Post by redonihunter in Game not indexed?

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Your games seem to be good for that particular nieche, so you should be visible to fans of the genre by picking out appropriate tags. Since you do horror games, you might want to select the tags very carefully, as there are so many horror games with generic tags. Or else all you will get is a spike while you accidentally are visible somewhere - like with a major update devlog in a few months. And if you do short one shots, maybe there is a game jam where your games fit in. In my opinion you need to build an audience for these type of games, as I assume you do not have recurring players for the games. In other words, people play it for 5 minutes and move on. Might be completely wrong of course.

As for the tags, these here tell me not really much beyond: it's a horror game.

Survival, Action, 3D, Atmospheric, Creepy, First-Person, Horror, Psychological Horror, Retro, Short, Singleplayer

Survival, Action, 3D, Atmospheric, Creepy, Dark, First-Person, Godot, Horror, Indie, Short, Singleplayer

Survival, 3D, Atmospheric, Creepy, Dark, First-Person, Horror, Indie, Psychological Horror, Short

Those are three different games, are they not? I could not tell by the tags. You can ditch the Indie tag and the Singleplayer tag. They do not carry information on Itch. You can tag things like bigfoot or other things that are related to the games that would distinguish them from similar games.

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That Guy Who Makes Games136 days ago

The tags do help slightly, but in my personal experience, the number one top contributing driver of visits is from being at the top of most recent due to the impressions and visits, and then the visits from most recent would push it into new and popular

Other people might have different results depending on genre/theme or simply different luck or unexplained algorithm behavior, I believe it is not deterministic, I am explaining this has been what worked for two of my games in the past and what I am familiar with, and my capacity is to learn from my experience

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No Time To Play136 days ago

Your oldest game is from less than a year ago, and from your posts it sounds like you expected itch.io to promote it for you. That's not how the site is intended to work at all. You should probably double-check your tags and post more in the community so that people know you exist. (I don't mean as in release announcements; I mean simply talking to people. It's a community.) The boost from being at the top of Most Recent is short lived at the best of times, in my experience around a day; a popular post on social media might last you for two or three days. You need to build long-term popularity, and that takes work, both on itch.io and elsewhere.

P.S. My personal recommendation is to make a personal website and/or blog somewhere. There are free hosting options.

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That Guy Who Makes Games136 days ago

No I don't expect itch.io to promote my oldest game, as I've mentioned, so far from my experience, being at the top of most recent is what would propel the games (if we at least put some actual effort into the game, page, and poster) into New And Popular

And perhaps if it is very good, it will do well on that new tab and go to the next tab, and as the "most recent" name implies, this is only for new games, and only one chance for a game, if it falls off, it falls off, and I do not expect itch.io to promote it for me

But on the other hand, I also did not expect that the one chance at discoverability through the most recent page could be taken out of the developers hand, which for established and known developers may not be a problem, but would certainly have an impact on newer developers who expected a fair shot for their projects

And again, it might also be that we're not supposed to depend on itch.io at all, no matter how small, even to give a fair shot to us in the Most Recent tab as I've described, this is what I am learning from our discussion. If this is the case and official stance of the platform, it should be very clearly and aggressively communicated to new developers, since most new developers including myself, would expect the platform to behave consistently and not take away the one helping hand the platform gives us at discover ability

And I have to reiterate, my expectations are not to have the platform consistently promote my old games, or on the other hand have the platform completely provide zero help at all by taking the fair chance at discoverability through the Most Recent page.

No, we must not view it from these extremes, we must take the middle ground and look at it realistically for what it is, that is, the platform indeed is not intended or expected to land a helping hand at discoverability in the long term, but it does give you a fair shot for your game by being at the Most Recent tab to be noticed by players through impressions, and if it is of good quality, it will be propelled into the other tabs which, how far it is propelled, is depending on how good of qualities it has. That's why I said by taking away the chance of the project to be at the top of Most Recent, is unfair, especially for newer developers

I don't know if what I'm saying here resonates with other people or not, or it's only for my genre/theme, or maybe even it's only for me personally, but that is the fair assessment that I can give based on my experience and observations so far, and also the reason why I've said and what I said about taking away Most Recent exposure would be unfair

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