itch.io

My plan isn’t one or the other. it’s a combination of manual work, automated enrichment, and player contribution over time. You’re right that collaborative systems have worked for decades precisely because people want to contribute when the platform gives them a reason to. That’s the direction.

On getting users you’ve identified exactly where I’m stuck. Building the features is the solvable part. Convincing people to try something new when they’ve seen a dozen similar posts this year alone is the real problem. The saturation you’re describing is real and I feel it. Players are disengaged from new platform announcements because most don’t deliver anything meaningfully different.

The difference here is that this is a niche platform focused only on indie games. Not all games. Most platforms like IGDB or Steam just index everything, which means indie games get buried under AAA and AA releases. Even when you search for similarities on those platforms, the results mix everything together regardless of what you actually want. I tried it myself: I love pixel art, games like Dead Cells or Huntdown games lets say like 2D, action, fast. On IGDB or Steam the similarities are loose at best and often completely off. Wrong genre, wrong scale, wrong feel. So I built my own similarity algorithm specifically to get as close as possible to what you actually want. The filters compound: pixel art, 2D platformer, action, rating above 7, completion time under 20 hours. That combination on most platforms either returns nothing or returns noise. Here it works and returns genuinely close matches. I found games through it myself that I couldn’t surface anywhere else. There’s also a strict mode that tightens the match criteria further for people who want very precise suggestions rather than broad ones.

Your Darkest Dungeon example is the clearest illustration of where tags fail completely. DD1 and DD2 share the same tags on the surface but everything that made DD1 resonate the dread, the careful planning, the weight of losing something you invested in was removed in the sequel. No tag captures that delta. What would capture it is players describing how each game made them feel. That’s the player mood logging feature I’m working toward. Not metadata assigned by a database, but how the game actually felt to the people who played it. Over time that signal would naturally show that DD1 and DD2 land differently for players even when every classification field is identical. But also, and this matters I can’t decide that for anyone. Some people genuinely love DD2. Some prefer the lighter roguelite loop. The platform shouldn’t exclude DD2 from suggestions or penalise it for being different from its predecessor. What it should do is surface DD1 to the player who logs “dread, strategic, investment” and DD2 to the player who logs “fast, replayable, casual runs” and let the player decide. The signal separates them, the recommendation follows the player’s own taste, not a verdict on which game is better. Monster Train 2 would cluster with Monster Train 1 for the same reason, players who loved the first described the same feel in the second.

On dev submissions and criteria you’re right that it’s a delicate matter. Right now there’s a manual approval and rejection flow with a reason given. But the criteria aren’t clearly defined upfront and that might create frustration. The honest answer is that a finished game with existing reviews and some evidence of player engagement is a much stronger submission than a fresh upload with nothing behind it. Making those criteria explicit before someone applies might be a fair approach rejection hurts less when the bar was clear from the start. Still working out exactly where to draw that line.

The hardest part isn’t the engineering. It’s making someone understand within thirty seconds why this is different from the last thing they saw. That’s unsolved and I won’t pretend otherwise. These are all genuinely good points and I appreciate the depth of this conversation more than I can say. It’s rare to get feedback that actually challenges the assumptions behind what you’re building rather than just the surface of it. I’ll keep thinking through all of this a lot of what’s been said here will directly shape decisions I haven’t made yet.

If you’re curious about where it goes from here, I post development updates in a Discord new features, decisions, open questions. You can find the invite link on theindiegame.io. No pressure at all, but if you ever want to follow along or throw in an idea, you’re more than welcome. Any perspective is valuable, especially from people who think about games the way you clearly do.

Coming back to this one after a while, it’s stuck with me as one of the most thoughtful and genuinely challenging pieces of feedback I’ve gotten on this, so I keep returning to it.

One thing you raised that I wanted to actually address. The entry bar question, accepting developer-submitted games with no real way to verify “professional” versus hobbyist, and whether that undermines the whole idea of surfacing quality. This was genuinely one of the hardest things I’ve had to sit with building this.

Where I landed is that you can’t gate on solo/team/hobbyist status, because that status tells you nothing about whether the game is actually good. A solo hobbyist can absolutely make something that deserves to be found, and a “professional” team can ship something mediocre. The only honest lever is clear content policy, not credentialism. For example, live-service MMOs and idle/incremental games designed to be played indefinitely with no actual ending aren’t accepted, for now at least, since the platform is built around discovering games with a real endpoint you can reach, not a rule about whether a submission is finished or still in development (early access games are welcome). Anything stricter than that puts me in the position of being an arbitrary judge of who “counts,” which isn’t a position I think is fair or sustainable for one person to hold.

I went and looked at how IGDB actually handles this, since you mentioned not knowing, and found their content policy here: https://www.igdb.com/content-policy. They land in the same place, accepting solo, team, and hobbyist developers alike, gated by content policy rather than professional status. Good to see that independently confirmed rather than just assumed.