itch.io

Ah I see, I understand what you mean.

I completely empathize with you. I feel your frustration as well. You may or may not know this but I am a hobbyist dev as well as running this jam I also submit my own games to other jams and I find it unfair that itch downgrades games without enough ratings. Unfortunately, my hands are a little bit tied because I found out there is no one good and fair way that the voting works on itch.

Let me show you with this:

Making it a public vote becomes too fraudulent so I will never use it. Anyone can make a bogus itch account and upvote their friends game many times. I understand that to make it fair so everyone gets one vote from only the judge would solve the problem but the issue is I like to give the submitters (such as yourself) the reward of rating other's games for their hard work.

If you look at the rating queue it makes it so everyone wanting to vote has to vote on more things that are not their choice of game. The problem with that is to get to the game they want, they might not even play the games they have been allocated and may choose to rate the game poorly or highly just to get to the game they want.

Also people may not have much time to fit around making their own game if they have work, education or childcare commitments to play each and every game in the jam. Having to force people will put them off and make the jam less fun, I don't want to punish people by doing that.

But you are right, if you don't get enough ratings, unfortunately your game gets downgraded. My last project my raw score was low 4 stars, high 3 stars and because I did not get enough votes it was downgraded to mid 2 stars. I am going to write to itch and raise this issue with them. Your score should be your score and not penalized by lack of votes. But I'm not expecting much - they will not change their metrics for the sake of me, one guy XD

On the plus side, there is still time for people to vote on your game in this jam. What I have noticed is the last 24 hours people get a lot of votes. So 2 votes is not the end of the world.

I will try sort things out so that it can be as fair as possible, but nothing's ever going to be perfect. Yes, making a game available in browser may get you some more votes but it is not a guarantee. If you wish to make a browser game make sure your project has less than 1000 files or it will NOT work. I have MZ and by default it has around 1600 files in a blank project before you add anything, so you must delete everything you do not use. My advice is to make a browser and a download version if you think the browser version may lag.

Hope this has helped you, thanks again and all the best - hope to see you in the next jam!