itch.io

Ah, found it.

Tags To Exclude

Pick up to ten tags. Steam will then filter out games with those tags

Do not forget to suggest such features with the suggestion button too. Talk in community is just talk in community. 

Why would that be per profile filtering? Hmm. You meant like the maturity settings on Steam, probably. Do they have tag filtering as well for a profile? I know they have an ignore button for games.

For recurring searches you can use bookmarks. (You still need to be logged in for that exclude thing to work)

https://itch.io/games/tag-3d?exclude=tg.low-poly 

But that is still over 100k games. https://itch.io/games/tag-3d/tag-low-poly is 15k games, while 3d is 130k. 

Maybe in the nieche you are regularly visiting they are more common. The problem is, that the ?ex... string gets lost every time you change the positive tags. And that's what my extention does. Iirc I made the extension to work with ff, but getting unsigned extensions to run on ff is a hassle. Bookmarks are easier. Just make a bunch of them, if you filter the same things often.

Personally I favor individual filtering by games, not tags. I made a tampermonkey script for that, and this works on any browser that can run the tampermonkey extension. It would work super effective in a small nieche you regularly visit. You would also be able to mark games you already tried. Something you cannot do with tag filtering.

It works like this: configure the script, hover mouse over game, press key, game disappears.

I hope it gets better. They need to come up with something. Other sites have to deal with such things too. There are bound to be solutions that could be applied by Itch.

Some of the software is free.

You still need a server that is reachable over the internet by dns and runs that software. Which for commerical games means renting server capacity and registering a domain name. It's a similar topic as how to run your own website.

If you have a server that runs on one of the player's machines, you need that player to overcome the router issue. That's not that hard, but it's a hassle for casual players. You need some port forwarding and use ddns or rely on finding out the external adress and giving those to the other players.

Maybe there is a free service somewhere for connecting machines to play together. But I guess that's hard to find. Multiplayer games are usually commercial or have local multiplayer. I quick search came up with some adware services and I do not know how trustworthy those are. Also it seemed like they were running the game, not merely connecting the machines.

NP-complete

As far as I remember, those are all equivialent. So you make one, you made them all. You already made one ;-)

That thing with limited time and resources is the basic plot of the typical dating sim. There were lots of those in the flash game period. You typically had like 100 days (till prom or whatever) and like 3 stats and girls liking different stats and you needed money to train or go on dates, and could get more money by having more stats and all that. And if you were good at it, you could maybe date more than 1 girl within the time frame. Or achieve the plot device goal at the end of the 100 days as well.

If you did a knapsack dating game, you might want to check out 80 Days. That's a traveling salesman, knapsack and dating sim adventure.

As a game idea: wedding planner. You need to plan seat arrangements. If you are clever enough, you end up nudging your love interest away from your competition and towards spending time with you. Of course you lose your task for the next wedding in that circle of people, if you do bad. And maybe you can nudge your competitors to other people, so not only you have less competition, but also more weddings to plan.

I am not sure which np problem that is. Maybe one of those where you color things.

What do you think shadow banning is? And how do you know how little or how much spam was blocked by filters?

When I looked at feed I typically saw a few spammmers. Currently, I saw none. That's not a statistic, but it does feel a little less.

And shadow banning would be, if a commentor would see the comment, thinking everything is ok, but everyone else would not see the comment. Telling people that comments are held for moderation is the opposite of shadow banning.

Additional payment options sure would be nice.

They could change revenue share for projects that accept other payment options. Industry standard is 30%. You can offer other payment options with that. Itch's share is 10% default and some people lower it further, yet scream loudly when something does not work properly, takes longer or features are missing that the big players like Steam have.

Unfortunately, there are not that many options for low cost payment options. Crypto is not low cost. International money orders are not low cost. And since Itch does not have a wallet system, those paysafecards are not an option. As far as I know you cannot refund transactions paid by paysafecards - not onto the paysafecard. But it would be possible to refund it onto a shop's wallet.

A Itch wallet would solve some problems, but Itch's account security is ... not optimal. It's a combination of site security and other things. But Itch accounts are faked and hacked right and left. If there were wallets on the accounts, that would make this problem even bigger, as the hackers could make money directly. If Itch manages to clean up this mess, a wallet would solve a lot of problems. For perspective, I have seen literally hundreds of hacked accounts that were used to spread malware.

