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We don’t disclose the details of our sorting and recommendation algorithms. We recommend focusing on naturally building your audience and encouraging them to leave ratings as they see fit. Attempting to “game” any of the systems through artificial rating scores, or comments, will result in your page being unlisted. We take this very seriously.
To answer your question about if a 4 star rating will “hurt” a game. An individual rating exists relative to the ratings all other games receive. There is nothing in our code base that will penalize a project if it receives a rating less than 5 stars. The rating system is designed to look at scores in aggregate, with a higher confidence level based on the total number of ratings received. No individual score will cause any significant impact to a game. My advice is to not get caught up in individual ratings, and instead focus on building a good product.
okay this kinda feels like a cycle all I need is to see what people say in their reviews on my game but I don't see it when I go there and when you say "I have plain settings" I don't get it, you are saying it like if I need to enable something to see it either there is something I need to enable or I'm actually stupid as a peanut right now
dude it's been 3 days and I know the reviews has a message inside of them but for some reason I just can't be able to see them? I know they have a message and I'm still in the ratings & reviews thing and I've clicked on the red star thing to try to see it but no it doesn't work maybe this has to be a bug or something or I don't know about something that I should know about, sorry if I am bothering you I just am confused here on how to see messages on reviews
Go to your dashboard.
Click the "more" button on your project and see the menu that says devlogs metadata distribute interact. Select Revies & Ratings under interact.
(You can select this section by other buttons as well.)
If there is text in addition to a rating (also called a review) you will see it under the stars of that rating. If you do not see text, there is none.
I would want to add two points here.
First, there is direct and indirect. A negative or less than perfect rating could indirectly impact popularity. I assume this to be not much of an issue. Having ratings at all is a huge thing for small time developers. And certain content is prone to have haters or to have fans that are not fully satisfied. Actually compared on a global scale of ratings, most games here would not even score a 0. They have to be compared in their context. And if you compare between similar games from similar developers, some users that do rate have to adjust their scale. They can't just rate everything 5, else the 5 would be meaningless. No room for improvement.
Which brings me to the second point, similar games, or rather ratings in game jams. There are some discussions about ratings you might find in community about ratings adjustments and how a 4 star rating might have an impact. This is a separate ranking to find out who "won" the jam. Since ratings are few, there has to be weighting and adjustments to be somewhat fair.
So what is popularity even? On Itch it is not the click counter. It cannot be, since it is a secret composition, that even includes an undisclosed boost for new games for an undisclosed time. Maybe it includes click count. Maybe it adjusts click count in relation to downloads. A clickbaity game would attract lots of clicks, but few downloads. How to calculate "popularity" from that? What if many clicks come from the same source? Like Youtube. Is that worth more or less than internal clicks from browse and search? What about recurring users (followers). Are visits from your followers worth more or less in popularity than interaction from a new user?
Oh, and there is a ranking for ratings, it is top-rated. Maybe your answers got mixed up with answers for that. Or not. But as it is with that one pirate captain in that one movie, iirc, the conversation went like this: you are the worst captain I have ever heard about. - But you heard about me.
Ratings given independently of reviews and anonymously are meaningless.
Most sites have moved away from allowing ratings on their own or allowing people who haven't bought / downloaded a game/asset to rate it. It's too easy for people to give 1 star or 5 stars and move on. When they need to write a review i.e. explain their rating, it becomes more meaningful because people can read the reason for their rating.
I've seen that itch.io still puts faith in ratings - especially when choosing games for bundles. But anyone can rate a game or asset - whether or not they've played / used it. I would encourage itch.io to rethink their system.
It's too easy for people to give 1 star or 5 stars and move on. When they need to write a review i.e. explain their rating, it becomes more meaningful because people can read the reason for their rating.
On the Steam platform, the marked leader by far, you only have 1 and 5 star ratings in a way. You can vote up or down. And ratings with little text are drowned out by their helpfulness system. You will not read the reviews of a game with 1000+ reviews. You will see a few of them, and those will have "helpful" text.
On Itch with mostly anonymous ratings most games barely have ratings at all. It is not the problem that people rate meaningless, it is the problem of them not rating at all. But as soon as you have a game with many ratings, it also evens out. Speaking about rating things you did not download. For a system with so little restrictions, in my observation rating manipulation is very rare.
You can scroll past https://itch.io/feed?filter=ratings
Most, like 9 out of 10 have no text and the rest a one liner. Reviews are very rare.
So would we see even less ratings or more, if reviews would be mandatory and public? There are reasons to expect an increase and other reasons for a decrease. And would the average text get more meaningful?