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How about something like Steam's Wishlist Option?

A topic by Krunchy Fried Games created Feb 27, 2022 Views: 894 Replies: 2
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I made a thread a little along these lines once before but didn't phrase it very well, and people ended up giving me devlog tips (not that I aren't grateful, of course), so... let's try again...

What I'd suggest is a clearly visible option on a game's devlog that either notifies or emails the player when the game is released.

Currently, when someone goes onto a devlog page, the main highlighted action is an 'Add to Collection' button. As far as I'm aware, this doesn't give updates about development. Following the developer does- but I don't think many people choose this option. I'm sure more people would choose to wishlist a game.

My interest's obvious- we're working on a big project and I want everyone who enjoys the beta demo and devlog to know when the full game's out, but I'm sure this would be good for players and boost itchio's sales too. Might need to call it something other than 'wishlist' though...

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This is actually the start of a great idea, it's not far off from the 'collections' feature that already exists [private or public collections of projects that users like] but what indeed does make this different from existing collections as implemented, and why it matters, is really the fact that collections now don't have all that much to notify you when a thing in your collection has changed or updated. I approach this from a creator POV, but for players it's also a useful feature. And currently there's simply no feature on Itch to handle that situation of project-specific updates. 

I myself personally have a bunch of 'follows' and 40 'followers' so clearly some people on Itch do use that, but not most. It's like the Itch.IO star rating/review system, it's not being used anywhere near enough, or well-understood or noticeable enough, to be useful to most people here. 

Itch's setup for tracking and interacting with projects, users, etc... it is a hodgepodge of features that should be better connected to each other in some way. We have collections, that's nice, and ratings, and follows. Is there some way to streamline these functions and tie them together in a singular panel? We don't really even need a wish list per se, but some sort of merging of the collections/follows that includes all of the best features of both in a single, robust system.  

When you realize you have had thousands of people visit your profile and 40 of them followed you as a dev (not a specific project even, just... you as a developer? sort of?) and a completely different group of people put you in various collections, and only one person has reviewed you (a person who's seemingly not in either of the other two groups) you realize how problematic and messy this is.

I have had around a hundred $ in sales total by now - all asset-pack stuff - but the audience that is interested in that content is expressing that interest in a ton of different and disparate ways that do not intersect much and are very uncoordinated.

I can't help getting the feeling there's a weakness in the Itch community and site that's not only my own decisions [yeah, I'm sure I've made some mistakes in my profile and that's a part of the experience I've had], but also more platform-wide and structural confusion for users. Connecting and improving these mixed up features won't solve everything, and undoubtedly it will pose a challenge to figure out how best to do it, but if you get it right... it could help. It could be a start to making that better. 


--Matthew L. Hornbostel, https://matthornb.itch.io/

Yes, I definitely think it would be great to streamline everything and not add too many features. No one wants the site to be a convoluted mess (*coughs* Gamejolt), or to lose the feel itchio has.

A simple solution might be to ask people who interact with games under development (e.g. comment/ like the devlog/ add to a collection) whether they want to receive a notification when the game comes out.

Another might be to give everyone a special 'games under development' or 'wishlist' collection. This would be the same as the standard one, except when an unfinished game is collected, it defaults to being added here, and the user could select whether they want notifications when the game is out (which should be the default option), notifications of every update, emails, or the option to disable it because they're happy with the collection folders they have already thankyouverymuch.

A third option (and the most unimposing) would be to keep the current system, but notify the player when any unfinished games they've added to their collections get released. Again, this option could be disabled.

That's just off the top of the head- there might be better ways!