About
About
gameindustrytrends re-reads the public counters on thousands of itch.io games and Roblox experiences every day, and ranks them by how fast those counters are accelerating. It is run by one person, it is free, and there is nothing on it that anyone has paid to be on.
Who runs it
Quod Soler — writes the collector, the site and the Friday email. There is no team, no company behind it and no editorial staff: one person reads the code, runs the collector and answers the mail. That is worth saying plainly rather than hiding behind a plural, because the alternative on a site like this is a “we” that nobody can write to.
Why it exists
Neither itch.io nor Roblox publishes a history. Both show a game’s counters as they are right now and nothing about what they were last month, so the question a scout actually has — is this thing speeding up? — cannot be answered from either site, by anyone, at any price. It can only be answered by somebody who wrote the numbers down every day beforehand.
That is the whole product. A collector reads the public counters daily and keeps them; a scoring pass turns the record into an acceleration; the boards rank by it. The counters a game accumulates do not all move at once — attention arrives before intent, and intent before a rating — so the early ones carry information the late ones have not shown yet. How far ahead they run is not something these counters measure, and no page on this site puts a figure on it.
How it is paid for
There are no ads on this site, no sponsored placement, no affiliate links, no trackers and no analytics, and there is nothing to buy.
So nothing here is paid for by anyone except the person running it, and no entry on any board can be bought — which matters for one reason, and it is not modesty: a ranking that could be paid for would not be worth reading.
There are no investors and no outside owners: the person named above owns it outright, which is stated here on their word rather than derived from anything a reader can check on this site.
The public boards and the Friday radar stay free, permanently. The intention is that publishers, acquirers and investors eventually pay for something the boards are not: a short, human-read list of the games worth a conversation this week, with the counter history behind each one. That is a different product from a leaderboard with alerts bolted on, and it is worth paying for only once this site has a record of calls that landed — so there is no price here, no checkout and nothing to buy. None of it exists yet, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
What we commit to
These are descriptions of what the software already does, not intentions. Where there is a page that lets you check one, it is linked under it.
We store metrics and metadata, and nothing else
Counts, chart positions, timestamps, and the identifying fields a public listing carries — title, author, tags, links. No descriptions, no comment text, no screenshots, no images, no game files. Nothing a developer wrote is copied into this database, which is why search here matches names rather than text.
We link out, always
Every game we hold has a page here, and the most prominent thing on it is the link to the game's own page on itch.io or Roblox. We are a way of finding something, not a place to keep a reader from the thing they found.
We never republish anyone's page
There is no cached copy, no mirror, no reader mode and no scraped artwork anywhere on this site. What we publish are numbers we computed from counters we read, and the arithmetic that turned one into the other is written down.
The crawler says who it is on every request
It sends a User-Agent naming this project and pointing at a page that lists every host and path it asks for, how fast it goes, and how to slow it down or block it outright. It reads robots.txt and obeys it. Nothing about it is disguised as a browser.
The only things this site writes down about you are an address and one dropdown
There are no analytics, no tag manager, no session recording and no third-party scripts of any kind. Every page here is served from our own origin, fonts included, so your browser is never asked to fetch anything from anyone else. One route is not a page, and this is the whole of the exception: when something shares a link, the picture that appears is drawn by /api/og on our server, and for a title whose alphabet or emoji our own faces do not carry it fetches that one glyph from fonts.googleapis.com, fonts.gstatic.com or cdn.jsdelivr.net. That happens while rendering an image nobody is waiting on, and never on a page you are reading. The newsletter form is the single write this site performs, and all it writes is the address, the page you typed it on, and which of the four you picked — scout, studio, creator, or none of those. It is not shared and not sold. Nothing has been sent to it yet.
How to reach a human
bot@gameindustrytrends.com, which is read by the person named above. It is the same address the crawler publishes, and it is deliberately the only one: one mailbox that is monitored is worth more than two, one of which is not.
Write about anything — a number that looks wrong, a game we have mis-attributed, a request to be left out of the boards, or a server we are being a nuisance to. If it is the last of those, the crawler’s own page lists every host and path it asks for and the robots.txt token that stops it, which is faster than waiting for a reply: it identifies itself as gameindustrytrends-bot and never exceeds 2 requests a second.
Get the Friday radar.
One email a week: what gained the most Velocity on both boards, and the numbers behind each one. Nothing else is sent to this address.
We ask so the Friday radar is written for the people actually reading it.
no spam · one email a week. We store the address, the page you typed it on, and which of the four you picked — nothing else about you, and it is not shared or sold.