Pelipulssi normally publishes in Finnish. This is a rare English-language exception, because the dataset behind it does not care what language we write in.
In April, Luden.io published a postmortem titled "How we stayed on the front page of itch.io for over a month". 80 Level followed up in May with an interview about the same feat. Both tell the story from the inside, with the developer's own analytics.
For anyone arriving from a search engine rather than from itch.io gossip: SuperWEIRD: Idle Automation [Alpha] is an idle automation game from Luden.io, the studio behind while True: learn() and Learning Factory. The alpha is the small itch.io sibling of a bigger upcoming Steam game, and its launch doubled as a very public marketing experiment, which is why the postmortems exist. What the postmortems cannot show is how that experiment looked from outside the studio's own dashboard. Hence this post.
We happen to have the outside view. Since early January 2026, Pelipulssi has been keeping longitudinal records of itch.io's public front-page feeds and game pages, covering 118,017 games to date. Our records pick up SuperWEIRD: Idle Automation [Alpha] 58 minutes after the page went public on January 29 at 15:02 UTC, when the game had 12 ratings and 7 comments, all presumably from Luden.io's existing fanbase, because the page had been live for less than an hour.
So we can check the claim. The short version: "over a month on the front page" is accurate. It is also an undersell. SuperWEIRD appeared in itch's featured feed every single day for 112 days straight, from February 20 to June 11, the last day of our data. The longest gap between sightings was ten hours. It may still be running.
First, the treadmill: 776 new games a day
To appreciate the featured run, you need to see what happens to a new itch.io game by default.
SuperWEIRD entered itch's chronological "new" feed at position 28 within the hour of publishing. Eight days later it was at position 7,193. That is a sink rate of roughly 875 positions per day, which matches what our data shows globally: about 776 new games arrive on itch.io every day (118,017 games in 152 days of tracking). The "new" feed is not a discovery channel. It is a conveyor belt into the archive, and it does not slow down for anyone.
Here the data shows something the postmortem does not mention: SuperWEIRD rode the treadmill twice. On February 11 Luden.io pushed a game update, and on February 12 the game reappeared in the "new" feed at position 20, then sank again over the following ten days. The second ride is the one that mattered. On February 17, two devlogs went out, ratings jumped from 12 to 46 and comments from 7 to 41. Three days later, on February 20 at 16:00 UTC, the game shows up in the featured feed for the first time, at position 24.
Luden.io has said itch featuring is manual and "somewhat of a black box". Our timestamps cannot open the box, but they can establish the order of events: update, second "new"-feed ride, devlog push, engagement spike, feature. The virality came first.
The featured-feed marathon, week by week
From February 20 onward, the picture is remarkably clean. Our records sample the featured feed several times a day, and on all 112 days from February 20 to June 11 SuperWEIRD is there, 652 sightings in total.
Position is the more telling metric, though. The featured feed is the curated catalog behind itch.io's front page, and it runs deep: being in the catalog is not the same as being seen on the front page.
For the first five weeks, February 20 to about March 22, SuperWEIRD held weekly average positions between 29 and 73, with a best of 24. That is the literal front page, and it matches the developer's "over a month" claim almost to the day. Then, in the week of March 23, the average slid to 191, and the week after that it fell off a cliff to around 520. It never recovered, drifting between positions 400 and 1,400 through June.
The cliff has a suspiciously good explanation. Luden.io's last itch update of the spring shipped on March 30, the same week the position collapsed. The game stayed in the featured catalog, where company is sticky (evergreens like Desktop Goose have sat there for our entire tracking window), but visibility-wise the front-page story ends when the updates do.
For context on how rare any of this is: of the 118,017 games in our data, 2,477 (2.1%) have ever appeared in the featured feed. Of the 296 games that entered it for the first time since February, only 8 lasted 112 days or more. SuperWEIRD is one of them and never left.
Rating gravity and breathing comments
Two smaller patterns in the data, both familiar to anyone who watches public counters for a living.
