This should be a good way to remove oversaturation from the platform
There may be good games under 50 megabytes. Either because they are really low requirements, made for a contest/jam, or whatever.
I had another idea for avoid the oversaturation a bit is to not allowing constant uploads. For example, only be able to upload a maximum o 2 new projects per month or having a 'launching window' for example, only all days between the 1º and 10º day of every months can be used to upload new projects. My idea is not so much as 'quality control' (because quality can be subjective) but to 'disincentivize' spam, by making it cumbersome.
Who's to say games whose size is larger than 50MB are good or have high quality?
Even if itch io did apply this rule, some devs could be creative and bloat their games with redundant files to reach 50MB limit. Which cause more problems.
Also you have to consider game jams also. Most of the time, jammers submit small games mostly because they don't have time to make them large.
Entrants would need to be able to submit a page that doesn’t have any uploads to be able to upload their game to the page. I’m not sure how well that would work out….
I think a better solution would be to have a sorting feature for search results. Because that’s the problem, isn’t it? Too many unwanted results? But that feature might require another field in the upload pages for which category it should be sorted under.
at the risk of outing myself as a “bad game developer” here’s a project I released this year after about 5 months of development time. It’s a 40min+ narrative puzzle game containing a fairly significant amount of custom graphics and audio.
it’s 2MB (1 on linux). If I slapped together some free asset packs into Unreal over an afternoon it would dwarf this project’s size while being utterly devoid of substance.
Filesize is just not a good metric for quality.
And if you want to go even smaller, here’s a very fun 12 kilobyte roguelike: https://hundredrabbits.itch.io/donsol
My first game on this platform (HTML5, CSS, Javascript) was only about 3MB, and that was mainly because I had WAV files for music; I probably could have gotten under 1MB if I had used MP3 instead. My second game (also HTML5, CSS, Javascript) was under 1MB, with just my code, images, and some sound effects. A 3D first-person shooter called .kkrieger fits in around 96KB. It is vastly more impressive than either of my already-small games.
Unfortunately, gauging quality entirely off of file size doesn’t work well whatsoever.
If we’re going to remove games based on size, I’d rather see games over 100MB removed. Big games are often a sign of one or more of the following:
None of which bode well for the quality of the game. There are good 100MB+ games on itch, but they are the minority.
Well, I think it’s pretty unlikely that itch would do any kind of removal based on size in the first place (though it’s still good to push against the notion that small means bad, it doesn’t in the slightest). Bear in mind that itch has a soft upper limit on uploads, since you have to ask permission to publish a game that’s over 1GB in size…
Yeah, that soft upper limit is generous. I feel it would be better as a hard line for game uploads.
There was a visual novel on the front page recently that looked appealing until I saw its download was in GB. Gigabytes. And more than one. Here on Itch.io.
Why us that big? Who’s it for? Why was that approved? Who knows.
The graphics and visuals didn’t look significantly better than similar games that are a tenth the size (admittedly with lower-cost hardware like many indie developers have). I’m guessing the behemoth has large voice files but also invisible colors that weren’t compressed out.
I went to check the sizes of other large games with similar designs and themes. Those were large at 250 MB to 600 MB, far over 100 MB for 2D images (not counting simple animations), but each is several times smaller than that one exception to the upload limit.
In contrast, each country of our world could be represented by a game that’s under 10 MB and take up the same amount as space as that one game. I like how Itch.io could host a challenge like that.