It does not look like a section to visit. That there are things on that landing page that are not accessible on the other sections never occured to me. I never land there and I am not reminded that it exists. Maybe I saw it once or twice and disregarded it, since the first thing is just the push for the itch app.

If it would read "Start" "Browse" "Developer Logs" ... in the same style, it would be more prominent.

It goes on. Hover over the sections. There is a red underline under the sections. The homepage is not underlined as such.

This is what I mean by hidden in plain sight. It is always there, but easy to overlook.

I was today years old, when I learned that there is such a thing as a fresh section.

How would you select those smaller demographics? How would you select which small demographic's interests to push? Thought to the conclusion, practically every game is popular in a small enough sub group of users. If everything is "popular", nothing is. 

A browse page is selected not by demographic, but by content. So just select a tag or two for stuff that would categorize you into the group of people that like to browse for such games.

In theory, the site could create a profile of your preferences and group you into a demographic that is shown a tailored selection. But this selection would not be called popular games. It would be called recommendations. 

Anyways, putting a diversification in popular based on popularity of whatever subgroups would render the section to not be the popular section anymore. It would be the trending in special interest groups section.

Maybe the randomizer would be something you want to use. https://itch.io/randomizer

itch.io

That page has recommendations, a fresh section, featured games and so on.

... but do you use this page? Or are you like me and forgot all about this page, after making an account? I practically never ever visit it. It is hidden in plain sight imho.

When I browse for games, I click ... on browse. Who would have thought. It does not even occur to me, that the icon left of browse is a link to that page. It just fitted in the page design as a logo, not a clickable link to a page that might be of interest.

In my opinion that landing page could be a lot more promitently advertised. In the layout it should have some text, similar to browse, developer logs, jams etc. It is first, but it is the odd one out.

So are you aware of that link you see everyday, or is it hidden in plain sight to you too?

And I am missing links at other places to 

https://itch.io/games/featured (found that one. It is last under misc)

https://itch.io/games/newest/fresh (it is a hidden option under misc)

https://itch.io/randomizer

It’d be cool if the algorithm used tried to diversify the shown games

It does do that. But only to a degree. The real problem is, that people start browse on "popular", instead of a recommended page or the landing page. The link to the landing page is hidden in plain sight. It is the Itch icon left of browse. And that one has the featured section and a "fresh" section and all that.

But popular, by definition, should be the popular ranking. And faking it for the sake of "diversity" would be blatant manipulation. Horror is popular, immensly so in the indie sector. I blame all the youtubers.

Why would it need to look exactly like the game page? You can have text and images, same as on the game page. What more do you need?

You could make a blog post/devlog and put your alternative language game description there. And then link to those pages on your main page.

But if you just do automatic translations on those pages, well, anyone not understanding English browsing on an English website probably has the means to deal with that fact. Like translation in the client browser or something like that.

Recreating pages

This is about deleting a project and creating a "new" project that actually is the old project.

Itch is a store. The items are not supposed to be some mail attachements. And the mail feature is to be used only for notifications and best practise is to not use it all, if at all possible. People that want notifications from you, do follow you. And if you send them emails they can unsubscribe from those mails.

 How do we reward those who paid?

By having content accessible for those who paid.

https://itch.io/docs/creators/pricing#purchase-tiers-through-individually-priced...

Games installed by the app do not update automatically. They are updated by the app. For this the app has to know the game somehow.

You can scan install locations for games, but I suspect this feature is for games that were previously installed by the itch app.

Is there even a feature to verify an installation? If the app manages the installation I would expect such a feature. And from what I read about the app, there is not really a thing like making a game compatible with the app. Not as a requirement that is. I believe one could create a manifest for the app, but that is not mandatory for it to work.

Yes! There are people on touch screens with big fingers also. If there is no way to undo a thing, there should be confirmations asked. Especially for thing you do not do every hour. At least I hope you do not have to ban and delete comments too often ;-)

https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines#do-not-re-create-your-page-with...

This.

I hope people see a text like this the moment they press the buttons to delete a project, because not everyone reads the faq or community boards.

There is no "required" review process. If you saw your game on internal itch search, it was indexed. 

