Hi! Maybe I'm just missing a button somewhere, but it seems like there is, at present, no way to show the actual text of user reviews on a game's page. Is that the case? If so, I'd love to see that feature added. Positive reviews are one of the biggest persuaders for me when I browse storefronts like Steam, as a player.
I totally agree, I was searching how to activate the public review for a while, only to find out it isn't possible.
I think it would be really useful to have an option to let reviews be public.
It would benefit both seller and potential buyers.
In addition it will help itch.io to look even more professional as platform :-)
You can enable comments on your page and people can leave reviews in the comments if they want to.
BUT
Until itch.io has a feature like Steam, that can show you - how much time the person spent on the game, before allowing them to review it, any review here is not really valid. And Steam does some considerable tracking to be able to tell you that information. Itch.io currently doesn't track their user activity after a game is downloaded. So what you're asking would be a fundamental change to the whole of itch.io - they would have to force people to play games through their console and then track what they're playing and for how long. Without that, the reviews are meaningless - because you don't know if the person who reviewed the game actually played it, is a friend of the developer, is an enemy of the developer or is a troll - and not knowing that - means you can't trust the review.
Evolutionary Games I know that I can leave a comment, but that's not really the same thing.
While I understand about your point of view, you can't even expect to have everyone building a system as the Steam's one or have players happy to be tracked. As it happens in all other fields, not only related to games, yes, there might be some fake reviews (in good or bad way), but when you have a few reviews on your game, player will still think that some could be not honest. However if you have 100+ review then the occasional fake one are anyway not counting much.
If you have one fake review from a friend that say, the music is so cool and all the 99 other reviews says that the music is horrible, which one are you going to trust? Same thing in the other way around. So on the medium/long term I think overall reviews will be quite ok.
I agree with bmcarbaugh, the system is there, so why don't just publish it.
Then if the owner of the game is worried about troll, he can still hide the reviews.
When you have the review system as an option, then it will be all to the developer to decide if set them public or not.
I don't see the issue.
I don't personally care about playtime. I'm just saying, the functionality presently exists to submit user reviews with a score and text, but only one of them can be displayed on a game's page, and that feels like an unintended oversight, which is why comments are used as a defacto review field at all.
