I don't think these kinds of questions have ever been asked on this site, so I'd like to be the first. To begin, everyone who can participate, please answer the following questions: How many subscribers do you have? How often do they buy from you? Does the number of subscribers influence their purchase of your products?
33 followers, no sales
Your followers are not users, but other developers. And you make games. That means, you have bascially very few actual players following you. And that means your numbers are not meaningful for any statistics.
47 followers, 40 sales... mini sales
You make ai assets. Your customers are hobby developers. You followers are bound to be mostly your actual customers, so your follower count will translate to sales.
If it seems like I could make a living off of gamedev, I might reconsider.
A wise approach for a hobby. Have fun creating games, not stress.
That's a good question. It has been asked many times in the message boards. And I do not think there is a conclusive and easy answer beyond general advice, like have a good game and make the target audience find that game. Both of those tasks ain't easy.
Though the question is usually phrased differently. There is a point to be made, that there can be a difference between having a popular game and gaining followers. Like, people might play your game, but do not follow, or they follow, but do not play the game. And even if you have one or both of those, people might still not buy the game.
For your specific case, the most deterring thing is the fact that you submitted your game to a dozen jams. You can have maybe 1 jam plus a charity jam. More than that makes you look like a spammer and any ratings and comments look hollow. Meaning they probably come from other developers and not players.
A naturally grown and advertised popularity on Itch, according to my observations, looks something like this: followers is somewhere between 4 times the ratings and 20 times the ratings. So with 30+ ratings you should have 120 to 600 followers. You can verify this by just looking at games. Pick randomly and see how many ratings the main game has and how many followers. (Like, hempuli has 12k followers and Baba has 1.2k ratings.)
As for your game, I do like Baba Is You, and some puzzle games, but not many. I tried your game for 5 minutes. It was not appealing to me.
How are seeing who sends money through Itch.io accounts, unless their email happens to match their Itch.io account name or you personally know them well?
I think most of us have no clue when a transaction is initiated by someone following the account.
Does the number of subscribers influence their purchase of your products?
Likely not. Follower counts are displayed publicly on community profiles. The number is on neither the profiles that are linked in search results nor on the project pages where purchases or donations are made.
Account subscribers might see project updates in their feed. Whether or not they act on that financially depends on their personalities and intentions.
I doubt the different ways of looking for, say, game assets on this site translates as math.
