it's a bit sad that many released games get lost here because they're released at the wrong time.

I know there is a filter for games 'not in jams', but how many players use it? Your (Itch.IO) stats might tell you something about it.

The effect I see is that the visibility of a game, that the developers had invested weeks or months of their time in, sometimes goes to zero when just a 'program something in 2h about xy topic' started at the same publishing time.

This then leads to the fact that many (there are of course exceptions and wonderful games in the jams) unfinished, prototype or even bad games ensure that the 'serious' releases slide down in the all-important first few days after release.

So my suggestion would be to set the 'not in game jams' filter as the default.

If the jam developers are convinced of their game and have it in a state to present it permanently, they could maybe (supported by Itch.IO) additionally flag it as finished somehow.

I hope I don't offend anyone with my opinion, but I wanted to put it up for discussion.

Thanks for reading and hopefully some other opinions on this.

cu

SteBee

I don't know about making that the default.  I never use the jam filter because what it filters out is basically arbitrary.  Jams and jam games come in all shapes and sizes, and there tons of unfinished, abandoned, or "non-serious" games that were never submitted to jams.  Jam games also may be supported or developed well after the jam period, and jams are even sometimes used to organize collections, bundles, or showcases of existing games.  I think this will hurt well-intentioned projects as a whole more than it will help them.

Using myself as an example, four of my five completed projects, including my best and biggest ones, were made for jams; my smallest and most inconsequential one was not.  I would hate to have my best work hidden from view by default by a filter that, as you observed, many people may not even notice or bother to turn off.  The additional "finished" flag wouldn't help, as then we would just be right back where we started; of course everyone is going to want to flag their work as "finished" for the most visibility.  There is currently a flag for release status, but even that is not reliable, as many developers either don't set it, set it improperly, or forget to update it.

Incidentally, I took a quick look at this filter.  With it on, I was surprised to see that I still get 370k results back on the most recent tab, vs. 510k without, so it's only removing about 30% of total results.  Accordingly, scanning through the first couple of pages, the results aren't dramatically different.  Granted this will shift depending on what major jams are going on, but I don't know that it would be much of a boon to non-jam-game visibility overall.  Everything sinks like a stone on the most recent tab; even with jam games filtered out, games released less than one day ago are many pages down in the results.