itch.io

Today, or rather today and yesterday, I wanted to do an experiment.

Because of how half-baked/nonexistent the sorting system is on itch.io (lesser on the app, but still), I wanted to try something. To put all of the things I owned into their own collection based on what they were. Games, soundtracks, tools, etc, each collection had a label for them. I wanted to see how long it would take to do it since the process to just add one game to a collection in the app takes a bit on its own.  I also wanted to have the collections there so that I can export my itch.io data with all my items organized, since normally it's just one big, long, unorganized list.

For context, the amount of content I have consists of the Palestinian Aid bundle and the Ukraine bundles combined, which is abooooout 2000+ individual claimed items? I had to click on each one individually, wait for the page to load, click the "add to collection" button, select the said collection, and then leave to get the next item. I also had to wait for scrolling to catch up since it only displayed a certain amount of items on one part of the library's list.

After measuring how long the process took via the length of all the YouTube videos I watched during the whole thing, I found that it took me a generous, combined 10 hours. I also had to find out the hard way that the soundtracks and thing/misc items were not filterable, so I didn't even know they existed for a while. Also, just because I could, I did something similar with my Steam library as well. With the multi-select option, I grouped everything I wanted into their own categories based on the genre of game they were. This took roughly 20 minutes.

I didn't think this fit into the feedback section since it isn't necessarily very constructive, but it's almost laughable how poorly optimized the current organization, filtering, collection, and claiming systems are right now. Both in the client and on the site. It's been almost 10 years since the site first started. I would've hoped something like this would've been fixed by now, that's all.

Hear hear.

I love itch as a platform, I really, really do. But with the lack of filtering/sorting options (I'm aware that it's being worked on, but I think it should have been done a long time ago), the barebones app client, the game library and collections' lack of features, it's all really unfriendly. 

On top of that, you can only view your purchases on the website, not games specifically, so you would have to sift through each one in order to find a game instead of a game asset or tool.  So I'd have to use the app, which like the website, is stuck in a listed order instead of a grid, which is just plain inconvenient.

 A personal gripe as well is the inability to claim games that are free, like you can on other platforms. I have a lot of games in my collection that will likely stay in a collection instead of my library until I get space to install them. It's just a preference thing though, I don't expect anyone else to share it.

I don't want to stop using itch, but as we speak I am putting every single one of my games in my library into collections based on their genre because 1) there is no genre/tag filter, and 2) you can't add multiple games in a collection at a time. It's just really exhausting right now.