An external wallet would do. Paypal is such a service. Now we only need alternatives that offer similar functions, but without the things people hate about paypal. And Itch supporting those alternatives.

Well. It is not exactly the time of the year for working, unless you are a criminal.

And of course, Itch's system is not all that good in catching the spammers. This is unfair, of course. We only see the spammers the system did not catch. But the spammers just try again and again and again and again and again and and agian and again and again and again and again, till they manage it.

There was a typo in there. Did you all catch it first time...

I sure hope they come up with some genius low cost idea to fix the situation. They once managed to break a certain type of scam. That particular scam was never seen again, but those criminals did not stop working, they just used other methods to try and scam and hack people. Short of sending some police to take away their toys, nothing is gonna help there, I fear. I guess it is one of those "call centers" in certain places of the world. I have seen them in documentations. They professionally scam people all over the world and probably hack Itch as a side gig.

large spike

Glancing over your games. I do not think what you call large is actually large. You are in the hobby enthusiasts bracket, it seems. And not a professional struggling to sell games.

our marketing

Existing is not marketing. Marketing has a budget. If you did not spend that budget, you did not market your games. You might have tried to entice some people to play it. Nothing wrong here, as I believe you are a hobby game dev. Those do not usually have a budget above pocket money. And marketing on zero to no budget is hard. There are many topics about that question where people discuss it. I have yet to see a good answer to that problem. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it and everybody would be at square zero again.

how should we improve

Have a game that people want to play and be findable for those people.

Let's look at the tags for your quack game. You did not set a genre.

2D, Automation, Co-op, Crafting, Godot, Indie, Multiplayer, Pixel Art, Short, Singleplayer

Sooo. Is this a singleplayer game or a multiplayer game. You posted on Itch. All games here are indie. You have made-with-godot, you do not need tag-godot (that fuzzyness is on Itch. This could be better handled.)

You do not have https://itch.io/games/tag-factory  , https://itch.io/games/tag-duck , nor other "interesting" tags. Glancing over the description, it might be intended as https://itch.io/games/tag-funny or https://itch.io/games/tag-silly . You are building a giant golden duck, come on.

Your screenshots are not really inviting. After taking the first hurdle of people clicking on your cover, what do they see? Some lame green grass and a guy with a shovel. Your cover image promised a lot more.

Maybe your analysis of your traffic can give you hints, how people found your game. If it was recent, read what no time wrote. If it was certain tags, maybe expand on that.

My guess is this for many popular games: they are good for streaming. Either funny or horror, or cool, mind boggling, or whatever is entertaining to show. And it was shown by a streamer or two. Then a cycle of unknown streamers latches on to such games to also show them and become more famous. That's why you will see a lot of comments with links to videos on popular games. But is has to start somehow. And it has to be able to sustain itself for a while. You need a good enough game for that, and lots of luck.

To gain a base fame and experience, you should consider joining some game jams.

If you want to release projects into the general public, you have to play by the rules.

Itch is a store. Even if you do not collect payments. If you publish you need to be able to enter contracts. Minors cannot do that. This is not a thing about wanting or not. It is not legally possible. Exceptions apply, like if you are at least 13 years of age and have parental consent (on Itch). Which basically says, your parents will take legal responsibility and go to jail, if you screw up.

Imagine an underage developer releasing stolen assets. Another developer buys that in good faith and uses the assets in a game, but it turns out a 10 year old sold it. Who is responsible? Who pays the damages?

Of course you do not have to go to sites geared for small children. But using a site like Itch as a publisher is still not allowed. Also there is the whole social interaction with strangers on the internet. You need a safeish environment for that. Those sites geared at children have that. Itch does not. And I am not speaking about nsfw content. I am speaking about mundane things like a project getting a 1 star rating or a bad comment. Or people getting into an argument. Talking politics. Being a nuisance for grown ups by acting like a child (remember, we are talking about kids here)

So, if you want to publish games as a kid, you need to go to sites that allow this.

Those are the ones that need to be reported by contacting support, because there is no report button.

There is a report button under each comment. Just report a few of them.

Producing a game is risky business.

