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Windows Mitigating Windows "Unknown Publisher", etc?

I'm getting feedback on my first game (okay, second, after asteroids) by putting it up on Itch and sending people to grab it.

This unfortunately leads to them getting varying levels of google/windows/etc basically saying "We don't know this guy or his game, seems sus."

Should I have left the "publisher" bit of general information as coming from game maker? Is this usual? Is there anything I can do to mitigate that in general?
 

Yal

šŸ§ *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
AFAIK you need to sign up through a pretty paperwork-heavy process to get a publisher ID you can use to sign your executables, and even with one people will still get the same "are you sure you wanna run this?" popup in Windows (only the "unknown publisher" text is changed to your publisher ID/name) - you can observe this when installing a GMS update, for instance.

Most users are savvy enough to know how to force their OS to run the game anyway (if it seems legit enough on your itchio page), basically these warnings are getting in the way of stuff people want to run so often they'll basically ignore them most of the time. As long as you don't get your game marked as a virus whenever it's being run you should be fine user-reaction-wise.
 
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