I want to know what works well with itch and if anyone can help me with it that will be a great help

idk, maybe your definition of successful is different from mine. But imo a sucessful game is one that have a good amount of players that really enjoy your game, and maybe your game even got a community around it. And a sucessful game dev imo is one that can use game development both as a fun hobby and a potential source of income, so that they don't need a boring job along making games (basically being self employed, like a freelancer or smth).

Here have been my observations, based on responses to my projects, view counts, etc.

• Do not make your games difficult.  If you want difficulty in your games, either leave it closer to the end of the game or have different modes (Like Easy vs Normal vs Hard).  A game that is difficult at the start is a serious turnoff.
• Do not make your games too long.  Your typical itch game should be complete-able in about an hour.  If you want your game to be longer, it's a good idea to mention it (somewhere) that it will be a longer game.  Even then, I would cap your full gameplay duration at 2-3 hours.
• Metroidvanias and other action-oriented games seem to do better.
• Heavy text-based games seem to be iffy; might work or might not.

Paid games on itch only rarely have high levels of visibility even when extremely well made. 

Free game with optional tipping or a longer paid version connected as optional upgrade (upsell) might succeed if it is good enough.

Horror is dominant here especially freeware horror. That's why I am working on a horror asset pack - knowing the itch community has a seemingly insatiable demand for that type of material.

Retro PSX 3d style is common, which is an aesthetic choice but maybe also is just a way to limit texture filesize and ensure things run in a browser window given the severity of WebGL technical constraints. Browser games are often hits here.

There are visual novels, often sexual, and quirky experimental projects of a few types scattered around but horror seems to be by far the most common category of successful material.

My sense is just do the sort of project you have a passion and vision for though, as that is more likely to get finished. Who knows, the game idea you have might be a hit precisely because it stands out as unexpected and different from the rest of the material on the platform. If you aim for commercially successful, and make a by the numbers game, you miss the reality that the weirdest games doing their own oddball unusual thing often are among gaming's biggest hits. 

Many game devs over the years  have made massive hits they didn't even realize would be huge. They just felt the thing they were doing was too intrinsically promising not to try it. Think Portal in '07. They had a great mechanic sure but it lent itself to puzzle solving and platforming, hybridizing two genres that were both fading painfully by '07. Valve made the thing anyway because they wanted to, and could - and hedged their bets on it by sticking it as a bonus in the Orange Box. It was an afterthought until it launched, at which point it blindsided everyone by being wildly successful. It's like the film biz, nobody really has a particularly good clue what will actually succeed until it does. Star Wars being the classic example, it was a scifi movie and that alone made everybody in the studio ignore it. Scifi was generally thought of as a genre with limited audience potential. Star Wars did something with it nobody at all saw coming, the studio execs included. Myst was financed in a year (1991) when the most successful CD in the world was a digital encyclopedia with 80,000 copies made and sold. But a few small developers, saw the potential of the format and couldn't resist so in '93 Trilobyte launches The 7th Guest and soon after Cyan releases Myst and both shatter expectations, sell over a million copies. Myst specifically tops annual PC sales charts four years in a row by doing something almost nobody else had been actively trying to do. It held the all time PC game sales record up til 2002 when The Sims broke it, and that game was also its own weird thing very unlike what other developers had been doing, the core idea emerged from Will Wright watching children playing with a dollhouse. That guy was often finding ideas from oddball sources. Simcity, his first hit, was the result of an urban planning course in university and he was excited about the idea for the game and nobody else got it. Like, it seemed to be such a boring subject, but he had this idea that wound up being one of the earliest examples, maybe first of the entire city builder / economic management category in gaming. 

Sometimes a USP matters. Unique selling proposition. The specific thing your game is doing that nobody else is doing. The thing that makes it a special twist on its existing category. A strong special standout element that makes your game different + strong execution + capable promotion doesn't guarantee a hit but does massively boost odds I think.

Sometimes it is good to see a USP as elevator pitch you can convey quickly. "This, but that." 2025 indie success Blue Prince for example: Roguelite + mysterious puzzle game. Two things normally not combined, and some may argue they did not gel that well but the fact that it was doing something weirdly different from traditional puzzle adventure titles can't have been too bad for its visibility. 

Thing people recognize but with a twist on it somewhere, that makes it stand out as interesting. Can be as simple as an art style others would not choose. I have games in two genres slowly moving forward that use scale miniature photography as the aesthetic. The core concept is fairly established but the look makes the thing unexpected in relation to otherwise similar work. Find your own creative spin and do something cool. 

Don't feel the need to chase popular trends. Be ready to try something other people are not yet considering. 

It might fail hard sure, but might also be huge precisely by attaining novelty. 

"The smart person hits a target that is hard to hit. The genius hits a target nobody else even realizes can exist." I don't recall where the quote came from but it sure stuck with me. 

Matthew H.

https://matthornb.itch.io

I am unsure how this question is meant. The trivial answer is, that the platform does not matter. A successful indie game will be on many game platforms. If you exist on Itch alone and do no marketing and have no "viral" game, the game will be unsuccessful, no matter how good it is.

And going "viral" on Itch is hard. It's not impossible, but if one could find out a recipe for that, it would not be hard. And by viral I mean that word of mouth is enough to market the game.

What does especially well on Itch specifically, are things that are not seen on big game platforms. That covers things like games that are still in development. Fringe and nieche topics. Special interest. Low budget. Even horror can be considered such, as it extra popular on Itch, but not so much elsewhere. And yes, also the gay furry dating sims mentioned above. While Steam does have games with lgbt topics, they have exactly one tag for that. lgbtq+. And there is no furry tag. 

All that being said, there is one point to make. An important point. Just because things do well on Itch, does not mean that if you create such a thing, it will do well. Horror dominates the first page of popular games. But there are currently 77000 horror games on Itch. Creating a horror game will not make that game appear in the top pages, just because it is a horror game.

Speaking for the RPG community, I would say the Old School Rules (OSR) adventures are having a resurgence. We've been writing for the Shadowdark RPG (think a simpler version of D&D) and it's been going quite well. Maybe you could design PC games for the same universe?

Paid games with 100% off sales

I have a 126.5% CTR