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Is my game *actually* unpopular? Trying to better understand itch's game jam popularity metric

A topic by Sundler created 5 days ago Views: 103 Replies: 5
Viewing posts 1 to 5

According to itchanalytics:

Information About Your Game:
The Lionel Countdown
Your Coolness: 71
Coolness Is Used By Itch.Io To Calculate Karma. Coolness Means The Number Of Votes Given By The Game Developer To Other Games In The Game Jam.
Your Karma: 1.673
Karma is what itch.io uses to give people who rate other games a boost in ratings and votes.
Your Game Ranked 7631st In Popularity. Thats Bottom 26.698% In Popularity.
Rating Count: 65
Your Game Placed In The Top 3.362% Of Games, With A Ranking Of 351st In Rating Count. No Score Reduction Will Be Applied Since Your Rating Count Is Higher Than The Median Of 13 .

I really don't understand how my game is ranked 7631st place, out of roughly 10,000 games, in popularity.  My rating count conversely is quite high, so how could it be so unpopular?  It just doesn't seem to make sense.   Perhaps there's a mistake with itchanalytics?  Can someone please enlighten me?

(+1)

The rates given were too random in the GMTK 2026 jam. It didn't make sense at all. I am just going to stop joining GMTK jams and do Brackeys instead.

(+1)

Also the popularity is weird.

I have been working on my Brackey's game since it ended, and now it put me as #5 most popular, even though it was not there during the game.

It literally placed me above the winner for no reason. /jam/brackeys-15/rate/4297449

You need to link to that /jam/brackeys-15/entries

And that is Itch "popularity" and not the Jam's popularity. The jam ended in February.

Most of those games are jam games. You did heavy promotion for your game after the jam.

Hmm, looks like it's yet another thing itch needs to fix...

rating count conversely is quite high, so how could it be so unpopular

Because ratings and popularity are not the same metric.

But actually, it's simply because this external statistic does not tell you how good those ratings were. Only how many there were.

Enjoyment #4468 2.955 2.955
Narrative #5146 2.328 2.328
Creativity #6447 2.851 2.851
Audio #6459 2.358 2.358
Artwork #8138 2.224 2.224

The average of those positions would be around the 6k/10k position and near your 7k position in popularity.

From what I understand, your high karma gave you additional ratings and thus boosting you to the top 3% of number of ratings.