The way itch.io's system works is weird in general. When you publish a game, there is a checkbox, saying "Make game visible." If you don't check that box, your game that you published is not visible. Ummmmm, so when I publish a book, if the publisher don't put it on the shelves, if they don't even put it in a search engine, that doesn't seem very published to me. We call these things "Drafts."
And yes, writing a long review that nobody could see is kinda off.
I just found out about this now and while I understand what you're trying to do here, naming an action a "review" implies that it behaves like a "review" on other common platforms. If you're not going to consider making reviews public, then PLEASE rename "review" to "give feedback". The current wording just made me assume that devs would be notified of a review, but it would still be visibile to all.
I personally find public reviews to be very useful before I buy a game, and the ones I've seen on itch.io have been very helpful to me (as well as kind to the developer). I also left some reviews to help others out but realised only now that no one would have seen them. That is an issue - how you address it, is your decision.
I know itch.io has a very small team. I think it would be nice to address the comments here. I personally think a system like Bandcamp is nice. I like the developer having control of their page. There are a lot of mean reviews and comments I've seen people make. Let us choose reviews to highlight on the page. Or just let us turn off reviews. Some people don't want to be scored by strangers and just want to share art for the joy of it.
Edit - Just realized you can turn off ratings. That's great.
I didn't realize until seeing this thread that the reviews i've written for games are only seen by the dev and anyone who happens to follow me (which is one person, since I don't publish my own work here.) That's very frustrating and I feel kind of awkward about it now for reviews that were more critical of a game's UI/etc. I write reviews with the assumption other prospective players are going to see- if I knew reviews were actually going ONLY to devs I'd have written them to sound more like "feedback"... it's very confusing.
"I just wonder if this is in the backlog or what’s taking focus instead"
It's likely neither. I'm pretty sure the devs of the website just don't care about the user experience. We still don't even have an actual way to exclude tags when browsing, and that feature has been requested multiple times for years. All we have now is a shitty band-aid solution of manually adding some stuff to the URL to exclude a single tag.
I suggest using a bookmark to apply the band-aid.
If you are on Chrome, I made a button for that band-aid, to be auto-applied. And if you can run tampermonkey, I made a script to hide games by their main genre. And another script to hide individual games/developers by pressing a key.
A roadmap of features to come sure would be nice to look at. But maybe they do not want to commit, in case features have to be scratched or postponed. Last was some search optimisations and it was said, they are still working on it, but not what future changes are to be expected.
The wording should be more clear, yes, absolutely.
But reviews are not only shared with developers and followers. They appear in https://itch.io/feed?filter=ratings
The "problem" is, that they are not attached to a game. But while this should be obvious, if you looked at any game at all and could not see any reviews, people still misunderstand the wording when writing a review.
It's now been over 4 years since I've suggested making a tiny change to the way something is phrased to make things clear.
"Reviews are shared with developers and your followers"
should read
"Reviews are shared ONLY with developers and your followers".
As it is now, the reviews you write are still not shown publicly.