It sounds to me, like you think you have the great "idea" to produce a game that basically profits from an existing fan base. Add some actual professionals and the product will sell.

That's not an idea. It is business as usual for actual existing professional publishers and studios. Success of the original IP does not automatically translate into success as a game. Your youtube fans that nitpick over the source material might not be the ones that would even play the game. Or they would be the ones ripping the game apart for it's flaws.

Chances are, that someone already has the rights to the "underrated" IP for creating games, even if none was made yet. And you do need those rights to create material based on that IP.

But maybe I misread and you only want to create a "spiritual" successor. Like gotta catch them all principle and make a game out of that. That means the risks are even higher. Just because the original has some die hard fans years later does not translate into success of a similar concept in a different media. Or a new franchsise that copies core ideas.

What do I do?

Do not throw away your life savings onto such a high risk project. And do not go in debt for this. You described some red flags here about your future business partners.

If you have budget to spare you can fool around with it, of course. If you aim for crowdfunding, that is a long process anyway. Maybe you can recruit people from the fan base. Fan games are a thing.

Itch's shop system centers around selling access to project pages. A jam is not a project page. They cannot sell entry tickets to a jam.

If you need to filter participants by having them meet certain criteria, like having paid something somewhere, that might be doable somehow.

But I guess your jam will be seen as a scam by many, if you ask for money to even join the jam. There were jams that required the usage of certain software and promised price money and such. Imho it was a mix between scam and advertisement - of course there was crypto involved in the examples I remember.

I searched the internet for "game jam with entry fee" and this very thread appeared on page 1 of the results. That should tell you something. It's just not done. Also Itch sites rank high in relevance for games. I also checked google and the answers from the google ai are garbage (it claims you can filter Itch jams for their entry fee and there are ones that have 200 $ entry fee. It did not understand the difference between a price money and a participation fee. Also I did not even see any price money filter.)

Note, there are jams with entry fees, but those are physical events.

Hrmpf. Seems the Itch app is pretty much unreliably usable since like two months or so.

The issues you have with the downloads might be the same cause, so it will probably not work with app either. My hopes were that at least the app has some kind of download continuation, if things fail. It does handle downloads a little different, as far as I know. But I do not know how exactly.

This workaround worked for me: https://itch.io/post/14552731

I needed to click update Agent or something like that. And follow step by step. The Itch app is a chromium browser and whatever user agent it is sending is not working.

I do not understand. If you want to know what is being sold, just look at the top sellers. There are no numbers shown, but higher up probably means more sales, maybe adjusted for recentness of the item.

But Itch is geared for games. If you look at top-rated, you will see most books having a lot less than 100 ratings, while top-rated games have several thousand ratings.

If you have a special interest item, it might look better. Like that game development book mentioned below. But selling books in general here? That's only gonna work, if you are known elsewhere. Like, you have a website and use Itch as a store.

It you want to know that "sells" here, you can just look. It is not hidden.

https://itch.io/books/top-sellers

Maybe the Itch app has less problems with that, if the files are hosted on Itch. That's pretty big files for Itch.

If it has the same problems, you have a least a legit bug to report.

Which market?

And which IP? Local?

The vast majority of people will not even be able to enter an IP adress to connect to each other, even if they wanted to. You need port forwarding for that and find out your external IP adress to even start. That can be dealt with of course, but this is deprecated for just about any application. Some olden games that need such things can be played over special software that basically emulates a local network with vpn techniques.

Ask people nowadays to enter IP adresses and they will think you are trying to "hack" them.

Because of the router firewall, you need some kind of brokering. Itch does not have this. Steam has, and they are the market. So to answer your question: it is nonexistent in a commercial market. A game will just use the tools of the game platform to broker a multiplayer match, or have it's own server.

Maybe some enthusiast will give insights to this, but I doubt that there is a nieche group that likes games because of that, as there is for pixel art or text games. It is just not done anymore for lots of technical reasons to enter IP adresses to play a game together.

You might have replied to the wrong post or misunderstood what I wrote.

No wonder people often think mods are staff... ;-)

The problem is, that Itch cannot reliable say who is legit and who not. That's my educated guess. 

