We’ve implemented some minor changes to our browse pages for multiplayer games. We want to make it easier for you to find multiplayer games when you know the number of players you have. When filtering on a tag that suggests multiplayer (e.g. local-multiplayer, or multiplayer), you will notice the following adjustments to your browsing experience:

In the sidebar, you can now filter projects based on the specific number of players supported:

Each game displayed will show the suggested player count range as provided by the developer:

Note that due to a bug with how our system asked for the player count, there are likely many multiplayer games that are currently missing player count information. Please allow some time to elapse for developers to update their pages accordingly.

For developers:

1. You can now set the minimum and maximum player counts on your ‘Metadata > Classification’ page, regardless of other classifications set. Previously, this was only visible for ‘local multiplayer’ games, which was likely due to a bug.
2. If you have classified your game as multiplayer via the Multiplayer classification or by using multiplayer tags such as multiplayer, local-multiplayer, etc. you will be prompted to add player counts on your dashboard above the project’s row.

Enjoy

btw 2 search updates in a row, does that mean you will be focusing on searchability?

The requirement to set a maximum, limited to 255, seems flawed for larger games, even if they are far and few between on itch.io.

For example, Old School RuneScape permits 2000 players per server, and these servers are interconnected to allow the exchanging of messages and trading of goods between them. There'd be no way to attach accurate metadata for that type of game on itch.io.

It would be more appropriate to be able to set "1 or more players" for games where the limit is either unclear (e.g. you don't know how many players it takes to break the server) or high enough that it isn't impactful (e.g. your game may support LAN parties of up to 2^16 players, but no-one is at risk of hitting the limit).

Additionally, I'm unsure on the use case for being able to set the minimum player count as 0. Maybe if it plays itself, like an attract mode?

In any case, for local multiplayer games in particular that are likely to only support 2, 4 players (additional thought: a game might not support 3 players, e.g. if it requires two teams of 2, but a range doesn't let you express that) I can see this being useful for people browsing the catalogue.