itch.io

Thank you, genuinely. A few words go a long way when you’re building something solo. I’ve put a lot of work and passion into this and there have been moments where I seriously considered walking away, but something keeps pulling me back to it. Comments like yours are part of what does. Means more than you’d think. Godspeed to you too.

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.

Really well put — the psychological difference between “claim” and “submit” is real and I hadn’t framed it that way before.

Worth mentioning that the dev upload feature wasn’t something I designed in isolation. It came directly from feedback from indie devs who asked for it. So while the claim model solves one population, there’s another population that actively wants to own and manage their listing from day one. Both are real.

A few honest constraints on the itch.io crawling path: itch.io’s API is developer-only (your own sales, download keys) there’s no public catalog API to browse or ingest games the way IGDB provides for mainstream titles. So coverage would require a scraper, which is technically possible but would likely violate their Terms of Service, and is the kind of thing that gets you banned or ignored if you ever try to reach out for a partnership later. That’s also why direct dev uploads are cleaner for now; I control the relationship, and devs get a dedicated section in Discover. And a crawler would undercut exactly what makes the upload flow valuable: a dev who submits their game gets immediate visibility, their own dedicated page, and a section built specifically for dev-submitted games. That’s something a crawler can never replicate.

On the claim model specifically, you’re right that it removes the self-promotion barrier, but it does hand control of the listing to someone who never asked for it. Platforms like Steam and GOG go the opposite direction and require devs to own their page from day one. There’s a reason for that: devs who care about how their game is presented want to control it, and an auto-generated page can misrepresent them before they even know it exists. The opt-out you mentioned is the minimum but the first impression problem is real.

On the claim model from an engineering perspective, I love the idea and “your game is already listed, do you want to claim it” is a much better pitch than a submission form. The challenge is verification: how does someone prove they own the game? Without that, a bad actor creates an account and starts claiming and editing games they don’t own. Discogs works because music ownership is verifiable through external signals like label credits, artist profiles, release history. A game dev claiming their itch.io page needs a similar anchor, probably proving ownership of the itch.io or Steam URL. That’s solvable but not trivial. IGDB is actually a closer comparison than Discogs here since it’s a community-maintained database where anyone can edit, and it works because games have enough external reference points to catch bad edits. The difference is IGDB has a large active community to self-correct and is not just indie oriented. At this scale, every claim needs manual review, which brings back the bottleneck the claim model was supposed to remove. Worth building toward but the verification layer has to come before the claim flow, not after.

On the psychological barrier, you’re right that claiming feels different from submitting. But I’d push back slightly: some friction isn’t always bad. A dev who puts zero effort into visibility is also likely to put zero effort into responding to players, updating the game, or engaging with their community. The platform works better when devs are at least a little invested. The goal isn’t to remove all effort, it’s to make the effort feel worthwhile. If a dev sees that listing their game here drives real traffic and real players, the motivation follows. That’s the bet. And players notice. Gamers genuinely respond to devs who show up who post updates, respond to feedback, engage with their community. Some of the most beloved indie games probably aren’t the most polished ones, they’re the ones where the dev was visibly present. That engagement is part of the product, and it starts with being findable.

The deeper issue with “never market” devs is motivation, not friction. Even a claim flow requires them to care enough to act. Some won’t, and that’s genuinely hard to solve without something pulling them in: visibility, downloads, a reason to show up. That’s what the dedicated dev-uploaded section is trying to build toward: if a dev sees real traffic coming from a listing, that’s the motivation to engage.

On Bombercup, I don’t have a crawler yet so I can’t pull it in automatically, but I’d genuinely love to have it on the platform. It sounds like exactly the kind of game that deserves more eyes. A few options: I can add it manually as admin, or you can upload it yourself through the dev upload flow. It has its own dedicated section for dev-submitted games. Either way works, happy to do whichever is easier for you.

