Hi,

I am browsing games on this page https://itch.io/games and see many sorting criteria. Can I check how they are sorted?

- Popular: sorted by the number of downloads?

- Top-rated: sorted by the number of raters and/or high rating score (out of 5) ?

- Top-sellers: sorted by the number of copies sold?

- Most recent: sorted by the latest published date or update date?

- New&Popular: ?

I am new to itch.io and I couldn't find a definition of these sorting criteria in the documentation. I hope to get some answers in the forum.

Thank you

Popular

A special algorithm we’ve created that combines many signals from a project. We don’t reveal the specifics because we don’t want people trying to cheat. (Note to cheaters: we see you and we will delist your pages). The popularity sort is comprised of a “historical” and “recent” component added together. What that means is that recent activity has more of an impact compared to overall views. This helps new games surface on top of games that have been popular for a while. How new something is also has an impact. We’ve designed the algorithm to show both stuff that’s really popular, and up-and-coming projects who need a shot to get discovered.

Top rated

This uses a weighted average rating to sort. We weight the rating based on a confidence level determined by the number of ratings. What this means is that a game with 1 rating of 5 stars does not beat a game with 500 ratings averaging 4.8. It’s also worth noting that not all ratings from accounts are equal, if spammy of suspicious behavior is detected then those ratings may not influence the weighted rating.

Top sellers

This sorts by the number of payments made, including purchases of paid games and donations to free games. It is similar to popularity sort: it has “historical” and “recent” components to help boost games that are currently being bought a lot versus games that have accumulated many purchases over a long time.

Most recent

Sorted by when the game is initially published and made available, or if there’s a update that causes it to be “refreshed.” This could be a major update from a devlog post.

New & popular

A variation on the Popular algorithm that places more emphasis on new and updated projects. New & popular is adjusted to push older or stale projects down to make it easier for newer projects to rank higher.