Citing this site
Cite
How to cite a figure, ranking or finding from this site so a later reader can check it, and what the licence behind it grants and reserves.
The licence
Figures, rankings and findings drawn from this site may be quoted, cited and linked freely, with attribution to gameindustrytrends and a link to the page the figure came from.
Bulk redistribution or resale of the underlying dataset — taking the tables themselves rather than quoting a figure out of them — is reserved.
How to cite a figure
A citation from this site states four things: the site's name, the figure itself, the date it was observed, and the URL of the page it came from, in that order.
gameindustrytrends, <the figure>, observed <YYYY-MM-DD>, <the page's URL>
Worked example, against a game that does not exist — this page reads no table, so any real figure printed here would be stale the day it shipped:
gameindustrytrends, Velocity +0.612 for Hollow Meridian, observed 2026-08-18, https://gameindustrytrends.com/game/itch/hollow-meridian
The route shape is real: this site’s game pages live at /game/[source]/[slug], and /game/itch/hollow-meridian above is shaped exactly like one, even though Hollow Meridian is not a game we track.
Why the date is not optional
Every counter behind this site is re-read every day, some of them more often than that, and every figure on a game or trend page is a reading taken on one of those days — not a constant the game holds. That is the whole reason this site exists: neither itch.io nor Roblox shows anything but the current count, so the only way to know whether a number is moving is to have written down what it was before.
Which means a figure keeps moving after it is quoted. The worked example above states a Velocity for a game on one specific day; by the next day that game's Velocity may already read differently, and nothing prevents it moving again the day after that. Anyone who repeats a figure from this site without the day it was read is stating something that was true once as though it still holds — and an undated figure copied forward stops matching the page it came from. How fast that happens for any given game is not something this record measures.
So the date is not decoration on a citation; it is the part that makes the rest of it checkable. With it, a reader can open the same page, read the counters recorded that day, and confirm the figure. Without it, there is nothing to check against — the number could be six months old, could have been misread, or could simply be wrong, and a citation with no date gives a reader no way to tell the difference.
Check the limits before you cite
A figure from this site is only as trustworthy as the method behind it and the record it was drawn from. Both are written out, and a citing reader should check them rather than repeat a number blind.
What not to claim when citing
Three specific overclaims this site can already rule out for you, because each is a number or a scope this site has never stated.
No lead-time figure
The counters a game accumulates do not all move at once — attention arrives before intent, and intent before a rating. How far ahead they run is not something these counters measure, and no page on this site puts a figure on it. A citation should not attribute one to us either.
No hit rate
Calls made while a game was still small are recorded, and the page listing them states its own standard: they are calls that landed, not a hit rate, and not a count of every flag this site has ever raised. Cite one as a single dated call — not as evidence of an accuracy figure this site has never published.
Not comprehensive coverage of itch.io
This site holds a few thousand of the roughly 1.5 million games itch.io hosts, and it cannot say how many there actually are. A citation should name what was measured — a game, a tag, a board — not imply it speaks for the platform.
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