Alright gang, pull up a seat and let’s speak concerning the primary matter on the hearts and minds of kids all over the place: curation. If you’re unaware already, curation on this context is the act of choosing video games to focus on and current to clients. Every market/ neighborhood/ web site takes a distinct strategy primarily based on what they assume works finest for them and their content material. With this being such a contentious matter I needed to elevate the curtain slightly on how we’re curating content material on itch.io and the place yow will discover this curated content material.

How we’re curating

If you’ve stored up with the curation debate in video games, you’re most likely conversant in the development towards changing human selections with algorithms. To put it bluntly: We’re not tremendous desirous about that. One of the issues we’re proudest of is the range in the neighborhood on itch.io and the range within the video games hosted on the positioning. An over-reliance on algorithms sometimes narrows down suggestions to solely essentially the most “profitable” video games and has traditionally labored to the detriment of marginalized teams. We don’t need that. Reliance on algorithms additionally permits unhealthy actors to recreation the system. We additionally don’t need that. So we do issues the quaint manner: many of the content material on our entrance web page at any given time is hand-picked by somebody on workers. (We’ll go into element about what content material is and isn’t hand-curated within the subsequent part)

We’re proud to advocate video games we expect are attention-grabbing to the itch.io neighborhood and we’re consistently updating the entrance web page in order that there’s one thing new everytime you come again to the positioning. Is it plenty of work? Yeah. Is it value it? We assume so. Furthermore we strive to not restrict ourselves with strict guidelines about what we wish to function. What issues to us is spotlight artistic works that resonate with us and (hopefully) you, no matter which means.

Where we’re curating

So now that you understand how we curate, the place are you able to see these video games? One place is correct right here, the itch.io Blog! Once every week we spotlight 3 tasks with some quick write ups for every. These is perhaps indie darlings or secret masterpieces from recreation jams. Some of those aren’t even video games! You can learn the backlogs of itch.io Recommends right here. We additionally do extra rare interviews with builders and spotlights on particular video games.

What when you don’t wish to learn and might’t wait each week? This is when the beforehand talked about Featured Games part involves the rescue. Our workers spends plenty of time taking a look at video games on itch.io. We spend extra time than we think about anybody else would so we condense a few of what we’ve discovered onto the highest of our entrance web page. This is without doubt one of the quickest transferring areas of the positioning and I feel essentially the most approachable manner of beaming our suggestions proper into your pc.

If you wish to hear from us outdoors of the positioning itself we additionally do curation on our Twitter, Facebook, and sometimes in our e-mail digest. On Twitter and Facebook you may get updates from us day by day and our digest is a large curatorial haul that comes out semi steadily. These channels additionally speak about website happenings and upcoming jams/ tasks so there’s one thing for everybody in there!

Alright, now we’ve obtained to speak about our robots. We’ve obtained 100,000 tasks on our website now and whereas we have a look at plenty of video games day by day, we will’t have a look at all of them. That’s the place our robots are available. There is a portion of our entrance web page underneath the Recommended For You header that is simply video games that our robots assume you’ll like primarily based on what you’ve downloaded and performed up to now.

Finally we even have curation that comes from the neighborhood. Underneath the Featured Games part are the Fresh Games. This is a set of video games which were featured in customers’ collections across the website. If you need much more neighborhood curation you possibly can comply with different customers so you possibly can see their collections or simply try the collections themselves. Who is aware of, possibly you’ll even make a buddy out of it.

We’re actually happy with the quantity of curation that we do on the positioning, however we all know we will hold enhancing. Curation is a bit like swimming upstream and whereas no methodology is ideal we hope you discover some video games you’ve by no means seen earlier than by means of our efforts.