I am not sure if this has already been discussed or not, but one major issue I find with most game store fronts is that discoverability is very difficult. It can be very difficult to sift through the sheer number of games to find something that catches my eye. Steam's community curator system is pretty handy in that community members can build up a reputation and a list (or lists) of games they recommend others try, often with their own personal review attached. I really like this idea. The Google Play store has curated lists (editor's choice) but that is not nearly as comprehensive, and is not community driven. Google itself curates apps and games and their obvious motive is to push games that make bank, which is heavily biased and leaves no option for personalization.

Have a scenario:

Let's say I am looking to pick up a new visual novel. If I click the VN tag, maybe a list of 1000 games appears. That's a pretty big list! And what do I see on that list? A single screenshot, a title, and a short blurb. Not much to go on. I can filter it down more such as by platform, price, but I could still be left with a list that is hundreds of titles long. I'm a busy guy, I don't have time to find a game I just want to play one! But hey, VN_Lover_9001 has played hundreds of these games and given them each a rating and created a list of his top picks. Well if this guy loves VNs, maybe his curated list of the best in the genre is all the filter I need! Now I have a list of, say, 25 games with a nuanced review of each I can look at to pick the right game for me. VN_Lover_9001 being a poweruser can feel like he's helping the community (he is!), I get to save time searching for games and spend that time actually playing them, and I can feel safer spending my money knowing that this game is highly rated by a semi-trusted source. Win/win/win!

Another idea on top of this could be to give powerusers some sort of incentive to spend their time (and money) curating (store credit? special badges? featuring their lists, etc), and allow other users to either vote on the user, or the specific list, as good or bad quality (this could help deminish trolling or gaming the system by only giving positively rated users incentive bonuses).

For now, game reviews aren't even visible to anyone but the creator. However, look in the (left) sidebar while doing a search, it should list a number of relevant collections under the filters. Following people whose opinion you trust will also notify you every time they rate or collect a game. And creators do that fairly often with the games that inspire them.

Ah, so that type of system is already somewhat in place. That's handy, I totally didn't see it. However, I think that making reviews public would be really useful too. I always read Steam reviews and check the rating before I consider a game.

I think we can do a lot more with collections to make them more valuable. Right now to find collections you either have to follow someone who has a collection, or find one of the ones that gets featured on the sidebar on browse. Feel free to share any ideas you might have to make collections a bigger part of itch.io.