But your game can be put on that review list after publishing for any number of reasons that you usually will not be told. You will not even be told that your game is on that review list, or that it passed inspection.

But there also is a possiblity that the recent changes in the search algorithm made your game visible for a short time, while being actually on that review list. There was something about the new search being asynchronous or something like that.

Either way, you still have to wait.

I do know this tactic from other sites. Create account, make profile a spam message with pay-link, follow random users and hope they visit your profile and see the payload. Or even click the links.

On itch you can see how many follows an account has. For those two accounts to be "spammy", there are two things missing.

1 The payload. I did not see any links there. No advertising. No payload. Maybe one or both have changed since or were abandoned.

2 The actual spamming. Such spam accounts follow not 3 people, they follow 300 people.

I glanced on which topics and games you post and considering the general feeling those two accounts gave, it might be genuine followers. Remember that you do have a public collection. If you change that collection your followers get notification. This is part of the intention of the following mechanics. That is what it is for.

So maybe remove those accounts from your post, as it can be considered name calling and breach of privacy.

If you have more information to support the suspicion that those are spam accounts, write a mail to itch support explaining the situation. But as I wrote above, with my current information and experience, it does not look like spam to me.

Since itch has free tagging, 70+ games already did have that tag.

For single word searches you might want to consider to insert some short blurb anyways, even especially if there are no suggested tags as a result. It could read similar to "Missing something? Maybe try freestyle tag filtering instead (show tag filter box here)". There are many tags that are used and have many items, but are not in the suggested list.

And that tags are freestyle is not really advertised prominently. I remember a heated discussion where I even was called a liar, for claiming that tags are freely choosable and was quoted the then 14 pages of "all" tags.

If it is not indexed quickly, there is a queue with rather unpredictable waiting time. It can be days or weeks. It can also become "overlooked" or not indexed intentionally. Since no information is given, an observed "maximum" seems to be around 30 days. After that you might want to appeal or complain.

And should it be about a mature game, you have to be logged in and have mature content enabled to search and find it. (The game in question here is not marked as mature, but some of these indexing threads are about this issue).

Also the search features are being changed currently. So it might be, that you do not find your game, because it is not in the ~60 results that come up with your search term. Full titles work best for search, but some titles conist only of generic words. You can check the tag combinations of your game, if it is indexed. Like so https://itch.io/games/tag-3d/tag-atmospheric/tag-creepy/tag-dark/tag-first-perso...

If they are spammy, you can remove the account as such by reporting it to support. I have yet to encounter this spam tactics. And itch gets abused right and left, but not with this one, as far as I know. Maybe it is rare? Or you meant something else with spammy.

Following a user is somewhat strange, and some people mistake itch for a social media site. But you do actually have a public collection and post frequently. An odd follower here and there is not uncommon.

This question most often does not even arise. It would only be valid in the cases where there is the possibility of choice. And if you remove the games that are only webplayable, because the engine offered an html5 export, it is even less.

It is two different approaches and traditions. Web games "historically" were hosted on content aggregators. Often specifically created for that purpose. Most of those were flash games. They were made to attract people to play that game on a site.

Downloadable games are a continuation of the games that were distributed on discs. People are used to having "a copy" of a game. Even if it now is fully digital distribution.

The term casual might apply here. It is lack of "commitment". Downloading something is a bit of effort, while playing a browser game is basically just opening a webpage.

You can add online features in the mix to make this more complicated.

But in the end, it just heavily depends on the game. You would rather play "Bejeweled" as a browser game or a mobile app and you would rather play "Doom",  "Super Mario" and "Minecraft" as a downloadable game.

And to answer the question, it does also depend on the game. Do I believe that the advertised game is sufficiently playable in a browser? Would I want to play this game without being on my browser? It go either way. 

It does help when you can only partially remember the name

That feature existed before. It was improved. But it still is title matching. It now matches url and creator display names too. Short description was matched before, but as far as I observed, if it could fill the results with title matches, those usually had more relevance.

The number of results seems capped more than before. It was something like x = exact title matches + 60 or less. It seems now to be x = 60 or less with exact title matches no longer leading the results, nor being mandatory included.

Also, the relevance ordering seems kinda strange.

