Post by GoodGuyGames in Game and Post not appearing anywhere after publishing

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The problem is not indexing, its the game/post not appearing at all, for the first time in 2 years of me publishing games on this site. I'm searching for the root of this problem not promoting this game only.

I think if there is a queue in which games wait to be approved before being published on the site, at least the developer should be aware of it, not thinking there is a bug (like instead of "published" tag, it gets "waiting for approval" tag or something like that, which is already exists in many various sites).

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No Time To Play50 days ago (3 edits)

...Not appearing at all... Where?! I can see your game just fine on your profile. The page is published, and fully functional. It's just not indexed yet. And devlogs also have to be approved by itch.io staff before they show up in their section. That's separate from the project page where your post shows up just fine.

And yes, this feature has been last suggested three days ago. Until it's implemented, please follow official advice. It's your best bet.

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GoodGuyGames50 days ago

Why did it not appear on most recent page then (As its a very good way of promotion, and it can also lead to popular and recent, which is even better for promoting)? When will it be on recently published games then? After approval, or never?!

Good to hear that's being implemented :)

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No Time To Play50 days ago(+2)

...Because it's not indexed yet. That's what indexed means, as explained in the documentation you claim to have read. And yes, it will show up there after being reviewed by itch.io staff, as explained in the same documentation. And I didn't say it's being implemented. I said until it's implemented. Hope this helps.

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GoodGuyGames50 days ago

Ok that helped a lot.

But that's odd (and not satisfying) anyway, moving from everything being indexed instantly for 2 years to suddenly nothing indexed even after 8 days!

Thank you again.

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redonihunter50 days ago(+1)

There are people waiting over a month to get their game indexed. And that is not even unusual. You have had 7 games indexed right away. Still indexed, I might add. I believe those people might want to have a word with you... ;-)

And frankly, you need better promotion than existing for 5 minutes on page 1 of recent games. You had 7 games do that and existed for 2 years with those games. It does not look like that turned out to be effective promotion. That's not "good" promotion, that's zero promotion and views/plays are accidental.

In my opinion, if you want to do passive promotion, adjust your tags. Be findable for people that seek your type of game. (That needs indexing as well, but is not dependant on being on page 1 of recent for 5 minutes). Ditch the manual no-ai, singleplayer and godot tags. Those add nothing to describe your game and you can add more tags to distinguish what the game is about. At best you manage to find the tags your target audience is looking for.

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GoodGuyGames49 days ago

Thanks for the great advices dude : They were so insightful.

My problem is not with indexing, promoting or anything, I make games for fun, but the sudden change of instant index to many days makes me believe that there is something wrong with the system. Why some games indexed instantly, (without review of course) while some other take days/weeks to be indexed. The problem is with the indexing system, if I publish the same games from before, they are going to be indexed after some days, not instantly. Nothing changed in my games, but the timing required for them to be indexed changed for no reason.

I think games that are going to be indexed should get an estimated time-to-index. Right now I have to wait for an unknown amount of time just for my game to be indexed. (yes, you don't need to tell me waiting for indexing is not a good strategy, etc. etc. you already made that point correctly and clearly! But my problem is something else and I hope I made it clear.)

What type of tags do you generally advice me to add in my games?

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redonihunter49 days ago(+1)

I do not know what is considered and weighted to sort games into manual indexing vs. automatic indexing. The manual indexing queue is just so big and staff is so few. When they wrote the docs about indexing, a few days was correct.

The thing is, Itch is overrun by bad actors. Even with all their filtering and automatic, if you look closely, you can see all the things they still miss. Imagine how many things they do block by that manual indexing thing. It is rather rare that they intentionally not index a game for violating the quality guidelines - that's what the guidelines imply at least. But it often takes many weeks these days.

Because of those bad actors, it is also unlikely that they will implement accurate feedback why something was not indexed right away, or even if it is indexed. They could just as well give a blueprint on how to avoid manual review by staff.

Temporarily being delisted till staff looks at a game can even happen for an already indexed game. It happens even to big and established developers. So 7 out of 8 indexed right away does sound quite good. Just to give a perspective, I did see several hundreds of hacked accounts posting malware. They cannot give indexing protection to an account, just because that account has posted games in the past or is years old.

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redonihunter49 days ago(+1)

For your tags, I just looked at the screenshots and the tags and it felt like something is missing. Maybe a sub genre of what you are doing. Or people call it differently. Based on the screenshots, I would not expect an adventure tag. And I would not expect a strategy game to be rogue-like. Acting stragegical with your ressources kinda goes without saying for certain games, but I would not call them strategy games for that. Strategy games to me are more like 4x games. Strategy implies a grander scale. But some people disagree, see below.

This is only 170 games. https://itch.io/games/genre-adventure/genre-strategy/tag-roguelike It is an unlikely combination. That's not bad in itself, but might indicate that some of those games would not be labeled by these tags in that combination by many players.

Your game is inspired by Blue Prince. That below is the Steam tags for that game, in descending order, chosen by players. Steam has a limited pool of tags, and tags like Indie are superflous on Itch, while a tag like singleplayer is important on Steam. But as you can see, even that game is labeled strategy by some. Players are not known for distinguishing tags accurately. For instance, a game actually cannot be rogue-like and rogue-lite at the same time. One implies very hard difficulty, the other does not. Yet most of such games have both tags. Even Slay the Spire has rogue-lite in the tag list on Steam for crying out lout.

Anyway, you only have 10 tags and one main genre to chose on Itch. Better not waste them on tags like no-ai or godot.

Puzzle

Exploration

Mystery

Investigation

Singleplayer

Roguelite

Story Rich

First-Person

Indie

Adventure

Atmospheric

Roguelike

Escape Room

Simulation

Nonlinear

Strategy

Level Editor

Stylized

Replay Value

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GoodGuyGames49 days ago

Thanks again for your great post buddy :)

Well tags are very important and sadly I'm not using them correctly. But your explanation makes the problem (and the solution) easier to understand.

I place both rogue-like/lite tags because as you said, most people don't differentiate between the two and often search one instead for the other.

Main tags don't offer that much variety to choose from (and that's reasonable), but I thought Strategy was the best fitting. I think checking Blue Prince's tags is a good idea if I want that game's player base to follow my game too.

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redonihunter49 days ago

Yes, there is two aspects. What a tag means and what people think it means ;-)

Both on Steam and Itch, the people chosing the tags are not reliable on the meaning of words. You would need curators for that. So ~~tags~~ genres mentioned on professional articles about a game might be more accurate.

Skimming such articles, Blue Prince seems to be a mystery puzzle rogue-lite. Bordering on deck-building, without being one. Of course the 3d immersion is missing from your game.

For strategy one might read the wiki article about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_game

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_video_game#Subgenres

Having strategical thinking involved is not enough. It would be like calling a game point & click, because you can point at things and click them. Or calling a game a visual novel, because there is things to see and things to read.

But I have not played your game. Nor the inspiration for your game. Chess is a strategy game. The strategy game. You command units. Strategy is the skill used by a commander. A game with a single acting entity feels wrong to be named a strategy game. Yet I even found an article mentioning "strategy" to describe Blue Prince. I disagree ;-)

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