On your cold-start challenge, it’s a fair test and I want to answer it honestly. Multiple moods are supported simultaneously so chaotic, competitive, and nostalgic working together isn’t a problem. On comparative search: it partially works. Searching “atmospheric horror” or “action arena” works because the system searches across tags, genres, themes and descriptions so descriptive language maps reasonably well. Where it breaks down is truly comparative language: “games like Bomberman but faster” or “something like this but shorter and more relaxing” — the system has no way to parse that kind of relational intent yet. That’s a bigger challenge and an unsolved one. On mood inference: moods are currently generated at ingest time and in the case of dev uploads the dev defines them directly. The longer term direction is player-driven: after playing a game, players log how it made them feel, which over time builds a much richer and more accurate signal than anything inferred from text alone. That’s harder to game, harder to hallucinate, and closer to how people actually talk about games. Not there yet, but that’s where i am thinking on going.

I genuinely appreciate the thoughtfulness here. This kind of feedback is rare and it does shape how I think about what to build next. That said, every feature decision sits at the intersection of what different people want, and those people don’t always agree. The upload flow came from devs who asked for exactly that. The claim model is a valid alternative that solves a different problem. Both represent real perspectives, and neither one alone defines the right direction. I’m one person navigating a lot of competing needs, and the honest answer is that no single conversation settles these questions but conversations like this one move them forward. So thank you.

First of all, thank you for your response I really appreciate it.

You’re raising something real, and I’d rather engage with it honestly than defend a pitch.

A clarification first. I don’t pull from itch.io. The catalog comes from IGDB, which covers commercially released games that went through some baseline quality filter just by existing on those platforms. The 1.2M itch.io problem is real, but it’s not the problem I’m solving right now and honestly, dumping 1.2M unvetted games into the catalog would break the thing I’m trying to build. Quality over volume is a deliberate call, not a limitation.

About the curation. You’re right that tags alone don’t work. That’s actually why the platform combines multiple layers instead of relying on a single signal: mood (“atmospheric”, “cozy”, “tense”), genres, themes, completion time, platform, and rating filters. Each layer narrows the search further. Someone looking for a short, atmospheric puzzle game under 5 hours on PC with a high rating gets a very different and much smaller list than a genre tag alone would produce. It’s imperfect, but it’s a fundamentally different bet than tag matching.

On the review point. You’re describing exactly what the platform should grow toward, and honestly what I’m already working toward. A number out of 5 tells you consensus, not fit. The next feature I’m building lets players log not just a rating but how a game made them feel and refine or add tags from their own experience. The mood and vibe signals are an attempt at that: matching on what a game feels like rather than how it scored.

The data integrity question is real: Community tagging can be gamed. But aggregation handles most of it: one bad actor’s vote is noise, a pattern across many players is signal. IGDB solved the same problem with community edits, moderation, and trust scores. The mechanism doesn’t need to be perfect, it needs to be resistant enough that manipulation doesn’t pay off.

One more thing worth naming directly. “hidden gem” is subjective by design. A hidden gem isn’t a game that’s objectively great and undiscovered it’s actually a game that’s right for you that you haven’t found yet. Someone who loves cozy farming games and someone who loves brutal roguelikes are looking for completely different hidden gems. The platform doesn’t curate taste, it narrows the search based on yours.

That’s the actual goal that if you finished a game you loved and want something similar, you shouldn’t have to spend an hour reading reviews, watching trailers, and cross-referencing completion times. You already know what you liked and the platform should use that to get you to the next one faster. The closer I get to a real player profile, what you played, what resonated and what didn’t the more precise that match gets.

What also makes this different from every other IGDB-powered discovery site is that developers can actually participate. They can submit their game, own their listing, and reach players who are actively looking not just browsing a database someone else built. Any dev, including itch.io devs, can go through the upload flow. I just don’t want to pull 1.2M games automatically and call it discovery.

On the “no ratings” point, that’s one of the harder problems to solve honestly, and I’ll be upfront about it. I’m building this solo, which means every design decision, what to approve, what to reject, how to weight signals falls on one person. An approval step helps filter obvious noise, but it creates a new problem: I become the sole judge of what’s worth listing, and that doesn’t scale and isn’t fair. A genuinely good game with zero ratings because the dev had no marketing budget looks identical to a bad game with zero ratings on paper. I don’t have a clean answer to that yet. What I do know is that volume alone isn’t the goal a smaller catalog where every game has a real chance of being found is more useful than 1.2M entries where 99% are invisible anyway. The right mechanism probably involves community input, dev engagement signals, and time but it needs more thinking, and this kind of feedback is exactly what shapes those decisions.