If you type neighbor, it will show you the game "That's not my Neighbor" in suggestions starting with "ne" already. But the search

https://itch.io/search?q=neighbor 

does not even have that game in the results (currently). And "neighbor" is the only real noun in that title.

The game will show up for "that's", and even for "that". But it currently does not show up for "thats". So much for the typo correction. It does show up for "thats not my", but since the game also does show up for "not my", that does not tell us anything.

--

The query results have changed since. The game shows now with "ne" or more, as a search term. It will also show up for "thats". 

That the search will match 60 results to "ne" is curious. While this is not a good term to search with, one would expect to match a lot more than 60 titles. But those everyday short words are not good titles. Like fps for example. Those are better used as tags, not as title fragments. You do not search with "fps" to find "banana fps".

In my opinion it depends all on what the search is supposed to do and to make it understood to the people using that feature - without need to consult a message board. I have different expectations from a box called "Title Search" in contrast to "Tag Search", "Keyword Search" or just "Search". Or expectations about a box that does not even tell it is a free write in box and disguises as a drop down list.

Finding those threads? I remember those, but as so much it might not be a definitve answer in those threads. Itch does not like to explain the inner workings and is opposed to search term optimisation and similar things.

So if you make a "devlog" with a "major update", just for the sake of it, without having new major content, it might not get approved. But that was the gist of it. Make a blog that is labelled a major update, and you might appear on recent again.

I would hope you can appear there without a blog post, since it would give a somewhat unfair advantage to people who blog a lot over the people that really update their content without making a buzz about it.

And if someone regularly deletes a page and re-creates it to appear in recent, itch staff might notice and might ban that account or remove publishing privileges or delist the author. That deletion-to-update thing should not be done for other reasons, but some people do it out of ignorance, and some really to try to game the system. https://itch.io/t/3693485/do-not-update-your-games-by-deleting-them-and-uploadin...

It is a matter of perspective, but you can have a paid downloadable for a web game - or a web playable version of a paid downloadable. On the same page.

From what was hinted in community, the alogrithm boosts new games for an unknown time frame in the popularity ranking. I do not know of any hints that they do this for old games or cycle through old games to boost them again. But the intention in those hints seemed to be, to push all the games a little bit. So, maybe. Also, old games can appear in recent again, after a "major update". And if that is really only after a devlog, they should change this. Games get a little boost by the devlog alone, since it is yet another location that has a recent system and links to the game.

So your original post is about a hypothetical situation, is it?

On itch this question does not arise and I am wondering how you even got the impression it was possible, as you might have noticed.

The platform hosts the files and deals with access to your project after a purchase. That is what leafo was referring to. You would have to implement drm on top of the restriction that only a paying customer can access your paid content.

And your first language does not change by moving ;-) Native language is another word for it. It is a statement about the past. Not a statement about which langauge you know best or speak daily.

Ok, English is not my first language, so maybe I need a translator. 

Can you please explain this:

Do you think is better to set a product for unlimited download after purchasing or set a limited number of time they can download it?

Actually I use to set "unlimited"

Where do you see an option for "unlimited" or "limited" downloads? Where do you "set" unlimited?

Because to my understanding of English, by saying "I use to set unlimited" you did in fact claim to be able to do so.

You do not understand. Maybe use a different translator.

You claimed to be able to limit the time frame something can be downloaded after purchase.

Do you think is better to set a product for unlimited download after purchasing or set a limited number of time they can download it?

Actually I use to set "unlimited"

Three people, including the site admin, told you, this should not be possible. So what are you talking about? Do you read a translated version of the itch user interface? What option in the project makes you think you can limit the downloads after purchase?

You might have noticed the recent complaints , when itch was unavailable there. There are not that many indie gaming platforms. Itch will get indexed very fast on the major search engines.

Something even bad actors exploit by hosting impostor games on itch or making blog posts with links to malware. They know that itch will show up in search results.

So, it is not random. If people search for indie games about the topic you make, you might get hits from search engines world wide.

Well done.

Might want to update now the help text inside the search box. "Search for games or creators".

