itch.io

Hey, glad you like it! Actually there are personalized recommendations once you sign up, your profile has a “Recommended for you” section built from your favorites and liked games, and there’s an optional weekly email with picks too. Making it respond to mood, so it learns which moods you lean to, is the part I’m still working on.

Hi and thanks for the feedback. Honestly! It’s useful to hear from someone who has run into these problems elsewhere.

On mood that’s fair. It’s not for everyone but sometimes is valuable in the sense a game fits to how you feel like playing something relaxing and short or intense on a given time. I personally like moods in games and maybe movies, but not books as well but you also have the traditional also search by name, genre, theme and etc.

About the AI-assisted work is not banned, but AI disclosure is there. If AI was used for any part of a game (art, music, text), the developer has to say so in the game’s description, so players can decide for themselves. It also protects developers since AI is a sensitive subject in indie dev, and being upfront about it avoids backlash later. Personally, I don’t mind AI-assisted work, but I think disclosure is right given how people feel about it. I’m open to feedback on whether that’s the right line, especially for AI-generated cover images and blurbs.

Pirated links. Honest answer is it isn’t written in the policy yet. In practice, every submission is reviewed by a person before it goes live, and wouldn’t approve a listing that links to pirated copies. But that isn’t in the guidelines, and it should be. Your question made that obvious, so I am going to add (already created a ticket). along with extra checks on store links that point outside the known storefronts. Logged-in users can already report a listing from its game page, and I will add a specific option there for pirated or illegal links. Thank you for raising it.

For analytics plausible is used alongside Google Analytics. Google Analytics is the part I’m least happy with, so thanks for saying. Matomo on the other hand is a reasonable option and I’ll keep it in mind.

For error monitoring It’s Sentry. Known sensitive data is filtered out before anything is sent.

If you have more thoughts, I’d like to hear them you can join Discord https://discord.gg/9TjkwrYfY8. I have changelog issues reporting channels discussion and etc.

Making this site got me to make this post/thread, see this comment and visit and learn about Abobo’s Big Adventure. And even though old enough didn’t know about it and ended up playing for 2 hours cause I was having fun, although I had work to do. LoL Thank you as well!

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.

I don’t get it I am sorry! Is this and ad/promo or are you suggesting something here?

I am asking kindly because I don’t understand this post. If you are suggesting can you explain please?

Thank you!

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.

Thank you so much for the bug report, and for including the console error and the note that /auth/me returned 200. That saved me a lot of time.

I think I found the cause. The upload form saves your progress in your browser as a draft, so that if you refresh, close the tab or lose your connection halfway through filling in a long form, you don’t lose your work. The catch is that if a saved draft comes from an older version of the form and is missing a field, the page can end up with an empty value where it expects a list. When it tries to filter that list while drawing the form, it crashes and you get a blank page. That matches your error.

I tested it: I saved an incomplete draft like that and opened the page. It crashed and showed a white screen, and the console error is the same kind you reported. Then I made the form fill in any missing fields with defaults, ran the same test, and the form loaded normally with the draft restored. I tested this in Chrome, not Firefox, so I can’t say the exact error text matches yours, but the cause is the same. I have deployed the fix.

If it still happens after the update, it would help to know:

• Whether you’d started or saved a game draft on the site before
• Whether it also fails in a private window
• The exact error from the console once it’s updated
• Your Firefox version

In the meantime, clearing this site’s saved data in Firefox or using a private window should let the page load, though you’d lose any draft you’d started.

Thanks again for taking the time to report this. It’s very helpful.

Hey Belle Thank you for taking the time to write this up. It was one of the most useful pieces of feedback I’ve had so far, and it led to real fixes.

You were right that the numbers didn’t add up. The upload form recommended 616×353 (16:9), but the “Preview Game Page” showed your cover in a portrait shape, and on the live site the shape changed again depending on the screen. When I traced it, I found two separate problems. The upload guidance was wrong for the shape the site actually uses, and the game cards were sizing covers by a fixed height and a flexible width. That’s why the same cover looked almost square on a laptop and stretched into a wide landscape on a phone.

