Building a community for your game is a crucial part of launching a project. Interacting with fans allows you to gather valuable feedback, as well as measure how your project is being received by the public. Itch.io offers a number of features that aid you in starting your community. These options include emailing your fans, allowing comments on your project page, and having a forum on your project page.
Sending emails is a great way to notify your buyers of major news, updates, and releases for your project. While these should be used sparingly, they are a tool you can use to communicate effectively with buyers. To send an email, you can visit your project's interact tab, and then select email. Simply compose your message, and then send it.
Allowing comments offers you a chance to see what your players are thinking and saying about your project. It should be noted that developers are responsible for moderating comments, and that itch.io does not monitor these comment sections. Comments can be made by any user, and can also be voted on by other users. Developers are free to disable voting on comments, or to set options for what type of voting to allow. Comments are enabled through your project's edit project page.
While comments can offer feedback and a glimpse into the community's thoughts, some developers may prefer to use our full-featured message boards for their community. These boards function in the same way as our official itch.io forums, and allow for moderation, sticky posts, set rules, and more. As with comments, developers are responsible for moderation within their itch.io communities. Users are able to report content to itch.io and we can respond to those reports. This feature is available on your project's edit project page.