Hello,
Currently, when hosting on Itch, I only know how many people click on my game page, how many people click to start the game, but not how many people stay engaged.
I'm planning to add an (optional and opt-in) feature to my game engine (Adventuron) for a player to be able to offer feedback of a game whilst inside the game, but I could really do with a back end to receive such data.
I'd love to have a per-game data store api for Itch hosted games.
The comment and rating could wire up to the existing rating system, but accessible via the API, but I'd also like to have a generic key and value system. Something simple and light weight, just to keep track of how engaged a player is in the game content.
e.g.
- player_started_game_first_time = LONG VALUE
- player_completed_pregame = BOOLEAN VALUE
The data could be 100% anonimized per session so I can't tell which players did what. I'm also fine with not having a user interface to interrogate the stats, so long as I can export them as JSON / XML / etc.
I think that if this api was to be supported, then I'd like Itch to display a user consent screen before the game is started, so that the player can opt out of engagement tracking, as well as allow a sentence from the game author about how the stats will be used.
I guess some sensible limits could be set up, but for small scale game makers (total plays of all my games are less than 20K views), this is essential information to be able to gather and track, so that they can see if they are wasting their time on content that does not engage.
Chris