13 barn owls in a trenchcoat<p><strong>How reviews and ratings work on Itch</strong></p><p>If you buy games, books, zines, assets, software, music or anything else on itch, please leave ratings!</p><p>They affect the order in which items are displayed in collections and jams, as well as in ranked search results.</p><p>Itch's top-rated lists weight games by both number of ratings and score, but aggregate ratings of less than five stars tend to disproportionately skew games' appearance on these lists downwards, so a template game with 18 reviews but a perfect five stars will appear several rows above a well-regarded commercial release with more ratings but an aggregate score of 4.8 stars.</p><p>This isn't a philosophy everyone can get behind, but it can thus be worth regarding ratings you leave as a Steam-style thumbs-up: if you like a thing, give it five stars.</p><p>When you leave a rating, you're given the option of leaving a review. The creator of the the thing you're reviewing will be able to read that, but it won't appear on the item's page - only an aggregated total of review scores appears, under the <em>More information</em> pull-down at the bottom of the description on its itch page.</p><p>If you want other people to read your words about that thing you like, you have to write it as a comment on the product's page.</p><p>You can also add items you like to collections and recommend them to your friends that way. People whose stuff you include in a collection can see that it's been included a collection and, if your collection is public, are shown a link to your collection in their analytics pages. </p><p>(We don't get to see your private collections, just that the number of collections our thing is in has gone up.)</p><p><a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/Itch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Itch</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/gamedev" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>gamedev</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/GamesPublishing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>GamesPublishing</span></a></p>