Yeah personally I think this is completely wrong and needs changing. I have looked at games and tried to find the reviews(before I realised how it worked) and left because I thought nobody had bothered reviewing it.
I think Itch.io needs a review system that customers can see. Yeah, you can post reviews in the comment section, but that's like setting up a tent in a parking space; that's not where it's supposed to go. If they do add reviews, they should let us include files and give us a file limit of at least 5, 6mb at the minimum so we can add in a few screenshots and a short 720p .mp4 or .webm showing gameplay (or how to do a glitch, easier to demonstrate through video than text and it's evidence that it works).
You could argue that pictures and videos are what hyperlinks are for.
Linking to a YouTube video is convenient enough for a comment and if for whatever reason it fails to post properly, you don't have the frustration of re-uploading said video.
As for photos...there are various sites folk use for storing them.
I completely agree, I've been reviewing games and adding things thinking that they would help other people thinking of getting the game but they're... not public??? What's the point of a written review then? I use comments for quick quips about enjoying the game and reviews for actual, yknow, REVIEWS, but the comments are all people see
Damn, I was reviewing things thinking it could be helpful for bypassers in case they were interested. But now I learn it's basically useless, and just a direct message?
That sucks...
What's the point of a metric being visible but not showing the added comment about it? It's contrary to any kind of rating style I know of.
I really hope they change this. How would I know if I want to try out something if I'm not able to know why people liked/disliked it.
As someone who's completely new to the website, I mainly registered to leave a review on a game I really enjoyed. Did that on the comment section and then wanted to check out, if there's anything more I could do for the game - like rating it, etc. And then I had to google a bit to figure out where the difference between commenting and reviewing is ... I'd really like to rate the game, but then I'd have to send my review twice to the developer and also the rated review wouldn't be public? That's just so confusing, honestly.
I think that both leaving a public comment/review and sending a private (for example for detailed bug reports) message to the developer would be viable.
However, I'd find a merged system nice, where when I want to comment on a game, I get asked if I want to just comment (maybe for a quick question n stuff) or leave a rated review (Plus maybe the option if I want this to be public or private?). Both ideally with the possibility for the dev to reply properly.
Reviews can be used to manipulate persons opinions and induce biases about any work, for both good and evil purposes. I believe this decision was to avoid letting someone make use of "mob mentality" against developers.
I personally prefer it this way, since who benefits most from reviews are the developers themselves.
Yeah, but that's not a problem with reviews, that's a problem with human communication. If the aim is to prevent cancel mobs, this is the equivalent of building a gate with no fence - and not even in the specific spot where you would need a full gate+fence, but in the middle of a completely unrelated street in the next town over.
Reviews hardly seem to serve any purpose. Star ratings without context are meaningless to both developers and buyers; star ratings with context are borderline superfluous, and far more granular than is actually useful. Stars only seem to exist as a visibility metric to give the site a way to help popular games get more popular. Want to help out a game? Uprate it. Want to actively hurt a game? Downrate it. On top of that, we can't even reply to reviews, making even a review with text a far less useful way to engage the developer than just leaving a comment.
If it weren't for the "top-rated" tab, I would probably just disable reviews. That and the fact that it probably makes it look like I'm not open to feedback, when I'm actually trying to encourage it.
I think everyone stumbles about that "feature" here. Easy fix would be to rename it from review to feedback. Maybe it was planned differently and scratched for various reasons and reduced to be only to the dev. I do not understand why it is visible to followers. That should have been scratched as well.
Public reviews have advantages, but also bring new problems. Problems an indie platform might not want to deal with. A dev has complete control over comments, if desired. For reviews that opens a can of worm. If you give the devs control over the reviews, that review section is worth nothing. And if you do not do that, you have to moderate it and you can bet that devs will whine and bitch about "unfair" reviews.
chiming in to say it's super dumb reviews work this way. i had a sizeable handful of review comments from people that i literally never knew about until i happened to click the ratings page for a work that had one. i never would have known to look otherwise! either change the name to feedback or make the reviews public: the people writing them clearly expected them to be!
That's the thing: I'm not even asking for the feature to be radically modified and scrapped altogether; It just needs to be made clear to users that they are just sending the dev a private message and NOT writing a public review, contrary to how it's done on every other platform.
But this thread has now been up for a year and a half without any official answer one way or another, so I'm not holding my beath.
I checked all the possible settings to see if I missed something - I wanted the review to my game to be shown on the page together with the comments - that's it. I don't need stars, just the players' feedback. But I had to google and I found this. A year old thread with no reply or comments from the mods.
Can you you please explain us how you intended this review vs comments concept to be used and tell if you have any plans to change anything?
Renaming reviews to feedback, as was suggested - so that the person giving a "review" understands it will be shown to creator only seems like the easiest fix.
I my experience, public reviews encourage dog piling and bias. When I uploaded my game on Newgrounds where reviews are public, there is a system where newly uploaded games and movies are "under judgement" where everything is hidden (ratings, reviews) until the game reached like 50 votes. My game passed with a decent rating (3/5) perhaps because people used their own personal judgement. But then right after a negative review shows up complaining about random things, suddenly a bunch more negative reviews started to pile in and as people enter my game page, all they see are negative reviews so they too, left negative ratings until my game was reduced to 2.0 at 150 votes and almost got kicked off the platform.
Also no I'm not saying what game, not gonna let you guys come over and finish me off.
As was already pointed out, itch does have a rating system already, and people can already leave negative comments on your game page.
I'm not asking for the creation of a new feature, just a clarification. The "Rate & Review" window should tell you specifically that your review will not show up publicly.
"Public reviews" don't do that. Humans being able to communicate is what does that. If you want to stop cancel mobs, you have to either move to an alternate universe populated by more reasonable sophonts, or put in the heavy moderation work on your platform to prevent it from happening. You can't do it by blocking one particular avenue of human communication and leaving all the rest.
No. I want people to stop trying to solve problems that boil down to "eliminate all the bad things that can be done with human communication," because [a] that has literally never worked, [b] the only way to accomplish it would involve total human extinction, and [c] it's almost always a distraction from some real problem (in this case, forum moderation), which requires a significant but achievable level of work to accomplish. Substituting an impossible problem for a possible one is just a cheap way to avoid actually doing any work, and I have zero respect for that kind of moral cowardice.
Also chiming in to add that I agree with the feedback. I'm hoping that reviews can either be made public (pretty much everywhere else, I expect reviews to be public because they can help other people decide if they might also like thing being reviewed), or renamed to "private feedback". Thanks for this thread!
The way itch.io's system works is weird in general. When you publish a game, there is a checkbox, saying "Make game visible." If you don't check that box, your game that you published is not visible. Ummmmm, so when I publish a book, if the publisher don't put it on the shelves, if they don't even put it in a search engine, that doesn't seem very published to me. We call these things "Drafts."
And yes, writing a long review that nobody could see is kinda off.