I support this with the fact that the latest scam spammer I saw was an account created in 2024.

due to this community's settings

You forgot this part of the reasoning. An often wished for feature by developers is to have at least restricted comment sections.

And I guess the overall system setting of communities is currently something that puts a lot of comments on that moderator approval waiting list.

I am not even sure who moderates those. Because people that work for Itch are not usually called moderators. Maybe it is the developers themselves in some cases. Or there are "moderators" that just do not talk and are different from the blue community mods (like no time). I think no time would have noticed the workload of approving a ton of comments. 

That's still going on. It might be that the people that would complain on public message board already did. But I sure do hope, they block some of the spam effectivly. But experience with those malware uploaders lets me doubt that.

It's the usual games, the usual comments. I think they grab some of the feeds for updated games or something like that. Everytime I visit some of the feed games, I see such spam comments. The last only a few hours old from a hacked account no less.

A few points here.

The ai tags are meta information. They do not show up in the info box.

If you see a tag concerning ai in the info box, the developer used one of the 10 regular tags to tag it such. These tags are not meta information. Itch has freestyle tagging, so this is unfortunately possible adding to everyone's confusion. Also, because Itch implemented the filter for the ai information as pseudo tags, available with the regular tag filtering. It is as confusing as it sounds. The only way currently to check if a game has the ai tags is to browse with the ai tags and basically see, if it shows up or not. Also, ai tagging is mandatory only for assets. Read here https://itch.io/t/4309690/generative-ai-disclosure-tagging In my opinion the guidelines ask for a description of ai usage anyway. I am also of the opinion that it is unfair to lump code and assets together under the no-ai filter.

You can suggest tags to a developer in the comment section. But Itch has freestyle tagging. There is no tags that are mandatory. You can even have project without tags. What is mandatory is certain meta information. Like ai info for assets or if a project is nsfw or not.

Hiding tags is often wished for. There is an undocumented feature to filter out one tag. I never found a good use for that, as tags are unreliable. Imho it is better to search for what you seek. Just add this to your browse bookmark: "?exclude=tg.visual-novel" (without quotes, and exchange for the tag you want to filter. Only works if you are logged into your Itch account.)

And I believe a far more powerful for browsing is to mark games as already seen. I even made a tool for that ;-)

The Itch client is not the same as the Steam client. Including the environment around it. Games are not managed by Itch. Many cannot even be installed by the Itch app.

There is no support for DLC or any kind of sub-projects.

Purchasing a project gives access to the files that are paid only on the project page. One can build a manifest file for the Itch app or hope that the magic of it will handle the installation. But basically Itch is a file hoster with attached store and a browsing cataglogue.

So, no, there is no such thing as modding support or whatever you can do with the Workshop.

However. If you do have a modding community, those mods can be released on Itch as projects by your modders. And you can link to them however you like. Be it a collection or links on your project page, or whatever.

Itch even has a separate category for game mods. https://itch.io/game-mods Maybe you can find examples there. There is bound to be mods for games that are hosted on Itch too.

but these don't always match the game tags

You sure about that?

The games on the front page you talk about are in the segment of featured games. That list is curated. Which means a human put them in that list and very likely selected some hash tags. And those hash tags link to itch tags, so they are probably tags of those games. But developers can change tags later and humans can make errors and link the wrong tags (or disagree with the tags the developer chose).

So I assume games that have those hash tags are either currently in the featured list, or were curated in some other way. And only the front page will show such hash tag tags.

You do not see a problem in voting people up and down?

It is personal, instead of work focused.

Can you name an example where you can upvote and downvote people on a content platform. Or even a social media platform? Directly, not by indirect means of followers or lack thereof.

There is reasons why you will be hard pressed to find an example. In short, it is a bad idea.

I could not find any examples. But I did not search extensively. Maybe you will find an example where it was possible but was deprecated.

In that case you could deactivate the events till the clues are found and then activate them for either input system. While it is easier with mouse, running around and randomly hitting the action button is possible with keyboard too, if you allow for things to be found without clue.

Input devices are not equal. All have advantages and disadvanteges in comparison. A touch screen vs mouse for example means you can have several pointers hovering over the screen instead of one cursor to move. That's almost cheating in a whack a mole game.