First, rating gravity. SuperWEIRD opened at 5.0 stars from 12 ratings, was at 4.57 by 46 ratings, briefly recovered to 4.64 as the feature brought a wave of new players, and then drifted down to 4.49 by 119 ratings. The curve is the standard one: the wider the audience, the further from 5.0. Even so, 119 ratings puts the game in the top 0.6% of all games in our data, and its 82 comments in the top 0.17%.
Second, comment counts go down as well as up. SuperWEIRD's comment counter peaked around 90 in late February and has been breathing ever since: 90 to 88 to 87, later 87 to 84 to 81. Deletions, spam cleanup, moderation. Public engagement metrics are not monotonic, which is worth remembering the next time someone screenshots one as proof of anything.
Where the attention went: itch.io, CrazyGames, Steam
The page's update timestamps tell a quiet second story. Our records show 28 updates: five in the launch days, a dense cluster through late February, steady work through March, and then silence. Between March 30 and June 2, nothing, a 64-day gap, after which a burst of four updates in two days.
The gap is not a mystery. SuperWEIRD: Automation Roguelite, the Steam version, is a different and considerably bigger game (planned for 2026, closed playtests running since March). The itch alpha did its job, and the team moved on. Luden.io has been open about this division of labor: by their own account the itch launch produced roughly 2,500 Steam wishlists and a similar number of playtest applications, and they have said plainly that itch is not a strong marketing channel for Steam games. What it produced instead was feedback that reshaped the roadmap, from exposing co-op earlier to redesigning towers that did not read as towers.
The funnel, as of mid-June 2026:
| Platform | Audience signal |
|---|---|
| itch.io alpha | 119 ratings (4.49), 82 comments, 7 devlogs |
| CrazyGames web version | 9.2/10 from 15,202 votes |
| Steam | unreleased, ~7,300 estimated wishlists (third-party estimate) |
The mass audience is on CrazyGames, where sessions last minutes. The conversation is on itch, where Luden.io says sessions ran over an hour. If you measure itch's value in players, it looks small. Measured in comments per player, it looks like the most efficient platform the game has touched.
The other 99 percent of itch.io launches
SuperWEIRD launched in the last week of January alongside 6,120 other games that first appear in our data the same week. Of those, 4,897 (80%) have never received a single rating. 149 reached ten ratings. 18 reached SuperWEIRD's 119. And 57 of the 6,121, under one percent, ever appeared in the featured feed at all.
That is the backdrop for every itch.io strategy thread: the treadmill runs at 776 games a day, and the exit is manual, opaque, and narrow. There is no recommendation algorithm to reverse-engineer here; by all available accounts, the front page is picked by hand. One studio with three shipped games, an internal tag-optimization tool, a banner CTR test plan, and a web build still needed a re-ride on the "new" feed and a devlog-driven spike to get through it. It worked once, measurably, for 112 days. The other 6,064 games from that week are in the archive.
Methodology and caveats
- Source: Pelipulssi's own longitudinal records of itch.io's public front-page feeds and game pages, sampled several times daily since early January 2026 (118,017 games). Position data is sampled, not continuous.
- SuperWEIRD first appears in our data 58 minutes after its public publish (page published 2026-01-29 15:02 UTC, confirmed against a day-one Wayback snapshot; first observation 16:00:53 UTC).
- Detailed stats (ratings, comments) were recorded sparsely between Jan 29 and Feb 17, so the 12→46 ratings jump spans that gap and the exact spike date is approximate. Feed sightings are continuous throughout.
- itch's internal metadata dates the page to January 16, thirteen days before the public launch, which likely reflects page creation or a private playtest period rather than publishing. We use first-sighting dates throughout.
- The Steam wishlist figure is a third-party estimate; Steam does not publish wishlist counts. The ~2,500 figure for the itch launch window is Luden.io's own.
- The Steam game is a different, expanded game from the itch alpha. Their stats are not comparable and we have not conflated them.
- All SuperWEIRD page stats were verified against the live itch page on 2026-06-11 and 2026-06-12 (rating, rating count, update date, tags, status all match).