Hi everybody,

A few days ago, we launched our first itch page for our first game, Hungry Horrors.

https://clumsy-bear-studio.itch.io/hungry-horrors

I have read a lot of marketing advice about Steam and how to set up a Steam page, but I cannot find the same for Itch. While there is a lot of advice about setting up your profile page, I am more interested in a game page, especially a cover image.

Our game is a colourful pixel art roguelite deck builder based in a mythological world where you need to feed monsters from British and Irish legends traditional food before they reach you and feed on you!

The general advice for Steam is to get professionally done key-art, but I feel like on Itch, more people choose cover images that showcase their game graphics.  
So now I don't really know if we should use a key-art image or gif or make a cover image from pixel art.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Also, feel free to advise on any other part of our Itch page. This is our first, and we would love to get feedback.

Thank you

(moved to the right category)

I feel like on Itch, more people choose cover images that showcase their game graphics

You might be able to test your hypothesis on these and similar lists' top pages.

https://itch.io/games/top-rated/tag-deck-building

https://itch.io/games/top-sellers/tag-deck-building

Most devs here do not have a budget, so no professional cover art. The cheapest way to have such an image is to take a screenshot from the game. So, while I do agree that gameplay pic is often used, I do not feel that this is done, because people think it increases success, but out of necessity.

Of course there could be a feedback loop, if regular users would expect their favorite games to do similar. Hence my suggestion to see if your observation holds true for your target audience.

Personally, I am on the fence about this. I would react to certain key elements. Seeing that this is a card game at first glance would peek my interest more than seeing that it is a horror game. But if I am interested in card games, I probably already would use a tag like deck building which would nullify that benefit.

But I think this is the high art of marketing psychology ;-)

Thank you so much!

This is really helpful. Most of the deckbuilders on the top are done with much bigger budgets than ours (which is self-funded from savings), and many still go with pixel art. So I might follow this and see what happens.

Die in the Dungeon is actually a great example, as they have pixel art given here and key-art illustrations on Steam. 
I think I will need to keep testing and see if CTR goes up... personally I know that what I find eye-catching rarely translate to the itch or steam game audience, so will just have to follow lead of others here.