For the mouse movement/action input you could also check, if the interaction-object is "visible" or "hidden". Hidden objects could only be activated while already standing there. Finding a clue would make the objects unhidden. I remember games where you could dig up treasure and such, but that was a disctinct different action than move/action. You could still brute force it, but it was basically impossible due to map size and time required for a dig attempt.

Which makes me wonder how does a keyboard moving player know when to press the action button.

... or how about deactivating the event when it is not time for that event.

If the event can be activated no matter the cause, that will lead to additional trouble. Like being able to activate the event multiple times. You seem to not have a logic inside the event (or at the even starter) to check if the event is allowed to be activated. Like entering a room that you do not have the key for.

Upvoting/downvoting people is a bad idea.

Also, followers already imply some of this.

That being said, I have seen bot accounts with more than 50 followers. If you can rate accounts, bots will fake that too, so it will not be helpful at all, but misleading.

If you see an account do bad things, like uploading malware, report the project. If you see an account uploading malware blog postings, report the account (by sending an email, since Itch unfortunately has no report button for such postings). If you see a spam account, you can report some of the indivdual comments.

players can accidentally trigger events just by clicking somewhere on the map

This is a game. It is an artificially created environment. If something there can be accidentally triggered when it is not the right time for the event, then this is a bug. Instead of fixing that bug, you think about restricting the whole input system.

Think about it in reverse. You have a mega bomb in your space shooter game and can activate it with space key and by clicking the icon with the mouse. But you notice that you can fire the bomb even if you are out of ammo if you press space. The solution: deactivte the keyboard.

That's what your solution sounds like, to me.

There is a topic like this about every week. Someone either asking why their game is unnoticed or asking how to promote their game.

One should not forget, that this is Itch. The whole platform is basically unknown. It has 1.2 million projects in the game category. But only about 250k of them are good enough to have some attention. About 60k of them are good enough to collect money.

So you asking why your game(s) are in the 950k, instead of the 250k of the games... meh. Who knows. It certainly does not help that you have an Android only game or feature AI. But even without that, it is unlikely that your game(s) would be in the 250k. Most of those other 950000 games are probably not bad either.

As long as you have fun creating games, all good.

For the other topic, and "evidence" how players view AI, citing the opinion of a former director of a studio is not exactly evidence. AI is not that old. How about some actual data on the platform we are currently talking. Maybe this is possible to see. AI games are relatively new, so I wish I could have used the 2025 category, but this does not exist yet. So I will use the last 30 days filter. We will use ai graphics, because that's what people notice the easiest.

https://itch.io/games/top-rated/last-30-days/tag-ai-generated-graphics

https://itch.io/games/top-rated/last-30-days/tag-no-ai

Those figures are the amount of ratings and the order is weighted, so that more ratings will appear higher, even if the average is slightly lower. But from the number of ratings you can conclude interaction by players and evidently how they like those games.

I think that's rather devastating for games with AI. Granted, that's not proof of causality. It could be influenced by other factors and likely is. But the bottom line is, if you release a game and have AI graphics, people are less likely to play and subsequently like it.

Those other factors might include people not liking AI, the AI graphics looking cheap and bland, overall lack of production value since the developer had no budget to hire an artist, or things like people releasing games who are not game developers, but just made a thing for fun and those projects are in the same lists as professional games.

You wanted to know. Now you have several opinions why and some with the reasoning behind the opinion.

If you have a better reasoned opinion why your game lacks success, maybe other people will benefit from it. Like the 60 word-game game creators behind you on that popularity list I linked. And that counted all games, not just Android games. If we take that list as a measure, your game is doing better than about 80% of them.

With your defending AI, with no less than using medical "AI" applications no less, you lose track of the important thing: how people react to AI "art". 

It does not matter, if it is ethical or not. It does not matter if a big studio used it to recreate the voice of a deceased actor with constent. Or that some indie developers use it in their games. This is all beside the point.

Players do not like it. You cannot use AI assets as an advertiseable feature of a game. So displaying the use of AI will deter a lot of players. Do that in a nieche that already does not have all that many players, and you have barely anyone left. Add to that the barrier of installing a casual game that should have been a browser game and what you get is what you have.

I believe these games stand out compared to what’s already on the market (they’re free)

Really? You think so? Is the "they're free" part the reason why you think they stand out? Because casual puzzle games that are free aren't exactly uncommon.

