I went to the Projects to rate & review page: https://itch.io/library/things-to-rate
and it shows many games that I’ve never played nor downloaded.
Inspecting the pages in question, the common point is that they all have an embedded web version. I suspect that itch.io counts landing on a web game as potentially playing it, even if it doesn’t have “Automatically start on page load” enabled.
However, that means many games I’ve never tried are displayed and it’s hard to find the games I’ve actually played among them. I couldn’t make good statistics about this because for some reason there is no page navigation so I can’t get past 60 most recent entries (I can only Sort by Oldest to see the oldest 60 entries, but cannot display anything in the middle!)
Would it be possible for itch (web) to actually detect a click on Run game and only count those as played?
Bonus suggestions:
a. a filter to only show apps Downloaded at least once (via itch web) or Installed at least once (via itch app). That would require more tracking, and connecting back from itch app activity to itch account (but it would make sense to share playtime across devices as on Steam, so you don’t lose your data when changing computer anyway), so possibly some changes in Privacy Policy
Downloaded is quite a loose thing, you could downloaded for later and never play the game, but there’s no way to track what user does after downloading when using itch web anyway. In fact, even itch app Installation does not guarantee playing, so to me the best would be:
b. a filter to only show games/apps played/used for more than a certain time threshold. This is to exclude web games that I clicked on just to peek at what it looked like, or that were automatically started, but I never really used them (less than 1 minute, but threshold could be tuned by user). However I don’t know if play time is tracked on web, I only saw playtime mentioned in the itch app (but that’s a good start)
That’s quite a mix of bugs and suggestions. I can open separate GitHub issues for each if you want, but I wanted a centralized discussion first since they are all related to the same page.