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Itch needs to change to be taken seriously for FNaF fangames

A topic by FlooferLand! created Jul 25, 2024 Views: 349
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I hold Itch near and dear to my heart compared to GameJolt because of how set it is on supporting creators, how fast the website runs, and how convenient it is to search for games and post games on here. But as a FNaF fangame developer I've noticed nearly NOBODY can take Itch seriously for those types of games, for good reason.

GameJolt is known for being the FNaF fangame website, and posting on here is very hard because the first thing anyone sees when they search through the Five Nights at Freddy's category are things like "Five Nights in Anime" (a slightly NSFW clone of the original game featuring naked furry women), Five Nights at Joe Biden, a Genshin Impact fangame, a FNaF fangame around the real life music artist Tally Hall, and a BUNCH of games that aren't even FNaF related at all. How are people supposed to take this platform seriously?

I understand there are systems in place to boost small creators and brand new games and that's why those show up, which is why I love Itch so much, but when people search for horror tags there HAS to be some filtering done, because nobody searching for an actual scary FNaF fangame is going to be happy when they find a bunch of meme games. They'll just think "oh these games suck" and go back to GameJolt.

One solution would be adding a little notice for people choosing the FNaF tag when they're making their game's page that forces them into adding add a #parody tag if their game isn't meant to be taken very seriously, then filtering the search so those games would show up at the very bottom unless one of the comedy tags is added (#funny, #silly, #parody, etc).

That solution might not be enough though, and I would personally recommend making some form of movement as a platform to try and advertise Itch more for FNaF fangames the way GameJolt has. This would not only monetarily benefit Itch because this fandom is HUGE, but it would greatly benefit fangame developers as Scott Cawthon (the franchise' creator) has said he is perfectly fine with people receiving optional donations for their fangames and GameJolt has no donation feature of any kind. This is one of the only places GameJolt has a strong upper-hand over Itch, and it will stay that way unless Itch does something.

When people want silly horror games, they usually search for #horror + #funny (I know because its so common that its one of the top indexed Itch.io pages on Google). But when people want actual terrifying horror games, they just search for the #horror tag. Something like this needs to be done with the FNaF tag as well. The #horror tag itself is perfectly fine and doesn't have this issue, which is why I beg you to go through with my change because it ruins the reputation of this platform in the FNaF community.

TL;DR  -  When people search for FNaF fangames here they find ridiculous unserious pieces of non-horror and unrelated slop. It makes serious and talented fangame developers lose their games inside the sea of "Five Nights at Joe Biden" and NSFW anime FNaF clones, and it ruins this platform's reputation in the fandom. I want to post serious fangames here and I cannot.