Post by Matthew L. Hornbostel in We got featured on the Itchio front page. Here is what other developers can expect comments

We got featured on the Itchio front page. Here is what other developers can expect » Comments

Viewing post in We got featured on the Itchio front page. Here is what other developers can expect comments

Agreed. Relying on itch.io alone is not good but using the platform as an extra option beyond Steam makes tons of sense as it's free to post a game here. So no $100 fee like on Steam, Epic. And yeah, sales are always vastly lower than traffic unless the traffic is intensely well targeted.

Ie stuff like search queries and tag filtering directly related to your game type from people who are actively looking and filtering down for a specific thing on itch or via search engines. There is a truism in business apparently that if 3% of visitors to a page buy, you have a hit product. 3% sounds small but it is actually better than most products do. Take that best case 3% and expect the number of user reviews to be about 3% of that. True on Steam and most places aside from eBay. On itch, for me, I have over 5% of customers reviewing which seems anomalous, but has to do with how impressed they typically are by my work. Normally reviews only occur when a product either blew someone away as far better than expected, or disappointed them strongly. Middling reactions of the 3/5 sort rarely lead to posted reviews.

What this means is when a game has say ten ratings visible, that means it made maybe 300 sales and that more likely than not, somewhere over 10,000 people have looked at it. Which is usually fairly hard to attain! But the user feedback in comments, reviews and ratings is gold, as it greatly boosts the probability of future buyers taking a chance on a game. So the more you keep at it, over time the percentage of people buying inches up as reviews are posted, and if you are persistent it can snowball enormously. It's why I deliberately take a moment to encourage comments, reviews and feedback on my own product pages. It seems to be increasing the odds of people posting feedback. Sometimes if you simply ask for that, it will have an effect.

Finally, it all still depends on having a good game people will likely review well, which is the most difficult step and the most important one, and takes a lot of work.

Anyway, good luck to you here. I think that you may have a hit over time. Not a big success yet exactly, but it's definitely a strong start.

Matthew H, matthornb.itch.io

Skydome Entertainment4 days ago

Thanks, I think that is a very fair assessment. Itch.io probably should not be the main platform for most commercial games, but as a free additional storefront it makes complete sense.

I'm not sure I have seen a review on itchio for The Hive in a long time, It's propably too complicated to leave them.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply and encouragement!

CoderGenius721 day ago (1 edit)

"What this means is when a game has say ten ratings visible, that means it made maybe 300 sales and that more likely than not, somewhere over 10,000 people have looked at it. Which is usually fairly hard to attain!"

Nope, just not true at all.

https://codergenius72.itch.io/dualspace

I wish though...

Matthew L. Hornbostel9 hours ago

You're right codergenius72 - in your type of scenario, it is not true or relevant at all.

The 3%, 3% thing is a rough, general market average that doesn't consider bots, and the exact numbers will vary by product given the individual sale item's quality and promotional content - and as a rough number was only ever meant to apply to bigger storefronts containing priced paid items only accessible with purchase, ie items requiring payment for access* (not free browser games with tips optional) so of course with your situation and a free browser game the ratio of views to downloads/plays and the probability of reviews will both be way higher, but the odds of sales also way lower.

In other words, a paid game like the OP's 'The Hive'.

Your data shows a bit over 2000 pageviews, 400 plays, 34 reviews, no sales.

The views to plays ratio, then, is about 20% and plays to ratings almost 10% so higher than would be typical for a paid game. People are more likely to play a game if it's free, and more likely to offer feedback too, but also far less likely to pay anything if they're not required to.

On Itch, Steam, Meta, Epic and other gaming storefronts with paid products specifically a typical average 3% of page views typically end in a purchase, and 1/30 - 1/35 of users who purchase a title review it. It's such a well observed pattern that SteamDB bases their linked estimates of how many people own a game largely on just two metrics, the review count (which is public) and number of players actively running a game over time. (also public) to extrapolate how many total people have the game.

But the specific actions of a store can skew it. Low pricing at around $1 per item, high product quality and scope relative to the content actually visible and posted on the promotional pages and a direct request for feedback as in my shop, for example, leading to a higher review probability than typical.

And there is a clear tendency of positive rating feedback to boost sale probability over time. So the well reviewed items do end up selling better than those with few or no reviews or feedback.

Anyway - sorry for all this conversational hijacking of the original post.