This is the second part of my analysis of Work Life, a game I made for the GBA 2024 Jam.

Tags on Itch.io: Choose Wisely!

Let's say you were thinking of building a game for the next jam but you were open to several categories. Maybe you don't have any followers on Twitter/Itch/Reddit that would see your game the moment it releases (so you were relying exclusively on Itch's "New" and "New and Popular" section). Which tags would you choose?

This morning, I wrote a small scraper to download the various tag summary pages: https://itch.io/tags . after, I found the css tags for the title, total, and weekly total for each tag. I saved this data as a csv.

I also wrote a ipynb notebook to clean the columns and look at the various tags and get the bottom of why the dating-sim tag has been so helpful for my game. The notebook output (containing: scrape summary data, and referrer table summaries can be view) can be found in this GitHub gist.

The "dating sim" tag has around 30  games per week (lets say 20-40). The reason I think this amount of games per week is important is combining the "popularity" of the game jam page with this number. Let's assume that my game is of an "acceptable quality" and that you are also capable of creating something at least as good as that. The top 30 percent of 20-40 games would be 6-12. The itch.io Browse page seems to be around 3/4 entries wide so staying in the "top 6-8" could equate to some traffic even after the first week of release. This is the only explanation I have as to why the dating-sim tag has continued to supply views to my game since release: I have probably stayed in the first page of results for this tag.

With that said which other tags might you want to choose for similar success. The complete lists are available below. Here are some that caught my eye:

• Real Time Strategy
• Dice
• Farming
• Dating Sim
• Turn-based Combat
• Food
• Mechs
• Turn-based Strategy
• Tycoon

Naturally, there are other questions: like the relationship between total vs weekly.  as expected: there seems to be a linear relationship between total and weekly games. I don't think there is much to be summarized here but I would imagine most tags receive a "constant" amount of game per week so if you pick something in the middle, you'll probably have a healthy amount of tag-browsers (not too obscure) and still appear in the New and New and Popular sections for at least a week.

---

"small" itch tags (40-100 games per week, "more" poplar than a dating sim)

"small" itch tags (20-40 games per week, "less" poplar than a dating sim