On Itch you compete against all these. It's only 1000 and with the word-game tag.

https://itch.io/games/platform-web/tag-word-game

Those games do not need to be installed. Installing games kinda defeats the purpose of "casual" games a little bit. Also, only 5% of them have AI. You might have written your code yourself, but you even made the game's description with AI. 

If it makes you feel better, your game is currently #16 of 82 of this list https://itch.io/games/tag-ai-generated/tag-word-game which is all games on all platforms with the word-game tag, but with AI.

Casual word games are somewhat popular, but it's a nieche. You limit audience further by having downloadable Android version instead of a browser version. And not many people like AI games. Why should they. There are better games that are free too and have no AI visuals. I tolerate AI in some games, but for a word game, there is literally no reason. Yes, that pun was intentional. You could have made the game without visuals at all. One of the most popular word games is Wordle. No visuals whatsoever https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html . But as I said, you even wrote the description with AI. I guess most people probably do not even bother to read past the first few paragraphs after visiting your page, let alone take the effort to download it.

How many casual games with AI visuals have you installed on your phone lately? For fun, and not to see competition? I have never done such a thing, so obviously I am not your target audience.

You can try making a web version of the game with free non-ai assets. It's still a nieche, but at least you will get more plays and feedback, as you are getting now.

What you ask is only an issue for some assets because there is the bad habit of asset creators to have a descriptive title, but not tagging all relevant information.

For games there is no use case for searching a game by title, but filtering results also by tags. And if you use tags, you do not search a specific game. 

Itch does not like it, if you try to skirt the rules. But they also do not like restricting creativity and freedom. I do not know the situation for the game you mentioned.

But all games that are adult games and accept payment are currently not indexed. No matter their content. This is because people that lie have started a dirt slinging campaign and made payment processors threaten to withdraw services entirely from Itch. For content that is ok on other platforms. Including Steam. There is no legal grounds for this. So those bigots bully companies. There is not really many alternatives for low cost payments internationally. So Itch just made it all invisible for the time being.

What Itch hosts and does not host is within in the chosing of Itch. Even if they write guidelines about it. It is not law and there is no rights involved to treat every game the same and have strict enforcement of guidelines. They do have several layers of how they chose to present content, according to my observations.

1 Promote it in the featured list. https://itch.io/games/new-and-popular/featured

2 Have it indexed in the discovery system. (Appears in search and browse)

3 Remove it from the discovery system.

4 Remove the game.

5 Remove the developer.

Adult games never get 1. 2 only happens if you set your settings to show it. All paid adult games currently got 3. 4 is banning the game, although you will find many complaints about so called bans, that are just removal from index. 5 fake accounts and actual law breakings get that. For payments, there is also the possiblity that Itch refuses the option to use Collected by Itch as a payment option. I believe that to have to do with taxes and risks and such things.

It is a vague policy that is ill defined. It's pixels and fiction. You could ban most Hollywood movies under such vague guidelines.

It's not "has x in it". That would be easy. Just like you can say, there's a nude pixel boob, it's nsfw.

It's something something gloryfication somethings something. Very ill defined. And morally highly questionable. There is games that glorify murder and genocide and slavery and other things, yet they are not under attack by the bigots.

So I would assume that the game in question might have x in it, but not in a way that violates guidelines. And from a legal standpoint, that's even more ridulous, since it is fiction and not illegal. Banning games is basically the same as burning books.

Oh, and the game is paid. Because of those bigot's attacks and blackmail, and because Itch has not implemented a sufficient solution to this, Itch hit an emergeny brake and just removed all nsfw games that accept payments from the public listings, so you can't find them within Itch by browsing.

Also, if it's "not allowed", it is not only not allowed to sell, but not allowed on the platform. The bigots have no legal grounds to try banning the content they do not like. That's why they pressure payment processors and those blackmail Itch. It's fiction for crying out loud. It is very, very hard to ban fiction. Even in prude USA. Especially in the USA. Fiction falls under free speech and even porn with actual humans doing a homevideo falls under this and is not legally bannable. That's why they fight so dirty. Inventing false arguments. Appealing to emotion and trying to invoke cancel culture.