itch.io

If you look at how man followers accounts have and how many comments and ratings there are and take into consideration that the people that do comment, comment a lot, my estimation of comment usage is about 1% of Itch users.

I mean, same thing if You check a subreddit for any game and compare subscribers to active users and both of these to game's sales figures/peak players. It's just a nature of media that a small portion of a community actually engages in discussing what they love, but there's also a lot of people that read it, without replying.

I mostly scroll through idle/incrementals on here, since I'm studying the design and how everything being fueled by AI and eastern influences affects the genre, but every now and again I stumble upon a game, .exe only, with a comment or two saying it's basically a virus. Regardless of validity of such claims, it's one of those cases where an open (or at least more active) comment section also helps.

I'm not gonna flip, because I can't post comments properly, but if this is how it has to be, I believe I, as a user of a public forum, who has to register and accept a bunch of terms, deserve a better treatment in regards to the issue. Be it Support that actually responds and resolves issues, be it a separate function to call in a mod or someone for approval, some sort of account-wide verification to make sure I don't land in the comment limbo anymore and can skip months-long approval process that never finishes, or, at the very least, give the user a view into their posted comments, so I know they're actually there and don't just get deleted the moment I click "post", while I'm being gaslit into thinking there's some sort of moderation going on behind the scenes. It just sucks to have to put in effort into something, trying to be helpful or whatever, only to see it disappear into a void. And now you have to put even more effort on pointless arguments and pleas, just to maybe get someone to look at it. If we go by the logic of putting in effort and how only a small percentage of community engages in commenting, then how many of these stuck in a comment limbo actually bother to work extra hard just to bring attention to the problem?

"My advice what to do was earnest, even if it sounds dumb. Just read all the other complaint threads. Itch's way of handling support requests is "indie". And if developers have to wait for a month to get their game visible at all, I see no reason, why comments should be treated with higher priority. It's what you get, if you go to a site that does not sell you and does not have 1000+ cookies and advertisements on every corner."

Okay, on one hand that's fine. Trade-offs and stuff. On the other hand, as a legitimate company, with income, employees and actual structure, this unfortunately makes Itch look more like a garage-based weekend project than indie anything. Even waiting a year for comments aside, if waiting a month for a game to be visible (or other serious issues) is factual, this is so bad PR-wise, I'm genuinely amazed this site still operates.