The Itch Market Brief

The fast chart is not a ladder to the slow one

Issue #0 · Week of November 1 to 7, 2026

Itch runs two public game charts, and they reward opposite things. Top Games, 72 seats, rewards staying: 57 percent of the games on it on Nov 1 were still there on Nov 7. New & Popular, 36 seats, rewards arriving: only 2 of its 36 games from Nov 1 lasted the week. Most developers assume the second chart feeds the first, that a game breaks on New & Popular and climbs into Top Games. In our first week of daily tracking, Nov 1 to 7, that mostly did not happen. A launch therefore has two separate problems, getting seen and staying seen, and the fast chart only solves the first one, for a few days.

Top Games is hard to enter and hard to leave

A seat on Top Games is defended by the games already holding seats, and most of them hold. Of the 72 games on it on Nov 1, 41 were still there on Nov 7, 57 percent held across the full week, while 111 different games passed through those 72 seats in the same seven days (our daily tracking, Nov 1 to 7).

New & Popular turns over almost completely. Only 2 of its 36 games from Nov 1 were still on it on Nov 7, and 93 different games passed through its 36 seats in the week. A game gets days there, not weeks, and then it leaves the chart, replaced or not.

Most games get days, not weeks

Across the week, the median game on Top Games charted for 4 days. 37 games lasted the full 7 days. 12 games appeared for a single day and were gone. The chart's population is a small class of holders and a large class of visitors.

A new game's realistic first-week outcome is a few days of visibility. Planning a launch around a full week on either chart is planning around the exception.

The overlap is not a pipeline

On Nov 7, 20 games sat on both charts at once. Read quickly, that looks like the fast chart feeding the slow one. The week's tracking says otherwise. Of those 20, only 3 arrived in a way that looks like a climb from New & Popular into Top Games during the week: The Devil's in the Details reached Top Games on Nov 4, Scritchy Scratchy on Nov 5, Goodboy Galaxy on Nov 6. Four of the 20 were already on Top Games on Nov 1, including Dating Killmulator, which climbed inside Top Games from #62 to #1, and Slice & Dice; both held New & Popular seats the whole time. The other 13 first appeared on Top Games between Nov 2 and Nov 6 with no climb from the fast chart visible beforehand.

So crossover happens, and it is rare: 3 of 20 this week. Most Top Games movement in a week is veterans holding their seats and churn in the middle of the chart, not new games breaking in from New & Popular.

That leaves a question one week of data cannot answer: do the games that do cross over keep their Top Games seats longer than games that were never on New & Popular? The tracking now follows that specifically, and future issues will report it. Until then, a launch plan that counts on the fast chart delivering a main-chart seat is counting on the rarest path the data shows.

Three of the overlap games held top-5 seats on both charts at once on Nov 7: Dating Killmulator, Goodboy Galaxy (for GBA), and Scritchy Scratchy. Two of the three are the crossover cases above. The third, Killmulator, is the veteran case: a chart regular that went to #1 inside the main chart.

The top of itch is story games, and most of them are free

Visual novels are not a corner of the main chart. On Nov 7 they held 39 of its 72 seats, 54 percent (chart snapshot, Nov 7). Simulation was second with 9 seats. Every other genre held 4 seats or fewer. Three of the top 5 games that day were visual novels, including the #1.

Almost nobody charges. Only 15 of the 72 Top Games on Nov 7 show a price at all, 21 percent. On New & Popular it was 10 of 36, 28 percent.

Story games are what this chart's audience shows up for: more than half the main chart is visual novels, and four fifths of it is free. A game that is neither starts colder. It has to win its first clicks from people who came for something else, and its page has to do that work in the first screen, because the chart will not carry it on genre momentum.

What holds a seat is a reason to come back

The charts can show a seat being held. They cannot show the work holding it. That work is the other half of this issue, "The leaders, and what they're doing": four profiles of games that held Top Games seats this week. The Freak Circus published the names of endings it has not built, and showed up in person while its thread was young. Mindustry's players answer each other's questions, after years of updates filled the thread with people who can. Dating Killmulator kept patching in public while its surge week ran. Slice & Dice charges $18 and lets a 4.91 rating do its marketing. Four different habits. Each one gives players a specific reason to come back after the first click, and that, as far as one week of charts can show it, is the whole mechanism.

The leaders, and what they're doing

Top Games seats are held, not launched into: of the 72 games on the chart on Nov 1, 41 were still there on Nov 7, and the median game that passed through lasted 4 days (111 different games in the week, our daily tracking, Nov 1 to 7). The four games below all held their seats that week, or took one and kept it, and each one did it a different way.

Two of the four are dating games, both classed as visual novels on itch, the genre that holds 39 of this chart's 72 seats. The other two are a factory game and a dice game, and the set's prices run from free to $18.

The Freak Circus (Garula): the community is the content plan

Publish your roadmap by name, and show up in person while the thread is young. An unfinished game can hold a chart seat that way, because its players always know what they are waiting for.

The Freak Circus is a free 18+ horror romance visual novel, still listed as a prototype at version 0.2, and its numbers say the unfinished part is doing the work. It sat in the top 30 on Top Games all week, #28 on Nov 1 and #27 on Nov 7, charting 6 of the week's 7 days (our daily tracking, Nov 1 to 7). Its thread holds 9,355 comments, more than any other game that held a chart seat this week, and its rating is 4.9 across 11,638 ratings (game page, read Nov 7). Finished games with threads this size exist. A prototype with one is running on something other than the game itself.

