I was checking the top 10 games of the Boss Rush Jam 2024 (https://itch.io/jam/boss-rush-jam-2024/entries) sorted by Popularity, assuming Popularity = Top rated.

However, I noticed a few entries with very low jam ranks. I checked this explanation of filters on the general game discovery page: https://itch.io/t/719515/how-does-itchio-sort-games-by-these-criteria-popular-newpopular-top-rated-top-sellers-most-recent and, assuming Popularity works the same for jams, it’s using a different algorithm that takes into account activity (apparently a mix of dev updates, comments on the jam page and possibly comments on the main page too).

In this case I think a Top Rated sorting for game jams would make sense. While I do not like using Popular and Top Rated during jam voting to avoid being influenced by other people in my votes, I find it very useful after a jam + voting phase ended so I can enjoy the best games out there.

To be honest, the Popular sorting works quite well and most entries at the top also have good ratings, although they are not ordered in the same way as e.g. Overall ranking - I could only find one entry at the top that didn’t make it to Top 100, and I think it’s because it had a lot of dev updates. It’s, but it may give a false impression that a game is really liked when the dev is just patching many things, so I feel that this should be reserved for the sorting “New & popular” which is used on the main game discovery page (but currently not on game jam entries list).