Skip to main content

Browse GamesGame JamsUpload GameHalloween Sale 2026Developer LogsCommunity
On Sale: GamesAssetsToolsTabletopComics
Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
evangelos258 days ago

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.

Reply
redonihunter7 days ago
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.

That's true. But if your platform's benefit is to recommend good games, you better have some criteria to establish standards or quality. Established standards, because the games is already known, is just very easily verifyable.

The discovery platforms talked about in Itch comments, in my opinion, are usually the type of platform where devs would submit their games in the hopes to get known. Because they fail to get known by whatever reason. That reason might be, because the game is not any good. Might also be, because the marketing has zero budget.

I could ramble and do philosophy about this for hours, but the main point for a new platform is quite simple. You need some thing(s) that your platform offers or does better than the existing platforms.

For a discovery platform the curation of games on that platform can be such a thing. It is the promise that users will find only good games there (good according to the curators).

Another angle can be to promise to find games better. Which I think was your main motivation. Professional status of the games does not matter for that. But accurate description of the game does. So your entry bar could be an exhaustive and honest review how it will fit into your platform's search criteria.

Reply
evangelos255 days ago(+1)

Thanks for sticking with this thread and coming back with more thought than most people put into a GitHub issue or even reddit sometimes honestly. I don’t think I have a counter to your point, and if I’m not gatekeeping on quality, I shouldn’t be implying that’s the pitch either.

Where I land after sitting with this: the actual thing I think this platform does differently isn’t “we picked the good ones,” it’s helping you find a game that fits what you’re actually in the mood for, not just a genre bucket. That only works if the categorization is honest. So that’s where I’ll put the entry bar, concretely. When I review a submission, I’m not asking “is this game good,” I’m checking whether the genres, moods, themes, and description the dev submitted actually match the game, from the trailer, the screenshots, the real thing. If someone tags a generic platformer as “atmospheric, dark fantasy, thought-provoking” to game the mood search, that gets bounced back, not because the game’s bad, but because the listing is dishonest.

Among other things I’m adding on the back of this is playtime fit, not just mood. “I’m a family man with one free evening this weekend give me something with smaller in duration” is a real, underserved question. Most platforms treat it as a separate lookup instead of something you discover by.

And honestly, the bigger reason behind all of this I believe is most big platforms list everything, and indies, even good ones, get buried under the volume of AAA titles with marketing budgets behind them. That’s not a secret, it’s a well known problem in indie circles, but it’s the actual gap I’m trying building into, not “we have better games than Steam.”

To be straight about where this goes next, I don’t think I land on a final answer to any of this alone. I plan to keep talking to devs and players and let that shape where the bar actually sits. If you’re up for it, I’d rather keep hashing this out with you than go reinvent it in a vacuum, this conversation’s already sharper than most of what I’d get elsewhere.

Reply
AboutFAQBlogContact us
Copyright © 2026 itch corp · Directory · Terms · Privacy · Cookies