Coverage

What this record does not cover

Each of these is a limit of the method rather than a backlog item, and none of them is visible in any figure above. They are the reasons a number on this site can be right and still not be the whole picture.

History begins when we started collecting

Neither platform publishes a history. itch.io shows a game’s counters as they are now, and nothing about what they were last month; Roblox does the same. Every number here is a snapshot we took, so the record starts on the day the collector started and there is no earlier data to load. A game that broke out before we began looks, to us, like a game that has always been large.

A day we miss is gone for good

Because the counters cannot be read retroactively, a day the collector did not run is a day that cannot be filled in later. It leaves a hole in every window that crosses it. That is what the grid above is for, and it is why a day with no run is drawn differently from a day with a failed one — the second we can retry, the first is already lost.

itch.io’s browse pages stop at page 200

New games are found by walking itch.io’s own listings, and those listings do not paginate past the two hundredth page. A game that appears and scrolls beyond that window between two harvests is never seen at all — not late, never. The six-hourly harvest exists to narrow that gap; it cannot close it.

We store metrics and metadata, never page content

What we keep is counts, positions, timestamps and the identifying fields a listing carries: title, author, tags, links. No descriptions, no comment text, no images, no game files. It is why search here matches names and not text, and why nothing on this site reproduces anything a developer wrote. The crawler identifies itself on every request and says so at /bot.

The two sources are not comparable, with one exception

itch.io publishes ratings, comments and community-board activity; Roblox publishes visits, favourites and votes. They are different quantities on different populations, so a rank is dense within one board and means nothing across the two. No query on this site orders them together, and no board mixes them.

The exception is a naming wave. Tags belong to itch.io and genres to Roblox, but a phrase is mined out of the titles themselves, so a wave can have members on both platforms at once — and its member count, its 7-day movement and its Velocity are then figures spanning the two. That such a wave has no share of the day’s movement is not an oversight: adding a rating delta to a visit delta compares numbers four orders of magnitude apart, so share is NULL for every mined phrase, always, and no page renders one as a percentage.

The movement figure is the one to read with that in mind, because it is the sum itself rather than a ratio of it: on a wave carried by games on both platforms it adds rating movement to visit movement, and visits are the larger by orders of magnitude. Every trend page that shows one says so beside it. It is directional — the wave is growing, or it is not — and it is not one consistent unit.

How Velocity is computed from all of this, and what it cannot tell you →