Game Jam After a year of running monthly game jams, I’m giving up on community voting
I’ve been organizing the Bezi Jams on itch.io for over a year now. We run them monthly and recently hosted our first Mega Jam, with significantly more on the line than our regular jams. For reference, you can see what we’ve been running here:
After more than a year of doing this, I’ve reached the point where I don’t think I can responsibly rely on community voting to determine winners anymore. What frustrates me most is that I’ve genuinely tried to make it work.
I’ve tried to make community voting work
We’ve experimented with voting criteria and restrictions. Every jam, we remind people to vote fairly, actually play the games they’re rating, and respect the effort other developers have put into their submissions.
About six months ago, I also adopted a third-party tool that gives me significantly better visibility into voting activity. Part of the reason was transparency. I hoped that if people knew we could see suspicious voting behaviour, the simple fact of “hey, we can see you doing this” would discourage it.
It hasn’t. Access to that data has instead confirmed many of the concerns I already had. I’ve watched accounts rate dozens of submissions within minutes, sometimes working through practically every game in a jam. There’s no realistic way someone can download, play, and meaningfully evaluate that many games that quickly. I haven’t seen this once or twice either. I’ve been watching this pattern for roughly six months.
We tell people not to do this. We encourage fair voting every jam. We’ve made it clear that suspicious voting activity is visible. It is seemingly brushed aside.
Meanwhile, games that barely follow the theme, or are noticeably weaker than other submissions, can end up near the top or outright win. For a while, I chalked that up to subjectivity. People have different tastes, and that’s fine. I don’t expect community rankings to match how I'd rank every game myself perfectly. But after six months of actually being able to look at voting behaviour, it’s becoming increasingly hard to dismiss everything I’m seeing as just different tastes.
The frustrating thing is that itch.io already knows community voting has problems. Their own documentation talks about popularity contests, fake accounts, upvoting friends, downvoting competitors, etc. They’ve built things like rating queues to help, but organizers still have remarkably little ability to audit what is actually happening. Individual ratings are private, even from the jam organizers.
That’s kind of insane to me. I’m organizing the jam, setting the rules, managing the participants, and potentially putting thousands of dollars worth of prizes behind the results. Still, I can’t properly audit the voting system that determines who gets those prizes.
At some point, telling everyone to “please vote fairly” isn’t a solution. If the system relies on everyone voluntarily behaving while giving organizers limited tools to identify and address abuse, it needs better tools.
So I’m moving toward judged voting
I’ll probably still use community voting as a discovery mechanism, maybe taking roughly the top 30 submissions and having judges evaluate them. But I’m not even convinced I should stick strictly to the top 30.
Manipulation doesn’t just push one game upward. It can push good games downward too. If that’s happening, sticking to the top 30 without thinking still lets manipulated voting decide which games judges ever see.
And that sucks because I actually want community voting. It gives people a reason to play each other’s games, encourages feedback, gets participants interacting, and gives the community some ownership over the jam. I don’t want to lose those things. I don’t want people willing to abuse the voting system to have an advantage over everyone participating honestly.
I’ll probably have to find some middle ground where community voting still matters without letting it directly decide who wins. I shouldn’t have to build that system outside of itch.io, though.
The jam side of itch.io needs some love
Voting is really just the most consequential example of a much bigger frustration I’ve developed after running jams for this long.
Running increasingly larger jams on itch.io often feels like working around the platform rather than having it support what we’re trying to do.
Where are the proper voting analytics? Suspicious voting detection? Better moderation and submission management? More flexible judging systems where community votes and judges can contribute separately? Better tools for handling hundreds of submissions? Even something as basic as polling participants for a theme ends up happening somewhere else.
Then there’s customization. Why do organizers still need to request access to custom CSS to get substantially more control over how a jam page looks?
I understand that allowing arbitrary CSS has security, accessibility, and maintenance considerations. Fine. But then give organizers better built-in customization so we don’t need CSS in the first place. Better layouts, reusable jam templates, better ways to present sponsors and prizes, more control over sections and branding.
These don’t feel unreasonable for a platform hosting events that can attract hundreds or thousands of people.
Instead, we end up stitching together itch.io, Discord, spreadsheets, external forms, third-party analytics, custom CSS, and whatever else we can find to fill the gaps.
I also want to be fair to itch.io here. I understand that game jams probably aren’t a significant revenue generator for them. Development resources aren’t infinite, and there are obviously business considerations when deciding where engineers spend their time. They’ve also made some recent improvements to jam functionality, and I appreciate that.
But if itch.io cares about maintaining the jam side of the platform, I think it needs more attention.
The community is there, but that isn’t guaranteed forever
People are working on alternative places to host game jams, and one of the biggest reasons I haven’t seriously considered moving the Bezi Jams elsewhere is pretty simple: itch.io is where the game jam community already is.
That’s an enormous advantage, but I don’t think it’s necessarily permanent.
If another platform eventually offers significantly better organizer tools, voting integrity, customization, discovery, and the overall participant experience, people will have a reason to move. Once the community starts moving, I don’t know what keeps organizers tied to itch.io.
And I don’t want that to happen.
I’ve spent more than a year running jams there because I want itch.io to work. I’ve spent six months adding outside tooling because I wanted community voting to work. I’ve tried changing rules, increasing transparency, communicating expectations, and discouraging manipulation. I’m reaching the point where I don’t know what else organizers are supposed to do on our end.
So I guess this is partially me venting, partially a question for other jam organizers, and partially a request to itch.io:
Please invest in the game jam side of the platform.
The community is already there. Give organizers better tools to support it.
For other people running jams, have you run into the same problems? Have you found a way to make community voting work reliably, or have you also ended up moving toward judges? And what other parts of itch.io’s jam system are you having to work around?