And maybe consider a clarification at some places, that this box will not search tags. There are many threads in community where this is not understood: that there is a second search box that is a write in box with non fixed tags you can enter and filter with, in addition to the suggested tags. It also has misleadingly a help text, that reads: "Select a tag". I remember a heated discussion where someone did not understand that  (View all tags) is simply an untrue statement, if taken literall. It is all "suggested" tags. Not all tags. It is not an exhaustive list. It was months after first using itch that I realized that one can actually write in that drop down box, and not just as a quick select for the entries of that box. As a counterexample, the tags on Steam are exhaustive.

In other words, the search for example with "banana" will give different results than the tag browse page of "banana".

The search box results imply that it will deliver tags, if you happen to search for a suggested tag. Like "horror". It will spell out for you several horror tags. But if you search for banana, it will not notify you, that there is in fact a banana tag used by about 200 projects. Searching for banana will give the usual roundabout 60 projects and people make threads about not understanding, that search results are cut off, or complain why their game is not in the results. A simple note at bottom of search result might deal with that. (Reminding that those results are mostly literal title search and that there is an unlimited tag browsing available as well, and that results were cut off. Especially single word searches might have been an attempt to browse/search for a tag. Or a keyword - something neither search nor tag browsing can achieve, but some people might expect from a box called search.)

Community announcements are all good and well, but the vast majority just does not read here.

If you’re looking to browse by category, we recommend using our browse pages and filtering by tag.

Something like this I would imagine at top or bottom of the search results. Along with the info, that these results were capped and that full titles might be required to find what is searched.

--

Oh, and try using a zoom level greater than 100% or a less than wide screen. The filter_label will flow over. I am surprised you did not use the same drop down box as seen on the browse page, to switch between games and assets.

when translating with Bing, your instructions were clearer

Ouch.

But as a pragmatic adivce, one can open up two translation pages. Write the text, translate it, and translate it back. If it sounds weird, the original might not have been as clear to begin with. If it translates understandable back, this should indicate, that the translator page understood the meaning, since the meaning was preserved through two translations.

Since itch has a worldwide audience, this is an interesting question. And what is considered sensitive is subject to a lot of subjectivity and local bias.

The tricky part is, to know, if you have to check that box. Especially for simple nudity. Or in the continuum between a jump scare and gore horror to set the line between made for adults only and being ok for "kids".

So I would check four things.

1. Is my target audience 13+ or 18+?

2. Will facebook mums get outraged, if their 13yo kids play your game?

3. Are similar popular games on itch marked as sensitive or not?

4. Would a streamer get in trouble for broadcasting gameplay of your game on the major platforms?

Especially 3. should give a good answer, since most stuff here is "correctly" marked.

This is not youtube or steam. The platform does not really push any games. And the recommendation feature is ... underdeveloped.

So a definitive maybe would be the answer. Your game could be pushed a little by being in some of those featured list, but it mostly is a feedback loop with outside promotion that makes games popular, so they rise in popular ranking and appear higher up in tag ranking when people browse for games.

So it can happen, but most things just get drowned by all the other things.

Basically it is a chicken and egg sitution. You need to be known to be known. Itch's stance is, to not rely on internal promotion. So any answer you might get here, will heavily depend on the outside promotion that is done.

But it sure would be an interesting read, if someone can give data on this.

I’m not sure what you referring to. 

I am referring to this very thread here, with the "obviously" you did not quote.

There are options that read like this. Obviously. I think op might talk about the option to sell a limited amount of a thing.

Also, the complaints about confusing features were not about those features as such, as I explained in the last paragraph. They were examples for a general issue that seems to occur frequently: users do not grasp what some features on this site do. (Or else, why does this thread exist in the first place?) There are many, many threads in community that show this issue at the core. Maybe it has to do with the world wide audience. Maybe it is just quirks of itch. I could give more examples, but those quirks do get troublesome if it is about payment options. I assume that for everyone not understanding a certain feature and posting about it, there are many more that have the same issue, but do not speak up.

You have more insight about the support inquiries. If people ask "stupid" questions about a feature/pricing option/etc, it means, that the site might explain it better. Like those limited downloads. And, it is speculations that those rewards were meant, since there is something limited about it. I believe there is a language/translation issue somewhere.

But however it happened, it looks to me, that op did read/understand something on itch to mean, that there is an option to have limited downloads.