
Wouldn't be surprising if it uses the user-made collections too. We don't know for sure how the algorithm works but we concluded by observation it uses tags to some extent and, of course, it must strongly base itself on user behavior.
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It has an algorithm that figures out similar games and groups them together - if you download a game you'll be shown a list of similar games and you can also check those by clicking "Related games" on a game page's upper right corner. Now, this is the moment where we need to talk about a feature of Itch.io.
This is bad, because it means users are less likely to successfully search it as it doesn't show up in the auto-fill. But there was a problem: those two terms were not among Itch's list of suggested tags.

What we saw was that many games used "bara" and "furry" as tags. Maybe they had this whole thing figured out already, who knows? Our biggest finding is that, well, yes but not really. We also looked at what other similar games were using in terms of tags. Broader tags like "Mystery" weren't so great. LGBT and Interactive Fiction are good, they do bring in some clicks. We started tinkering, monitoring traffic and, very importantly, checking what tags similar games (visual novels with gay content and erotic games in general) were using. (You can probably guess a few reasons why.)Īfter we realized how great the Gay tag is a question naturally came up: what are the other good and fitting tags we can use? Do note that it's not about picking tags that don't fit the game, that would be dishonest. This became evident quickly after we published the game. Users can pick a category and see what games are in it, and it turns out the "Gay" tag is intensely searched by users. Look back to the list above - the "Gay" tag is by far our greatest source of traffic. This may seem like an innocuous, inconsequential thing but make no mistake it's huge. Those are descriptive words/sequences you can associate your game with. There's a very long list of suggested tags - stuff like "Platformer", "Mystery", "Male Protagonist" and "Gay". When you publish a game on Itch you get to pick a genre (in our case Visual Novel) and up to 10 tags. What I'm gonna do is break down all the lessons we got from this data, which will Ok, what does this all mean?ġ. I want you to take a good look at it, try to figure out a pattern before going ahead. This is the breakdown of the top 20 sources of traffic to our page. Now let's look at a final piece of data setting up the stage for what we really want to discuss.
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This, of course, raises the question of how to optimize this process. So, while Itch can be convenient as a link to send to potential players/customers, the truth of the matter is Itch brings in players by itself. Below we have a breakdown from where those clicks came from.Īs you can see it turns out Itch is pretty good at bringing traffic to your game, which isn't surprising since it has about 200.000 games and who knows how many users. Here's another relevant piece of information: so far Minotaur Hotel's page has been viewed 8.800 times. But what matters here is that, so far, Itch.io has generated the larger slice of our downloads.
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It's impossible to know for sure how many downloads we got in total but we aren't too far from 3.000 - pretty good for a 0.1 build released not a full month ago. And let's talk about tagging, algorithms and numbers!Īs of today Minotaur Hotel has had 1.720 downloads on Itch.io and we estimate an additional 880 across different download links we offered (Mega.nz and Google Drive.) It's good to note that the last option had a head start, we took a few days to set our Itch page - still, Itch outperformed it. This will be another dev log that should be of use mainly to people making their own visual novels, we'll show some cool data.

This post tells the story of why and how that happened, and why that is important if you are making something like a visual novel with gay content like we are. And earlier this week they added a "Furry" tag. You probably didn't notice it, but about one and a half week ago Itch added a "Bara" tag to its list of suggested tags.
