I would like to know which game covers are the most attractive to Itch.io users. The ones that make you consider that this game has something interesting, or that directly make you click on it.
If you knew an answer to that one, you could make lots of money in marketing and advertising.
In practical terms, just sort browse by popularity, as should be the initial sorting. You might see, or rather not see, a certain trend.
Well, after you noticed, how many horror games there are and filtered them out.
https://itch.io/games?exclude=tg.horror
The only trend I can make out, people put the title of the game in there and most do not look professional - compared to the thumbnails on Steam. As is to be expected from indie games.
Everyone looks for different things and has different tastes. Appealing to everyone only leads to disappointed players. So my best guess is, making a game cover that captures the essence or at least the art style of the game, so it might attract people that might like the game, would be a good idea. But I would not put too much weight on this. If it were very important, one might really see a trend among the popular games. While it is a weak conclusion, the absence of a trend suggests to me, that the cover has not that much impact on a game's popularity. Maybe if you filter for certain tags or tag combinations, some trends will emerge. My guess would be, that horror games aim for creepy/shocking covers...
TBH there isn't any. After I see a game cover while browsing games here in itch.io, I'd immediately check game's screenshots to predict how the game would play. If they aren't interesting, I'd skip the game. IOW game screenshots are the one attracting me not the game covers.
That's why there are some games I love from this site whose cover I barely remember.
That's me, I don't know about others.
On itch I think the only cover images that are going to attract attention are the trendy clickbait ones, like the poorly made spongebob 'horror' games. Idk personally but I only click on games that have the title in the cover image. I tend to see the image before the title but that's just me, but again the only thing that "works" is just clickbait much like youtube lol.
I mostly agree with what has already been said. If you look at the Featured Games their cover images generally include their title and an illustration in a style that tries to evoke the feel of the game. However it is hard to know if that format of cover image has contributed to those games being succesful or if it is just something that people have copied after seeing other Featured Games use it. Like DarkBloodbane, if a cover image catches my eye I mouse over it and if there are no screenshots or gameplay video I move on. It surprises me the number of games that do not have any screenshots or video, even sometimes when they are expecting people to pay up front!
I would add that in general people are drawn to human faces and characters, so if you can work them into your cover image it is going to be more eye catching than one without.