[FEATURE] Increased Rating Visibility & Protections

[msprijatelj]

Is your feature request related to a problem? As a customer, I would like to be able to easily see ratings and reviews for projects in order to make an informed purchase.

In addition, as a publisher, I would like my projects' ratings and reviews to be visible, but only submitted by customers who have downloaded my projects, in order to more accurately demonstrate the quality of my work to potential customers.

Describe the solution you'd like To cover both the customer and publisher cases, I would appreciate the following changes:

• Making a project's aggregate rating more visible, without having to use the "rating" search or expand "More Information" on a given project.
• If a project has written reviews, make them public to customers.
• Restrict ratings to only customers who have registered a project to their account, either by purchasing or downloading it. Ideally implement a 24-hour "quiet period" after purchase, to encourage taking time to actually try the product before leaving a review.
• If publisher comfort is a concern, implement an opt-in/opt-out methodology to the above changes.

UPDATE: An additional nice-to-have would be opt-in/out notifications for publishers when one of their projects receives a new rating or review.

Describe alternatives you've considered The comments section could function as a sort of "public review" space, but since publishers can delete comments, it makes them unreliable. Furthermore, it also shares the current issue with ratings and reviews, where anyone can leave a comment on a project, regardless of whether they purchased or downloaded the project (which is fine for comments, in my opinion, but less so for ratings and reviews).

[sosasees]

Ideally implement a 24-hour "quiet period" after purchase, to encourage taking time to actually try the product before leaving a review.

not all games are so long that it makes sense to make the quiet period this long. most games on itch are shorter. the quiet period should be adjustable by the admins of the project. for gratis games, it should also start when pressing "play" to start the web version.

some paid games could be the full version in the web version, and some gratis games could be a demo version in the web version, so the admins should be able to choose for games with any price class if the quiet period starts after playing the web version or only after downloading — or even having no quiet period, which makes sense for game pages with no web game and no download, like Dwellers of the Mountain's Forest or old Unity games (not planned to be finished)

[sosasees]

i am the kind of player who likes how itch hides ratings. i don't want bad ratings to keep me from checking possibly really cool games. i have played quite a few badly‑rated games that i really like and well‑rated games i dislike.

i want to keep the classic itch experience of checking out a game by its presentation and checking the ratings only when i find it necessary.

itch is not like Steam or Google Play Store, which need to put user ratings front‑and‑center because they're overrun by clearly low‑quality apps. itch is a place where developers blur the lines of what is and isn't a good game, and likewise players have much more differing mindsets what makes a game good or bad, so a review written with one mindset might not help a player with a different mindset.

[sosasees]

i would make written reviews more visible just by adding the link "Read reviews" next to the star rating in "More information"