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(+4)

When you review your data sheet and narrow it down to make sense of it, I appreciate that you mentioned, "The audience reflects the game maker," to better understand and comprehend the data analysis. However, I want to argue that the website itself, Itch.io, is mostly an indie developer site; most people come here to look for non-AAA games. We (Audience) are always looking for the small devs and just want people who really put effort, work, and passion into their projects, like you. Anyway, I just want to mention this.

(+1)

Also true, although to some extend an extension of the above. The people who buy a console at Best Buy or Amazon and just download and play whatever jingle-jangle-keys is new this month probably do not even know that Itch exists. But at the same time, I imagine a lot of the people here DO own consoles and DO play larger, more professional games sometimes, or at least have in the past and gladly would again if they were worth it.

But maybe this is yet another example of the economic and cultural balkanization and stratification that's been tearing things apart for a decade or more now. Culture used to be largely UNIFIED and MULTI-LAYERED. GTA is a perfect example of this, because there was something there for everyone. If you were a nerd, you could marvel at the craft, the scale, the technical achievements, how polished the gameplay and systems were. And if you had a dent in your head, you could start the game up and spend 4 hours just driving around and shooting things. To be fair, I did as well, because even that was a lot of fun. But the point is there was a broad appeal. Maybe the days of that are over. Maybe now we have slop for the hogs and nerd shit for the nerds, and not really much combination of the two. And maybe GTA 6 can survive PURELY on being that hogslop. But we'll see.