How often do you rate games ? 

It usually takes me a while to make up my mind, and other times it's an absolute ten out of ten experience. But reviews don't seem to aggregate a total score, so should I be more honest and rate people's content? What's the mood to get a feel for writing better reviews? 

Anything that I play long enough to feel like I have good feedback, I will usually rate. I also have noticed that I rate a lot higher than most on itch. If I pick something up and it doesn't grab my attention and I click off of the game in under 5-10 minutes, generally I won't rate it, but anything I stay on longer than that I try to have some sort of input on. I honestly don't play a ton of games on here, so I'll go weeks at a time without rating anything.

If you have gotten to the point where you have genuinely useful feedback, post it as comment or rating. 

It's really extremely helpful both to the developer and to other potential players or buyers if it's a paid game or other product.

Especially given hesitation of itch users to trust anything that lacks prior feedback. Nobody here buys, downloads anything if there is no feedback. So posting feedback can make a massive difference as a signal regarding the legitimacy and quality of a game or product. 

If there is a problem with it or worse it's actual malware, which has been known to happen on itch and makes people wary of downloading anything here, clearly a one star review helps protect future visitors and warn them.

And five star reviews that seem written by an actual human, likewise are a significant green flag and more so if there are a lot of them and they're from longstanding trusted user accounts that didn't just show up suddenly purely  to rate that one thing.

I've found many people on itch.io don't even realize the platform *has* a star rating system, and it's not that prominent, but the rating system does affect sorting and visibility in certain areas and does matter somewhat in that sense. But its main value is in establishing trust and an understanding of what content on itch is good and has value and what is not good, not valuable, or sadly in some cases is even harmful.

My experience says eBayers rate things almost every time, Etsians only one tenth of the time at best, and itch users maybe 1/25th best case. The 1/25 only happens when they're actively asked to do so and when they realize the content massively exceeded initial expectations.

People usually are more likely to rate when ratings and feedback are actively requested and encouraged on the page, and when the page has content that provokes a strong reaction either positive or negative. Studies seem to suggest what we'd intuitively expect - if the game or other listed item is of middling quality in the view of its players/userbase there is a much lower likelihood of them rating it.

If it is exceptionally good, or awful/broken/scammy, they will be more likely to post a review. So that will explain the prevalence of one and five star ratings above 2-4 star ones in general. 

Presence of feedback is vital. In my experience it is THE difference between a wildly successful product and one that's outstanding but completely ignored and never downloaded. When I first sold on eBay I had to lower pricing over and over to 90+% loss margin. Nobody bought what I offered. I was offering personalized art - paintings on canvas - and firstly nobody was thinking that was a thing you could find on eBay, nobody looked for it - but even as I promoted it and thousands viewed the shop, no ratings, no sales. '99 cents to have a painting personalized, made by hand with paint on canvas, shipped to you'. That was how low the pricing got. Finally someone took a chance on that and was completely blown away, just ecstatic. That I actually DID what was promised somehow for $0.99 and it was good. The same on Etsy, just absurd financial losses at the start, and yet four years later people were spending 20, 30x more on the same thing and the level of customer activity had spiked 1000x even as the pricing was 30x higher. The difference was the presence of hundreds of reviews. It was indeed the ONLY thing that mattered and ultimately both eBay and Etsy shops were forced to close as people were buying so much so fast I couldn't keep up with it even as pricing kept being incremented upwards.

After that I realized digital products made prior to sale, were a wiser bet. The product already exists, hundreds of hours of work poured into it in some cases, it can be posted and sold an indefinite number of times, without each sale involving a set number of hours making, packing and shipping. So that is what I am doing now and itch has an easy setup for it, no obsessive formatting concerns (Unity asset store has some fairly specific rules for how to organize, name, and showcase all assets and given the sheer number of game assets in my texture packs... just probably not worth it. 

I've seen this on my page ( matthornb.itch.io ) as there are now 17 ratings on my gamedev asset packs and they're all five stars. It was way less activity not that long ago. 

Now over $400 in sales on itch and over 2000 downloads, over 100,000 page views from 10,000+ people. Overwhelmingly, the visitors the first couple years did nothing except browse. Now people buy especially during sales on holidays when it all combined drops to under $2. My aim has always been to err on the side of underpricing and make up for the low purchase gain with sheer volume of activity. It is finally working out. Or starting to anyway,

And I just want to thank everyone so much who has helped that start to take off. 

It's going to be way bigger very soon.

I have a horror 3d asset pack now a few days away from launch, should be out by Halloween 2025, plus Europe pack, Middle East pack, Scifi / Space pack, Fantasy/medieval asset pack, and many updates to already launched texture and 3d packs... all of these additions should be out by end of 2025. Hoping to have the total released asset file count at  over 5000 by the end of the year. Right now? 3300+ asset files released and 300+ more across various packs and updates in progress on the brink of release.

But it would not be my primary focus now if not for all the feedback and positive ratings that helped me shift from having a store on itch that I promoted almost relentlessly and truly believed was promising but that almost nobody bought from to one that's suddenly increasingly popular. Those ratings MATTER!

I was thinking this. I've started to rate some games upon returning to this site but also as a developer, I haven't brought myself to give a game less than 5 stars really. Which is to say if I think it is less than 5, I haven't given it a rating yet. And I wonder, if a developer is giving a review, do they ever give less than 5 or else incur some wrath and vindictive low rating for theirs?