I'm sorry to hear you've been going through a rough time. I'm really glad you didn't delete your games because I've been seeing people i follow here on the site review them positively and I'm hopeful they can find more folks. Hang in there <:)
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Maybe not the right time to say it: but games marked as "adult" on Itchio that don't take payment aren't shadow banned right now. But, I do know traffic for Itchio is down overall after the incident, so I wonder if that's playing a role.
But yes, this shit is awful, it's bad for EVERYONE and nobody is better in a world where we are able to express less in art. I HATE IT!
Unfortunately my game is shadowbanned (the one this devlog is on). It does not show up in browse or search, the impressions and CTR sections are simply gone from the analytics page, and it gets zero traffic from tags and genres (I used to have basically only internal itch tags and genre links in my 30-day referral list but now there are none and it's only external links and referrals from my other games). I watched it disappear from the site in real time after I made a change on the game page and saved it, and afterwards it was gone from browse when I went and scrolled to where it had been in the "top rated" list before I made the change five seconds earlier. When I reached out to itch about it, they were confused and seem to think it's some kind of glitch, but now they have been ignoring me for months, so I'm guessing it's something they don't know how to fix so it will just stay like this forever. Since this is the only game that ever brought me traffic, the traffic across all my games plummeted as a result, and it's been really tough on me with everything else going on 😩
(My game is not even marked as adult or with any adult/NSFW tags, so it shouldn't ever have been deindexed to begin with; I get the feeling something on the game page description triggered it and made some sort of glitch happen when I saved it in whatever they're using for their deindexing code.)
oh wow, holy SHIT That is terrible! The stuff just disappearing from the back end is horrendous. I'm so sorry to hear that. Do you have a bsky account where I can share a post promoting the game? I have a modest amount of followers and anything can help.
I'm so sorry to hear all of that is happening and I hope there's some way to turn it around.
That's incredibly kind and sweet of you??? ;A; I do have a bsky. I have a post I made about the deindexing back when it happened here: https://bsky.app/profile/justacarrot.bsky.social/post/3lv75caqazs2f I've been trying to market heavily since and work on new stuff but none of it is helping so I've been crashing pretty hard unfortunately.
if you ever wanna talk shop about marketing and posting techniques, let me know. That is the kind of stuff I do often with folks and the landscape of what does and doesn't work for promoting has changed heavily in the last 5 years. No pressure, let me know, you can think of me as a sounding board and I promise, I am not mean lol but hey, I've shared your post for now, I hope it helps and I'm wishing you all the best!!