Here’s what I changed:

One shape everywhere covers are now a fixed portrait 3:4 in the game cards, on the game page, and in the upload form preview, on every screen size. What you see in the preview is what you get on the live site.

Better upload guidance: the Cover Image field now says it’s your portrait box art, with a recommended size of 900×1200px (3:4), at least 800px wide.

A better mobile layout: on phones the cards took up almost a whole screen each. Games now show two side by side, and I trimmed the cards so the cover and title come first.

Responsiveness is trickier than it looks, because the same image has to work on a phone, a tablet and a big monitor. I’ll be honest. I already knew the mobile experience wasn’t where it should be, and I’d been struggling with how to make it properly responsive. Your report gave me a concrete case to trace, and that was the opportunity I needed to fix mobile and polish the game cards.

Since you adjusted your cover to what you saw in the preview, it should look right now, but if anything seems off, let me know and I’ll help.

Also, thank you for offering to post about the platform. It means a lot. I’ll be happy to return the favor and help promote your game as well however I can.

I will definitely make a LinkedIn page for the platform and I will aim for tomorrow and we will definitely connect there as well.

P.S. For any bugs or small issues you notice from now on, feel free to also post them in the #issues channel on my Discord, since that keeps them organized and I can follow up quickly. But if it’s easier to just message me here, that’s totally fine too. I’ll take feedback wherever it comes from.

That’s an excellent point, and a fair one and I’ve already added it as a ticket.

It’s not a small feature under the hood, though, so it’ll take some time. There’s real business logic behind it for eg collaborator confirmation needs to work properly (the invited person has to actually consent and verify before getting access, not just get added), and then it needs to talk to the analytics side to actually pull and show stats for that specific game per collaborator. On top of that, there are financial constraints since everything has a cost, and this is the kind of feature I need to budget for rather than just bolt on.

Worth remembering too that even itch.io didn’t have this from day one or maybe first year of development. it’s the kind of feature that comes once a platform has enough scale to justify it. Software development is a constant, ongoing process, not something that ships complete after some time.

Right now the priority is getting more devs and more traction on the platform, but this is definitely something I want to add along the way as things grow. It’s a “when” actually and not an “if” for me.

Thanks again for raising these valid points.

Totally fair, appreciate you being straight about it rather than just being polite.

Your game appears the moment it’s approved. After submission I check it for quality (valid info, no offensive material) that kind of thing. Once approved, it goes into the library and the search index, and gets placed based on similarity to other games, moods, categories(free games) and etc so it’s discoverable that way too. Since its a newly added game also, it goes to the top of all games because the newly added first is the default filter in all games. There’s also a dedicated Dev Drops section on the Discover page for visibility. So the fact that it’s not showing up yet is expected. It appears once I’ve reviewed and approved it. Which I already did as we speak btw.

Another example of how discoverability works once it’s live is if you go to Mood → Cozy, your game is there right now it’s near the end of the list since I sort by rating. I noticed your game is free, and there’s also a free filter, so if someone goes to Cozy and filters to free games only, the list narrows down to just your game and one other. I’m still investigating better ways to handle filtering and ordering. It’s fairly simple right now because I wanted the core functionality out there for anyone who wants to use it, but it needs more thought and feedback to get it right. The goal also from gamers perspective is to help players (myself included) to find exactly what they want to play right now, and actually narrow the options down instead of scrolling forever. This way I believe as well helps indie devs for their game to be discovered and find its players.

I’m hoping to get more indie dev uploads so I can figure out how to give them more visibility on the homepage too, still thinking through the best way to do that you know looking at other platforms, taking feedback, iterating. The Dev Drops section, for what it’s worth, actually came from a suggestion by another indie dev, I liked the idea and built it.

Definitely need improvements on how search results are presented, and design more broadly, as you said. I keep a Jira board with tickets for all of this so I can actually track it rather than lose it in my head. I’m approaching this the way I used to approach things professionally and it just takes time and a lot of iteration to shape a platform into something genuinely good, and I’m constantly working on it because I like the development side of it and I like indie games.

Really appreciate what you’re doing here you know, feedback like this is exactly what I need. What I think makes the real difference for a platform like this is users and devs actually taking the time to give feedback, and that’s hard to come by, especially for indie devs. So it means a lot.

