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.
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.
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?
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.
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
3D
Simulation
Nonlinear
Strategy
Level Editor
Stylized
Replay Value
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.
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 ;-)
I read some of the articles you mentioned, and although I'm not an expert, I don't like that restricted definition of a Strategy game. Its not like FPS or Sports category which are self explanatory, but rather can be applied to almost any game, so defining it is difficult.
Anyway, from now on, I have to think twice before choosing my games' tags!
Meaning of words can change. A roguelike game today is practically nothing like the game Rogue. What it now means is doing a "run" that is random in the way you can improve your character and generally that the game is very difficult and there is no save scumming. But that does not mean every difficult game or every game wihtout save games or every game that has things like game sessions fits the definition.
The strategy genre is a bit different what it describes. The kernel of it for me is commanding units. In every game where you have to manage resources, you need to plan how to effectively use those resources. But that does not make them strategy games. Strategy games give the player the feeling of being a strategist. Rpg games, adventures and rogue-likes do not do that. If resource management is a key element, I would tag such as management, not as strategy. Even if you would come up with "strategies" how to use the resources.
https://itch.io/games/tag-management
Management
Games where you have to manage resources in order to complete objectives.
Yet still people tagged that Prince game with strategy. Who knows what the word means in 10 years for games. But then again, the term strategy is used for games maybe as long as there is the game of chess.