I was wondering why my reviews never showed up on the game's page.

If I understand this correctly, when you rate a game and add a review, unlike every other website on the Internet, and contrary to human logic itself, that review is not actually published, but the rating is? If you want to write a public "review", you have to write a "comment", despite the fact that those words have different meanings?

It does say in rather small print that's easy to ignore "Reviews are shared with developers and your followers." But even that doesn't mean it's shared ONLY with those people.

So essentially I've unwittingly been a rude prick, telling people to their face I don't like their game when I've written negative reviews? That's great...

Who thought this was a good idea???

I also find this strange.

To me, the word "review" implies that I am writing for a general audience.  This is distinct from "feedback" aimed at the developer.  They have very different purposes.  Reviews are there to answer the question of whether a game is worth playing, whereas feedback is there to help the developer grow by encouraging them and praising what is good about the game while still pointing out where there is room for improvement.  Feedback should be gentle and encouraging when aimed at a newbie developer and highly critical when aimed at a skilled and experienced developer, but reviews should be the other way around.

I use comments for feedback and reviews for reviews, because reviews have a star rating and comments do not.  As a result, feedback aimed at the developer is publicly visible and reviews aimed at the general public are not.

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 agree that if a dev opts to allow reviews with ratings they should be visible to anyone.

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

In addition, I'd personally like the option to reply to reviews. Ask for more clarification on what could be done better, suggestions, and let people know that updates to fix the problems they had are on the way. It's so weird that reviews of all things are private, even if allowed by the dev.

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.

Just wanted to add in my support for this as well, I definitely would want my reviews to be visible. Even if it’s just an option for reviews to be visible or not (which is its own can of worms in itself but I don’t think too many people would abuse that).

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.

Seriously hope they do something about this. Itchi.io could thrive if they fixed up the site a bit. 

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.

I just found out about this now and while I understand what you're trying to do here, naming an action a "review" implies that it behaves like a "review" on other common platforms. If you're not going to consider making reviews public, then PLEASE rename "review" to "give feedback". The current wording just made me assume that devs would be notified of a review, but it would still be visibile to all.

I personally find public reviews to be very useful before I buy a game, and the ones I've seen on itch.io have been very helpful to me (as well as kind to the developer). I also left some reviews to help others out but realised only now that no one would have seen them. That is an issue - how you address it, is your decision.

I know itch.io has a very small team. I think it would be nice to address the comments here. I personally think a system like Bandcamp is nice. I like the developer having control of their page. There are a lot of mean reviews and comments I've seen people make. Let us choose reviews to highlight on the page. Or just let us turn off reviews. Some people don't want to be scored by strangers and just want to share art for the joy of it. 

Edit - Just realized you can turn off ratings. That's great.

I didn't realize until seeing this thread that the reviews i've written for games are only seen by the dev and anyone who happens to follow me (which is one person, since I don't publish my own work here.) That's very frustrating and I feel kind of awkward about it now for reviews that were more critical of a game's UI/etc. I write reviews with the assumption other prospective players are going to see- if I knew reviews were actually going ONLY to devs I'd have written them to sound more like "feedback"... it's very confusing.

Completely agree. I think reviews should be posted in similar fashion to devlogs.