Hot take: the biggest constraint on indie developers isn’t “visibility” it’s “interest.” The most common question I hear is, “how do I get more visibility on my game?” But my theory is that games get plenty of visibility, it is just that the majority of game shoppers and content creators saw the game and went “eh… maybe…seems ok… I guess.” The game just isn’t interesting enough to make shoppers buy it on day one, or content creators to make videos of it (and play it again and again), or to get players to recommend it to their friends. A lot of people see your game, it just gets lost in the noise.
Before you spend years working on a game, you need to see if the game has *the magic* which is my general term for that special spark that some games have that make people go crazy for it.
My theory is that players can see whether a game has *the magic* within the first month or two of development. The magic comes from the combination of graphic style, perspective, genre, and hook. The Magic doesn’t magically appear after years when the 5th art pass is complete or after you add that cool mini boss to level 5 that players encounter 12 hours into the main story line.
What does the magic look like?
From last-week’s-blog I told you how the narrative-puzzle-game The Roottrees are Dead saw amazing numbers even on itch.io. Designer Jeremy Johson got $3000 in tips in a month, Day9 went gaga for it, AV Club named it one of the best games of the year. Robin Ward was so impressed after playing the game he put aside his pet project and offered to fund and co-develop the Steam version of the game. People know right away when a game is exciting.
The same thing happened to the team behind Peglin. They put out a game jam game on itch.io, everyone loved it, so they decided to turn it into a full Steam game that earned over a million dollars in a week.
In my next blog post, I will be sharing more tales of developers who put out a game jam game, or a side project that only took a couple months to develop, and then after promising itch.io numbers decided to make a full Steam game that sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
But for now, let’s just look at the numbers on itch.
The scale for itch is different.
Itch.io has a very special audience of taste makers who spelunk into the depths of every game on the platform. They can look past simplified graphics, or janky gameplay. When they see a diamond in the rough, they surface it. There aren’t many people that are like them, so the traffic you see from itch.io looks a lot smaller than the traffic you see from Steam.
So I put out a survey about itch.io traffic to see what good looks like. 169 developers sent me their stats and what they did to promote their itch game. My goal is to try and quantify what good traffic looks like from itch.io so that you might be able to determine whether your game has *the magic* and is worth posting on Steam.
Methodology
The way games “blow up” on itch isn’t exactly like Steam. The Steam algorithm is all based on giving every game tiny bits of exposure and if the numbers look good, giving more, and more and more. This is how Discovery Queue Works and this is how Steam Next Fest works. It is an engine to showcase games for years after launch.
Itch.io on the other hand does not focus on doubling down on games. Sure there are some featured sections, and trending tags, but there are so many games being uploaded to itch.io that they cycle through them much more quickly. Itch.io doesn’t push that sustained traffic like Steam does.
Basically there are 3 levels of success on itch.io:
🥈NOTHING: After the game jam, a game is uploaded and players don’t think it is interesting so it disappears in to the depths of itch.io. And the depths are SUPER DEEP. Like 200,000+ games as of 2019. Those games get 0 views after their initial launch. Like literally 0. LIFETIME VIEWS: <5000
🥇MINOR featuring – Sometimes itch.io charts will feature the game as “trending” or the game will be one of the “Top 10 Ludum Dare Entries” and get a short fleeting featuring. LIFETIME VIEWS: 5000-10,000
💎THE MAGIC – Usually games at this tier also achieved the 🥇 GOLD visibility triggers but also got the itch.io twitter account to post about them, their trailer was uploaded to the itch.io youtube page, and itch.io store-front featuring, Also the game gets discovered by big youtubers. LIFETIME VIEWS: 10,001-1,000,000+
I reached out to the developer of Die in the Dungeon who had 💎 tier featuring when itch.io WAY BEFORE it became a hit steam game. Itch.io tweeted about their game way back in 2021. Here is the result of that tweet. See how twitter featuring got them 10K views in a day. That one day of traffic was more than 🥇 games get in a lifetime.
Because itch.io games have this hit or not visibility profile, you can tell what happened to the game just asking “what was your lifetime view count.” It doesn’t matter as much how long the game has been live because for most games on itch.io, they get 0 traffic after that first month.
So all data here is lifetime stats.
Views
Each blue bar is a different game. Despite the egalitarian approach that the Itch.io brand exudes, they also have the typical “hockey stick” difference in visibility that you see on Steam. An exclusive percentage of the games get most of the visibility.
It is just a fact of life, when a game has THE MAGIC there is no stopping it, no matter the platform.
Total views aggregate data:
Average 54,483
70 percentile 12,150
Median 1,582
30 percentile 397.5
Downloads
Many of the games were web-only but of the downloadable games here are the stats:
Total downloads aggregate data:
Average: 6017
70th percentile: 966.4
Median: 113
30th percentile: 32.6
Browser plays
Itch.io also supports playable in the browser WebGL versions of the games. Here are the stats.