Start with the page. The description opens with two named characters, a silent obsessive and his rival, and the threat that one of them will cross your path. It casts the fantasy before it mentions a feature. Then it does the thing the whole profile is about: it lists the endings it has not built yet, by name, as a public roadmap. The thread reads that list as a schedule. In the newest 69 comments (Nov 2 to 7), about one post in five argues for a specific character's route, and requests for the next named piece of story make up about one in six. Generic praise stays under one post in ten. These are not fans being patient. They are readers working from a table of contents, asking where the unwritten chapters are.

The second half of it happened earlier and is easy to miss. Of the 90 oldest posts in the thread (mid-2025), 30 are the developer herself, answering in short, warm batches, in Portuguese when the player wrote in Portuguese. In the newest 69 posts she does not appear at all, and the thread runs fine without her, because players answer each other now. She also gave fans blanket written permission to make fanart, fan fiction and gameplay videos, and the page credits a fan translator for the Chinese version. One fan translation put the game in front of a whole second market.

Mindustry (Anuke): the institution

The end state of everything The Freak Circus is doing: a community that answers its own questions, built by years of steady updates, until the developer's presence stops being necessary.

Mindustry is a tower-defense factory game, free on itch, that has been on this chart for years rather than weeks. Nothing about its week is dramatic, and that is the point. It moved from #35 to #42 and charted 6 of 7 days (our daily tracking, Nov 1 to 7), and its thread holds 1,801 comments (game page, read Nov 7).

The developer does not appear in the thread at all. In the 76 most recent posts, other players answer the questions. The page's devlogs are version numbers with pointers to GitHub, where the changelog now lives, and the page links its Discord twice. Nobody announced this handoff. The page just reads that way.

A game can only stop showing up like this after years of updates have filled its thread with people who know the answers. Before that, a developer's absence is just absence.

Dating Killmulator (Coolom Games): the surge, maintained

A surge is luck. What converts it into a seat is work that was already public before the surge arrived: patches landing on a schedule players could watch.

Dating Killmulator is a comedy dating sim about a serial killer, a popular guy, and a psychologist, to use the page's own one-line description. It is free, with 8 to 9 hours of content and an optional paid DLC (game page, read Nov 7).

On Nov 1 it sat at #62 on Top Games. On Nov 7 it was #1, and #2 on New & Popular, the fast chart where only 2 of the 36 games from Nov 1 survived the week (our daily tracking, Nov 1 to 7). It charted 6 of the 7 days, and its thread holds 1,429 comments.

Underneath the climb, the page shows a patch drumbeat: updates 2.1 through 2.7 across the first part of 2026 on the visible devlog list, Patch 2.7 landing on Nov 5, in the middle of the surge week, and the page updated the same day the patch dropped. A sequel has been out since March. The developer posted 6 times in the recent comment sample, and the page links a Patreon, a YouTube channel and an X account.

So when attention arrived, it found a fresh build and a page that was already being kept. Whether the attention itself came from somewhere off itch, the page does not show.

Slice & Dice (tann): the exception that prices

Charge in a mostly free chart and the rating becomes the marketing. What carries the seat is a finished game whose versions keep arriving, not a developer working a thread.

A roguelike dice tactics game, five heroes with their own dice fighting through twenty levels, per the game's own description. It costs $18. Only 15 of the 72 games on the Nov 7 Top Games chart show any price at all, and 34 of the 41 games that held seats all week are free.

The rating does the work here: 4.91 across 774 ratings, the highest score in this set of four. The thread is a modest 710 comments, with no developer posts in the recent 47 the candidates pass read (game page, read Nov 7). This week the game slid from #2 to #32 and still charted 6 of 7 days (our daily tracking, Nov 1 to 7). The page was updated on Nov 5, years into the game's life, and version 3.3 arrived on Nov 1 with curated mods built by the community. An earlier update put five fan translations into the game.

The thread is quiet and the developer is absent from it, because the deal is different here. Players pay $18, get a finished game, and keep getting versions of it. The rating does the marketing that The Freak Circus's developer does in person.

Takeaways from the four

• Name the things your players are waiting for. A public roadmap turned The Freak Circus's unfinished state into an organised queue.
• Show up in person early, then step back once players start answering each other. Garula wrote a third of her thread's early posts; Mindustry's developer writes none and has not needed to for a long time.
• Keep patching in public while attention is on you. Dating Killmulator's surge week contained a patch, a sequel already out, and a page updated the day the patch dropped.
• If you charge, the rating is the marketing. Slice & Dice holds a seat in a mostly free chart at $18 with a 4.91 rating and a quiet thread.
• None of the four holds its seat the same way twice. Staying power is a habit matched to the game, not a checklist copied off a winner.

Takeaways

• Top Games is a staying contest: 57 percent of its Nov 1 seats were still held on Nov 7, and the median visiting game lasted 4 days.
• New & Popular is a window measured in days. 93 games passed through 36 seats in one week, and only 2 of the Nov 1 games lasted it.
• Crossing from New & Popular into Top Games happens but is rare: 3 of the 20 games on both charts on Nov 7 got there that way this week. Most main-chart movement is veterans holding and mid-chart churn.
• Whether crossover games then hold their seats longer than games that never touched the fast chart is now tracked week to week. This week cannot answer it.
• The chart's default product is a free story game: visual novels hold 39 of 72 seats, and four fifths of the chart charges nothing.
• What holds a seat is a reason to come back. The four profiles in this issue show four different versions of it.

Next week

Issue #1 adds the first real week-over-week movers, in bands, and the first read on whether this week's crossover names kept their seats.

The Itch Market Brief is free. One issue a week. We track the charts all week, run the numbers, and send you the conclusions.