Questions, answered
FAQ
Every answer below is already stated in full on another page here — nothing on this page is a new claim. Each one links to where it comes from.
Questions
What is Velocity, and what range does it have?
Velocity is a weighted mean of accelerations across the counters itch.io and Roblox publish — a change in each counter's own weekly growth rate. It has no ceiling, no floor and a sign: it reads negative whenever the counters we could read grew more slowly this week than the week before, which is a normal reading rather than a fault. Reading Velocity as a percentage or a score out of one is a misreading — that 0-to-1 range belongs to confidence, not to Velocity.
What is confidence, and why does every ranked row carry it?
Confidence is two things multiplied: the share of Velocity's four-part ladder that could actually be measured for a game, and how much of a fortnight — days observed divided by 14, capped at one — it has been watched for. It is the one number on this site that runs 0 to 1. Most itch.io games have no community board, so a missing component is dropped from the weighted mean rather than scored as a zero, which is what keeps a one-component score comparable with a four-component one. Every ranked row carries confidence rather than hiding it behind a hover, because that is the number that says how much of the ladder actually went into a given row's Velocity.
Where does the data come from, and how often is it collected?
Public itch.io pages and Roblox's published charts, both read directly by four scheduled jobs. The itch.io harvest walks itch.io's own browse and tag listings, every six hours, and a full sweep of every tag board at 04:00 UTC. The itch.io deep read visits a watchlist of games for the counters a listing does not carry — topic views, comments, replies, devlog cadence — daily at 06:30 UTC. Roblox collection reads Roblox's published charts and then each tracked experience's own counters, daily at 05:45 UTC. The scoring pass touches no network at all: it reads what the other three wrote and produces the rankings this site shows, daily at 07:15 UTC.
Why can't the itch.io board and the Roblox board be compared?
itch.io publishes ratings, comments and community-board activity; Roblox publishes visits, favourites and votes — different quantities, measured on different populations, not two readings of the same thing. Velocity and confidence are computed the same way on both, but rank is dense within one source only: itch.io and Roblox each have their own rank 1, and no ranking on this site orders the two together. The one exception is a naming wave mined from game titles, which can have members on both platforms at once — but even there, its movement figure is a sum of two different units, and no page renders it as a percentage.
What does this site not know?
Four specific things. History begins the day the collector first reached a game — neither platform publishes a history, so there is no backfill, and a game that broke out earlier looks, to us, like a game that has always been large. A day the collector does not run is gone for good and cannot be filled in later. itch.io's own browse listings stop at page 200, so a game that appears and scrolls past that window between two harvests is never seen at all. And this site stores counts, positions, timestamps and a listing's own identifying fields — never a description, a comment, an image or a game file, which is why search here matches names rather than text.
How far ahead does a signal run?
It is not measured, and no page on this site puts a number on it. That the early counters move before the late ones is the thesis this site is built on — attention arrives before intent, and intent before a rating — and the lead-lag chart on every game page shows the shape of that order. How large the gap actually is has never been measured: anyone who quotes you a figure for it is guessing, not reading it off this data.
What counts as a flag on Scouted, and what confirms it?
A flag is the first day a game's Velocity reaches 0.20 with a confidence of at least 0.50. It is confirmed once, at least 30 days after that flag, the game's ratings on itch.io or upvotes on Roblox read at least 4 times what they read on the flag day, and have passed 200 or 1,000 outright. The outcome is graded on the least-weighted of the three counter rungs, never on Velocity itself — grading a call against the number that raised the flag would mean the flag and its own confirmation were the same measurement.
Who runs gameindustrytrends, and how is it funded?
Quod Soler runs it alone — writes the collector, the site and the Friday email. There is no team and no editorial staff. 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.
Is there a paid product?
Not yet. 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 does the site store when someone signs up for the email?
The address, the page it was typed on, and which of four options was picked: scout, studio, creator, or none of those. Nothing else — there is no analytics, no tag manager and no third-party script anywhere on this site. The address is not shared or sold, and nothing has been sent to it yet.
May I cite a figure from this site, and what should I not claim?
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. A full citation also states the date the figure was read — see https://gameindustrytrends.com/cite for the exact format — and should avoid the three things this site has never published: a lead-time figure, a hit rate, comprehensive coverage of itch.io.
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