Looking forward to hearing what you and your friend notice once you’ve both spent some time with it. And happy to share analytics with you as things develop. I’ll be straightforward about where the numbers stand, good or not.

Looking forward to hearing what your teammate thinks once they’ve had a look!

About analytics yes, page views are tracked, so I can tell you how many people have seen your game’s page, along with other traffic data.

On the design fair feedback and I’d rather hear it straight than not at all. Worth knowing that I’m actually a senior backend engineer, not UI/UX, so I’ve been doing the design myself, which is probably part of what you’re picking up on. I’ve been getting inspiration from a bunch of places along the way from Dribble, anime sites, other well-known platforms. The hero artwork on game pages, for example, came from that kind of research, and I’ve been constantly tweaking things as I find new references. So different parts of the UI end up pulling from different places, which might be why it reads as a bit patchwork or “AI-prepared” rather than one cohesive look. Truth is the design took many changes to look better and specific changes not AI decisioned but again UI/UX is not my forte :) sry

I do want to get real UI/UX help on this, it’s hard to prioritize this right now. In the meantime I’m actually about to make a Mobbin account a UI/UX person recommended it for finding better references. I also get feedback from other devs and users or friends along the way, on both design and feature changes, and a lot of what’s shipped has come out of exactly that kind of back and forth. If you’ve got specific examples of what’s throwing it off for you, or pages/sites you think do it better, I’d genuinely like to hear them. I want to improve this, and outside eyes catch things I can’t see anymore after staring at it for too long.

A couple of things worth knowing there are actually two themes on the site, a toggle near the top of the page. The default neon/synthwave one you’re seeing, and a calmer “Midnight” theme that drops most of the neon styling, which might be closer to your taste. The cyber look itself was intentional, actually. It’s meant as a nod to 80s arcade aesthetics, not something that just came out AI-generated. I was going for that honestly it wasn’t AI but wanted something different and retro and esthetically good.

Sorry again for the slow response/ I wanted to actually sit with this one rather than reply fast and let it go. Plus last days were crazy.

Thank you for this, genuinely. The Darkest Dungeon vs Darkest Dungeon II tag table is a great example and it lands the point hard that DD2 isn’t fast, isn’t casual, isn’t really “replayable” in the way that word usually gets used, and no amount of automatic tag-scraping would have caught that nuance. I also appreciate the links, and the honesty about the “dread/strategic/investment vs fast/replayable/casual” framing and you’re right that it was closer to “things I assumed were opposites” than an actual accurate read of DD2, and calling that out is fair.

The bigger point you’re making is that tags are noisy because people disagree on both what a tag means and how much it matters, and that this problem exists whether you’re picking the tags or trying to derive a signal from them is one I don’t think I can argue with. And the industry research angle is well taken too. So if 30 years of classification/matching work already exists, trying to reinvent that from scratch with scraped tags is a bad bet, and I’d rather know what’s already been tried and failed than repeat it blind.

This actually pushed me to dig more into it rather than just take the mood/tag approach at face value so thank you for that, even indirectly.

It also gave me an idea, though it’s a different angle than “classify the feeling correctly.” If the real problem is that no automatic system can honestly say “this game invokes dread” or “this one is casual” because that’s a subjective judgment, not a fact, then maybe the answer isn’t to try to nail that judgment algorithmically at all. Instead I can surface the actual differences between two games side by side (whatever’s genuinely knowable, pace, length, structure, mechanics, permadeath or not and etc.) and let the player read that and decide for themselves what it means to them, rather than the site pretending to have resolved something as personal as “does this feel like dread or does it feel like a casual run.”

It’s a good idea, but it needs real thought before I’d build it. Mainly figuring out what data is actually trustworthy enough to put in front of someone that way, versus what’s just tags with the same noise problem you described. But the core of it is don’t claim the verdict, show the differences, let the player decide on how it feels like the right instinct, and it’s one I want to explore properly rather than rush.