Since you’ve thought about this just genuinely curious: if you were setting the rejection criteria for dev-submitted games, what would you use? Not “is the game good” because that’s subjective, but what signals would tell you a submission is worth listing versus noise? I’m still working that out and I’d rather not get it wrong.

Lastly none of this is black and white. There are real tradeoffs between business logic, engineering constraints, design, and what most players actually want and as a solo developer I’m navigating all of those simultaneously. This is a work in progress. The direction is clear even if every piece isn’t built yet. Where I genuinely agree: without a richer player profile, the recommendations are educated guesses at best. That cross-reference layer is the hard part, and I’m not there yet. But that’s exactly where I’m going.

First off I wanted to say that I honestly appreciate the fact that you took the time to reply and with a detailed breakdown it really means a lot.

On IGDB: Agreed it misses the deep itch.io long tail, but I don’t want to exclude it either, plenty of IGDB games are also on itch.io, and players shouldn’t lose access to those. The dev upload path exists specifically to bring in games that IGDB never touches. You’re right that the devs who need it most won’t opt in, that’s an unsolved problem I’m still thinking about. The dev upload path addresses this. I mean upload and you’re visible from day one with no signal needed. The harder problem is reaching the devs who don’t market at all and may never find the platform. Still working on that one and open to ideas if you have any.

On cold start: Discovery here is content-based first like genre, mood, tags, description and not “people who liked X.” A game with zero ratings and zero collections still surfaces if someone searches for its mood or genre or play style or theme and etc. Interactions improve ranking over time but aren’t required to appear at all. On top of that, a dev who uploads directly gets surfaced in a dedicated section immediately, independent of ratings or collections. That idea actually came from an indie dev who pointed out exactly this gap. It’s still opt-in, so your point about reluctant self-promoters stands but the incentive is at least explicit: upload and you’re visible from day one.Nothing appears there yet since no dev has uploaded through it, but that’s the path for games that IGDB doesn’t cover. Happy to share a screenshot of how it looks on the test server if useful.

On tags: Valid concern. Currently relying on IGDB data which has its own quality issues. I’m actually working on a feature where players can add their own tags after playing a game, the idea being that player-supplied tags, mood and etc after real playtime are more accurate than dev-supplied ones. Curation and validation beyond that is also on the roadmap. Also in the long term devs maybe can edit their game as well anytime.

What’s your game? Happy to check how it currently shows up. If it’s not on IGDB you can create an account and submit it directly. There’s a short review process to verify it’s a real game and the data is clean, but that’s it.

Hey everyone,

I’m a senior software engineer and a gamer who loves indie games as well. As a gamer I had a problem which was finding what to play next based on my taste and mood sometimes and what I was feeling like playing. Spending time checking videos reviews and etc to decide if it’s for me the given time also. Not only the big titles but also the ones that fly under the radar and are genuinely great.

So I built a platform called theindiegame.io it is a discovery platform and library with recommendations for indie games. Search by genre, mood, feel, or just browse. The goal is to help players find hidden gems that never get the attention they deserve, and help indie devs get discovered by the right audience. Players can create a collection of games they want to play, get recommendations based on the favorite games and likes. Search by categories, moods themes and etc

For devs: I index games from IGDB or can be uploaded by you via the app if not in IGDB. No paywalls, no algorithms selling placement just discovery.

I am really passionate about this project and I am constantly improving it and trying to think about features and write down ideas and etc. Would love your honest feedback what would make this actually useful for you as a player or a dev?

Thank you!!

👉 theindiegame.io

I've been listening to MrSuicideSheep on YouTube for years — the channel was literally the soundtrack to my late nights coding. So when Sheepy showed up in my recommendations I immediately had to try it, and honestly it hit different knowing who made it. The atmosphere, the music, the whole vibe — it's exactly what I'd expect from someone with that ear for emotion.

I run a small indie game discovery platform (theindiegame.io) and Sheepy ended up in our Hidden Gems section — high rating, not enough people talking about it. Feels right.

Leaving a free invite code for anyone here who wants to check the platform out — good for 10 signups, no catch:

🎫 M4LKA5WW

👉 https://theindiegame.io/discover