If you haven't heard, GameJolt recently announced a Boosts feature that has been widely criticized by various developers. GameJolt staff responded with a "don't listen to the haters" attitude and is now blocking games of these developers from appearing in their algorithms, preventing them from growing organically.

I've been a critic of GameJolt's direction for years, although I rarely made that public outside of the occasional shitposts making fun of their new features. They have been gradually abandoning the developers that made their site what it is today for the past 7+ years. The "Game" part of GameJolt has been completely neglected in favor of social features that are getting more and more disconnected from what brought people to this site in the first place.

People have requested new game features for years and they were completely ignored. Even something as simple as support for Ogg Vorbis audio files for game soundtracks is still not a thing, and you are forced to use the outdated MP3 format instead. The only feature I can think of that was added recently was the ability to reorder the games on your game list, but that's about it. If anything, they've been trying to HIDE the games from the website. Putting the games on a separate "store" page instead of the main page, having to scroll down on dev profiles to see their games, making people's game libraries inaccessible normally so you can't see what games they follow or their playlists, those are just some examples.

This used to be THE place for indie games, but this neglect, the lack of maturity from the staff, the very clear bias they have towards certain people (you know who I'm talking about), and other things like the NSFW game ban that was handled horribly, led to most indie devs leaving the site for itch. At this point, GameJolt is only good for fangames. FNaF, Sonic and Undertale fangames have been carrying this site for some time now. But apparently even those creators are getting fucked over now.

I know a lot of FNaF fangame devs are switching to itch. As much as I'd like for that to work, I highly doubt it will. This community has been completely tied to GameJolt for 10 years, and unless GameJolt suddenly shut down, I don't see a move ever being successful. People have tried to put their games on itch before and they got little to no attention. Itch does not promote natural growth like GameJolt does. The only way to get attention for your game is by using other platforms like Twitter, and those websites have completely different audiences. And I know for a fact most of the fans here on GameJolt probably aren't willing to make the switch to those other platforms.

That and the fact that money from the creator program, even though it isn't much, has been quite helpful for me, makes it a lot harder for me to leave GameJolt right now. I have been considering posting my games on itch for a while, and now might be a good time to do it, but I am definitely not leaving GameJolt any time soon.

I know very well making this post might make me a target for a shadowban, so I would just like to remind people I have other social media:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Rhadamus

Itch: https://rhadamus44.itch.io/

Twitter: https://x.com/Rhadamus44

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rhadamus44.bsky.social

I don't use these much right now, but if a shadowban happens I will start posting more in these places.