When you give a star rating to a game here, more often than not, you aren't scoring a big game made by a big studio or something, but a person or a person + friends doing something. Knowing that stars rate are a factor on which people decide to play something or not, and knowing how hard is for devs to strive in general, it is fair using like, 3 or 4 stars for like "I like it but nothing more"? I what have done and I now I don't know if it is bad or ok. What do you think?
While I agree that a score system in itself is not perfect, sometimes people also may just overthink it (or in that regard, make them way too complex). With 5 stars, you basically have a scale of (Not at all - mostly not - middle ground - mostly yes - very yes). You can either define that by how much you enjoyed it subjectively, how good it was objectively, or a mix of both - which you then can specify with the optional review function.
Steam only uses two stars. Recommend or not. And devs still get sad about "negative" ratings. But honestly, the rating system calls it by name. Would you recommend this game? Yes/No? But it lacks context. It would be better if it would read: would you recommend that game to players that share your taste in games? We all know our vanity games. We might like them a lot, but might not "recommend" them.
But they do use public reviews, so people can browse those and read up why exactly the games are recommend - or not. Itch does not have those, probably because of the nightmare it would be to moderate those and the whining of the amateur devs that get two reviews and one of them is negative and unfair.
Oh and look, a reply in an undeleted thread. Might be coincidence, but you know what I mean. Also, about that nightmare, the reviews on Steam have comments and their own ratings. The rabbit hole is deep there.
I believe with Steam you at least have to give comment on your recommendation, so that people can 'review' the reviews. That of course does not change how the rating system works and that those ratings will always be a mix between subjective opinion and objective analysis.
The system could also be expanded to make it more custom-tailored and fair. But that is a topic that could be discussed a lot. Some had considered a middle option to choose instead of just recommend or not. Maybe giving viewers some tags or filtering the reviews based on the collected account interests could also be a viable solution.
In regards to itch.io, I get why they have 'limited' the reviews here - but it also makes their function just that - limited. Maybe they could also expand it for users to check some questions when rating, like 'What did you like/not like - Gameplay - Presentation - etc., or simply giving stars to more categories and then summarizing this to give a better insight when checking the review section for a user.
Then again, it seems not a lot of people are using the rating system to much extent anyway. And you can also always just open up your comment section if you want people to share their opinion on your product. The system might not be perfect, but I guess it is an additional thing to serve its purpose for users and when considering results in the search system.
Then again, it seems not a lot of people are using the rating system to much extent anyway.
This.
Of course it is a bit of a feedback loop. There are people not using it because the reviews are not public. So why bother writing one.
To clarify: on Itch a rating is a review without text. A review is a rating with text. (At least that is how I understood it. They are used interchangeably often.)
Anyone wanting to see an overview can do so on the global feed.
https://itch.io/feed?filter=ratings
And, well, a short skimming on that says:
no 2 star, no 3 star 80% 5 star 10% 1 star 10% 4 star. And maybe 5% have text.
If no one uses 2 or 3 and rarely 4 star, they could just as well switch to positive and negative like Steam did. I see merit in this. It is not "perfect", but it has about the same information value as a 5 star rating system.
Maybe jam ratings are a bit more nuanced since the games therein do compete with each other and you have something to compare the games to.
TBH you should ask the same if the games were made by big and famous companies also. The devs are people and they work hard to make those games.
That aside, IMO having a game rated 3 stars is better than no rating at all. At least someone consider the game good enough.
I'm fully aware that there might be trolls and fakers giving fake ratings + reviews but until I have proof, I'll consider ratings and reviews genuine.
OTOH how do you pick a game to play from a list of multiple games with no rating no review etc?
OTOH how do you pick a game to play from a list of multiple games with no rating no review etc?
Quality of game description and topics of interest.
There is no such thing as an indie genre. But what many games have in common is that they cater to a rather narrow subgroup of any topic. Like, things not considered mainstream. Stuff that the big studios do not bother or do not like to develop.
In other words, since I already have those multiple games in my watch list, I will probably try them all or at least look very closely at the screenshots and try to guess if I would like it, based on description and tags and maybe comments.
As it was said, ratings are basically meaningless. If people do not like a thing, they do not rate at all. And some do not even rate the stuff they do like. So to be more precise, the rating average is to be taken with a grain of salt. The number of ratings is not. A game that managed to get 200 ratings and have an average of 2.0 ... how could that happen? Or even 3.0. And anything with less than 10 ratings is probably rated by the dev's brother and his mom or by the odd hater on any game topic or the dev. AI games get this hard.
You measure the size of a game by the number of ratings? I know a Steam game with several thousand reviews that has a single digit review number on Itch and not a single comment.
But should we upvote games just because they are small? Would that not skew the ratings even further? A game with 3 pity 5star votes looking "good" but is actually crap? Or at least crap for the special interest group it tries to appeal to. Like a horror game not being horrible (pun intended).
Based on my observations people downvote for two reasons. They hate a topic. Like AI as a prominent example. Or they were disappointed. The game promised something and built up expectations that were not fulfilled. Occasionally you might have one of those regular raters who really rate just everything according to their own rulebook. But most people do not rate at all. Or they only rate positive like you recommend.
I measure the size of a game by the studio/people behind it. There's a difference between a game made by one person trying to push their game, to studios of ten or more people, to Sony. Also, what you have discussed in this threat has make me thing a lot of the rating of itch. Several good stuff to take in account.
You might want to compare by relative popularity. I like to use the follower count as a measure for that. There are accounts with 5 digit followers. But also the 4 and upper 3 digit follwers are "big". Many of those are individual game developers or amateurs. To the contrary I see actual game studios with less followers.
This is of course relative to itch and says little about success of the game developer or studio elsewhere.
that the game was actually good
How do you know it was good? have you tried it? maybe that's your opinion only. The negative scores OTOH could be right cause the game did have issues which make it deserved those scores.
So if you disagree with certain game ratings (positive or negative), just give your own rating and add your review+comment to counter them.
Knowing mostly Steam and shops, I always took the ratings as a tool to refine your own recommendations. Not as a reward or judgement of other people's work.
I would want to rate up or down things to get stuff recommended that is to my tastes. But the recommendation feature on Itch is rather underdeveloped and out of sight. People concentrate more on popular ranking in browse.
