The "Recent games" section is not really the place where games get discovered; most of our popular games are there for a variety of reasons whether it be overall quality, marketing strategy, or sometimes pure luck (much like all marketplaces).
The "Popular" browse section is far more likely to bring traffic than Recent Uploads, which is often getting rapidly populated basically every nanosecond by projects of all varieties of completion and quality, lol. We strongly recommend that users who want to increase their visibility work to advertise their project on places other than itch.io, as the activity will increase the chances you land in the Popular section; we have over a million projects that we host on our site, and with such a high density of projects, not all of them are going to immediately spark a boost in popularity just by virtue of them being released on itch.io and showing up in the recent uploads.
Hey, thanks so much for the reply, I really appreciate you taking the time to explain that. I understand it properly now. It makes sense that Recent isn’t really where discovery happens, and that it’s more about overall quality, marketing, and sometimes just luck. I guess I was too focused on that one section without realizing how fast it moves and how much is getting uploaded all the time.
I’ll shift my focus toward promoting outside itch.io and trying to build activity that might help my project show up in Popular.
If I can ask an off-topic but related question: will my future games also be held for manual review before they appear in search and tags, or will that process be automatic now? Just trying to understand what to expect next time.
Thanks again for the help, this gave me a much clearer idea of how to approach things going forward.
Hey, thanks again for all your help! I’m just curious, I’ve noticed that some games seem to get indexed almost instantly after upload. Is that because of account trust level or something else? And is there any way I can work toward that?
I know most of my earlier games didn’t meet all the requirements to get indexed (since they were just for jams and missing things like screenshots). If I upload 1–2 proper games and maybe remove those old ones, would that help improve my account or speed up future indexing?
Our queue organizes games and what order they get put through the queue by a variety of factors, such as risk level and past history of their account. It's also entirely possible that some games end up getting indexed faster simply because a staff member was online and received the game in their queue as they were working. As highlighted earlier, the recent releases section is a very small part of itch's overall "algorithmic discovery" aspect of promotion. That being said, generally the more work you put into having a full page (video, screenshots, detailed descriptions, page design) will showcase a higher degree of quality on your page which can lead to quicker indexing, but there is no exact science to when projects do or don't get indexed and how quickly or slowly that happens, as we have to go through hundreds of games a day, and the rate at which users upload new content is noticeably higher.