Post by redonihunter in Looking for sites that review true indie games

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"indie" or "true indie" is not the point here. It is success. For successful games you can find reviews on sites like https://www.metacritic.com/game/

There are literally hundreds of new games each day on Itch. How to select which games to review? Why select a game that does not even have comments or ratings on the platform it was released? Such a review site would essentially be no different then a famous youtuber showcasing random games. And the followers are not there for the reviews.

Imho, one either seeks information about a game one is interested in. Or one seeks recommendations from a trusted source. An unknown review site reviewing unknown games fulfills neither. So you have review sites reviewing all the popular games which include those you consider not true indie. And you have some recommendation sites with curators.

If you seek random reviews, try https://itch.io/feed?filter=ratings But those are also prefilterd by the frequency in which games get reviews, so another popularity hurdle.

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Indie-Wall275 days ago (2 edits)

"indie" or "true indie" is not the point here

It is.

Why select a game that does not even have comments or ratings on the platform it was released?

It is just my opinion, but I think you should be a lot nicer to these guys. What you describe makes up probably more than 96% of your site's content. Though they never get seen, they are the reason people come here.

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redonihunter275 days ago

I re-read my post several times. To whom do you think I was "not nice"? And what statement do you think was "not nice"?

If you are referring to the quoted statement, it still makes no sense. It was not me that did not gave the games no comment or rating. There are literally several hundreds of games released each day on Itch. And almost all of them would qualify for your true indie attribute. So how do you select the games you review? How does anyone do it? Does a reviewer select games that have no reviews and no comments or are games with a little bit of attention the ones that get more attention?

I was explaining my opinion why the thing you seek is hard to find. There is no incentive to review games for reviewing's sake that no one plays. No one plays those games I am talking about, evidently, by the lack of ratings and comments.

So imagine that site you seek. Reviewing "true indie" games. How many? Which ones? Is the site a hobby or is it generating money? A hobby site might review one day's worth of new Itch releases in a year. That is the order of magnitude. What I am saying, it is not rewarding for a hobby or a commercial site to create reviews for unpopular games. There are too many of them.

It gets better if you select a nieche with special interest. But that interest cannot be true indie. Go for retro pixel graphics rpg set in the future or whatever. https://itch.io/games/genre-rpg/tag-retro/tag-science-fiction That is less than 200 games. A hobby site can review those. But not a category that has 500 new games each day.

Though they never get seen, they are the reason people come here.

They are seen. And easily dismissed. Or how many games did you not visit, because you saw the cover image and the title and decided to try another game.

Also, users here are notorious for not commenting or rating. You can expect maybe 10 ratings for 100 followers. And only one of those ratings will have a review text. The fact that reviews are not attached to a game and viewable, as they are on Steam, might contribute to that situation.

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