There was a time where Gamejolt felt like a community to me. There were other users I regularly had chats with, and it used to be centered around sharing games.  But now, I feel like everything is being split into neatly curated sub-communities with no way of interacting with an audience.

Let’s start with my MAIN issue the website has. Open a browser and go to https://gamejolt.com/ . Two very different experiences may occur.

You are logged in

In this situation, you are no longer on a video game platform. This is just social media. There is ONE game on this page, and it sure looks really nice but where are all the others? Where are the games? To find them you need to click “explore”. This unneeded additional click will provide basically the same experience as not being logged in:

You aren’t logged in

You need to scroll down a bit before seeing this, but the front page puts a very big emphasis on communities. They’re a nice thing to have in some cases, however they take a huge space which could be devoted to showing games instead. Let’s scroll a bit more to see if we can find games.

Those are 6 really nice looking games, with very good thumbnails. However those are not the kind of games I’m looking for. I like the kind of games that I would be able to make. I like bad games, I like weird games, I like obscure games.  In other words, I like indie games. The 6 games above definitely fall somewhere into the indie spectrum, but it feels to me like they could also be on other major platforms such as steam or the epic games store. When I think about gamejolt, I think about all the weird games that could be played by streamers like vinesauce.

After several clicks in search of those kinds of games, I am greeted by this nice message which says a lot about the current state of gamejolt:

Now THAT’S more like it. This is the Gamejolt that I fondly remember. Those games are weird, with bad graphics, and probably break many copyright laws. This is the experience I need. Why do I have to go through so many hoops to find them? Most of them have 0 comments, no interactions. Among those bad games, there are definitely some really good ones with really good graphics and gameplay. Why are those not shown on the front page while others are?

The answer is curation. The staff at Gamejolt wants their front page to look as nice as possible. But this front page really isn’t representative of what people are looking for on the site. To find out what people really want, let’s take a look at the communities. There are a handful of featured communities, which are mostly about known IPs. No problem with that, it is after all a way for the site to attract players and is very needed.

However one thing bugs me: none of the games or IPs featured here are available on gamejolt. Sure, there is a community about Five Nights at Freddy’s which mostly centered around FNAF fangames, but Undertale/Among us/Robloc/Henry stickmin cannot be found on Gamejolt, and Pokémon/Minecraft/Super Mario/Kirby fangames are explicitly prohibited on this platform. (I know because I’ve suffered a few DMCAs myself for making Nintendo fangames)

After scrolling for a while I end up on the baldi’s basics community, which is about an actual Gamejolt game which is widely known on youtube. Why isn’t THIS community featured?

A side problem is that as a developer my main goal on Gamejolt is to get my game seen. However there are fan communities for each major title where most of the userbase posts, but where advertising for your own games is highly frowned upon (or gets you banned in some cases) and other gamedev communities where advertising is allowed but no players will actually see your content, only other developers who don’t have time to play games (I know because I am one of them)

Why is there so much content centered on games that are not on the site? Why does Gamejolt hide its successful but ugly titles?

Now for the reason I am posting this.

Gamejolt had a discord server. Did you know that? Well the server is now being removed. It was once seen as an alternative to the general website chat, and the site owners did their best to hide it as much as possible. Now it is being removed and there is no alternative to it.  

There exists of course a “gamejolt” community where you can talk about gamejolt. However it clearly says in its rules that it isn’t a general community. Where is that general community then? I want a place which is seen by all the userbase, devs and players alike. Gamejolt just doesn’t want to provide this place. Like they’re purposefully putting a barrier between devs and players. Like they want to be the only ones to decide what gets seen.

The mechanics of gamejolt

This website is just not what it used to be. I still will post my games on here, however I have little hope of being seen. There are many people who follow my games (if you’re reading this you probably are one of them) and I regularly get follow notifications. However what I don’t get is comments. What even does following a game mean? Should I post a fake update/devlog for my games to be seen? Everything seems to be highly convoluted, like they expect me to bring my audience from another website.

Players have no incentive to leave comments, so if you want any you end up with a weird comment trade logic where your audience becomes other gamedevs who also want comments.

In other words, the organic reach on Gamejolt is nearly zero if you’re not part of their curated selection. And the ways to be part of that selection are unclear to me (just make a good game with good graphics I guess?)

The things I wish worked better

-          I would like to see smaller games on the main page. Random games, not just the games gamejolt WANTS me to see. I want smaller games to have their chance at being seen too. That option for random games exists, but it is currently hidden behind layers of “you’re going the wrong way, proceed with caution”

-          I want a general chat. Somewhere everyone interacts. Stop separating the devs from the players.

-          It would be nice if exploration was rewarded. If players got some kind of badge for trying out new random games. Or maybe a list of games that are struggling due to a lack of ratings, that anyone can check to help. Basically it would be nice if Gamejolt was more like Newgrounds I guess?

TLDR; I want to play bad games and to get other users to play my bad games. I want better discoverability on Gamejolt but everything is done to prevent it.