More broadly this whole exchange gave me both ideas and motivation to keep pushing on this. I’ve genuinely enjoyed the back and forth with people here. It’s kind of rare to get responses where people actually think it through before replying, and it shows in everything you’ve written.

Thanks a lot man! If you ever want to share more ideas as this develops, or just see how it grows over time, I’ve got a Discord happy to have you there if that’s easier than threads like this one.

Hey man! sorry for the late reply, I know its been days but things got busy and this fell down the list longer than it should have.

First, thank you for the feedback back then I did take it seriously, even with the delay in acting on it. A few things came directly out of it:

The comparative chips idea “more like this, but faster / calmer / shorter / harder” I built it. It’s live on game pages now on similar games. You were right that it sidesteps the NLP problem entirely and turns it into a UI problem I can actually ship. There’s room to expand it further, but the core is in and working.

I also shipped automatic importing from Steam. It’s not OAuth, though since Steam doesn’t offer a per-developer OAuth flow the way itch does with profile:games. What I built instead is simpler: a dev pastes their Steam App ID or store URL, and the site pulls the store page data (title, description, screenshots, genres, etc.)

itch.io is next on my list, and the OAuth approach you laid out is genuinely the right one. I hadn’t looked at profile:games that closely and the argument for it (itch does the verification, no crawler, no claim-flow ambiguity) is convincing. I do want to be careful with it though, exactly for the reason you flagged that the payload apparently carries earnings and purchase counts, and I’d need to strip that at ingest and be explicit about it on the consent screen before I’d feel comfortable shipping it. Same with the published flag/ I’d need to filter on it so a dev doesn’t get an unpublished game exposed. So it’ll take a bit more thought than the Steam version did, but it’s on the roadmap.

On adding Bombercup manually as admin/ I’ve thought about this and I don’t think I can do it, and not because of effort. It would mean building a whole separate “admin creates and owns a listing” path, which directly contradicts the model the site is built on that the developer/user is the one who uploads and edits their own page, always. Adding an exception for that undermines the exact thing I’m trying to guarantee, and from an engineering standpoint it’s not something I want to bolt on as a one-off.

That said. I think I actually already got a submission notification for the indie dev form and approved it, so if that’s the one I’m thinking of, you’re one step away from having it live with your own text and screenshots rather than anything I’d write off the itch page. If you do want to finish it, another dev told me the whole flow took him about 4 minutes start to finish, so it’s not a heavy ask. But genuinely no pressure, if you’d rather wait for the itch.io OAuth import to land and do it that way instead, that’s completely fine too, it just might be a while before that’s ready.

Thanks again for the thought you put into all of this man it’s rare to get feedback this well-reasoned, and it’s already shaped what shipped. Cheers!!

That is a very good suggestion. I will create one for sure!

Didn’t know that indie devs are on LinkedIn to be honest.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Could you try adding your game to the platform (if you still want that is) and give me also some feedback?

Hello there! First of all, I want to thank you so much for your reply and your interest. Honestly, it means more than you can imagine! I checked out your game, and it looks like a wonderful, cozy game. I would love to have it on the platform, and having such a great-looking game right now would help me a lot. 

Uploading it is pretty straightforward. You just need to create an account and fill out two simple forms. Another indie developer recently uploaded theirs and told me the process was very easy and took literally 4–5 minutes. There is just a quick approval process to ensure quality and avoid scammers, but I am actively working to make this even easier! 

You can also join my Discord server if you’d like (link on the site). It’s a place to reach out if you run into any issues, need help, discuss, or want to share feedback.I also post progress and new features there. Since this is a passion project that I’m constantly improving, your feedback on the upload process would be incredibly valuable to me! I also try my best to playtest games for devs and provide feedback in return. I truly love discussing ideas and collaborating with people, and I have a lot ideas and plans on how this platform will evolve. 

In terms of visibility, uploaded games don’t just go into the standard game library. I also feature them in a dedicated “Discover” section specifically for developer-submitted games to give them extra exposure. I’m constantly thinking of new ways to increase visibility and bring more momentum and traction to the app. We already get daily visits and have 60 registered users so far, so I really hope you’ll decide to join us and upload your game! 

Thank you so much again for your interest. It truly means a lot!

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