Browser vs Downloadable?
Obviously, you will get more players if the game can be started in the browser, but how much?
It isn’t even close:
The blue bars are browser plays and red are downloads. Note that many games have both which is why you see the mix of colors.
All stats
If we look at how the 3 metrics compare across the data set you can see how important browser-based play is.
| Views | Browser Play (% of views) | Downloads (% of views) | |
| Average | 54,482 | 24,428 (44.8%) | 58,976 (10%) |
| 70th Percentile | 13,380 | 4982 (37%) | 809 (6%) |
| Median | 1582 | 590 (37%) | 110 (6.9%) |
| 30th Percentile | 418 | 113 (27%) | 26 (6.3%) |
What that chart is saying is a game at the 70th percentile will get about 13,000 views and 37% of the people who view the game will play the demo if it is browser based but only 6% of the viewers will play the game if it is download-only.
But that is aggregated data across all games in the survey. What happens if I look at a sampled game in that range.
For example deckbuilder Demon Bluff got 14,200 lifetime views after 1 month on Itch.io. The game is playable in browser and got 9,475 plays which is an amazing 67% play through.
Another game got 9,399 lifetime views and 6,198 browser plays or a 65% play through.
A game in my survey that was download only got 8745 lifetime views and 1765 downloads or a 20% play through.
Making your game playable In-browser matters A LOT! Basically 3x more people will play your game if it is downloadable.
What promotion separates the top tier games from others?
Many many games in my survey treated itch.io as a place to store their game after a game jam. They weren’t trying to promote it the way you try to grind for wishlists on Steam.
So the marketing approaches were much more serendipitous. They were kind of surprising. The top tier games were almost always like “we didn’t do anything, people just started streaming it” or “I don’t know, we didn’t do anything, itch.io just tweeted about it for some reason”.
Here are a couple quotes from developers about how their game got thousands of views on itch.
“Multiple streamers played it in the past, even when we didn’t have a Steam page yet. Also featured by itch.io itself occasionally.”
“Streamers: Didn’t reach out to streamers, but they played of their own accord: HelloYinny (64k views) + Mr Clockworks (30k views) on Youtube.”
“JackSepticEye played it on his youtube channel, it was on the top of the trending lists for a while.”
“Youtube, Rock Paper Shotgun, Itch.io featuring”
“It was the #1 played game on itch for several days and was in the top games played for several weeks. A lot of streamers played it, I think the biggest was CaseOh and the video got 1.6 million views”
“I think the initial boost I got was from someone posting about it on the something awful forums. Then people started sharing it on bluesky and on discord, and then it took off more once it was featured on Bontegames.com”
“It was featured on itch’s front page (which had by far the biggest impact). They also uploaded a video of the game on their youtube channel, and a few small youtubers made videos of it as well.”
“We got covered in the Itch-YouTube trend “Three random games” by a few streamers, then it continued from there – the biggest one being 8-bit Ryan. Youtubers like to put their gameplay in the comments, especially in horror, so I think that also triggered others in “oh! they’ve done it, so can I! and it’s free!”
Notice how effortless it is? How it just happens? This is THE MAGIC. People are looking for interesting games. If yours is interesting, it will be found.
Summary
You will not make money from Itch.io.
Nobody does.
BUT that doesn’t matter. It isn’t about the money (man). The real strength of Itch.io is that it is a great place to quickly and cheaply test out a game idea to see if it has *THE MAGIC* and people like it.
The absolute worst thing you can do is spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on an idea that nobody is interested in. Itch.io solves this problem for you. You can put out a 1-2 month long game-jam project, ship it for free, see if it has THE MAGIC, but if it doesn’t, move on to game #2.
When I put out the survey a lot of developers got very defensive about itch.io. They would tell me “well I just uploaded the game, it was just a gamejam. I wasn’t meaning to market it. I didn’t even tell anyone that I uploaded it” That is totally fair! You don’t need to.
The reason I did this survey was that I have seen time and time again developers upload just a silly “weekend project” but because it had *the magic* it took off without them doing anything. People would email them out of the blue and say “are you going to add more levels to your game?” And the developer is like “ugh it was just a game jam project, go away.
If you have uploaded an itch.io project, go check the stats. Compare them to the benchmarks. I saw a couple games in my survey that had diamond level traffic and no corresponding Steam page. They might have a best seller on their hands.
What I learned from studying The Roottrees are Dead is that despite having a full, free game on itch.io, you can turn around and upgrade the game, add more content, and sell it to a whole new audience on Steam.
In my next blog I will detail several games that went out with a quick project that just took a couple months to developer, got early interest on itch, and then the team scaled up the game and sold it on Steam. Basically, make a bunch of prototypes that each take a few months to put together, upload them to itch.io and see which one “hits.” This is a much more sustainable way of picking projects than picking a game, spending years working on it, and then launching it hoping that it is what players like.