Post by redonihunter in Game got de-indexed after changing tags

Viewing post in Game got de-indexed after changing tags

Sigh. I know why I complain about certain things being not intuitive. Did you know that there is a Unity tag and a meta tag with Unity-made?

https://itch.io/games/tag-unity

https://itch.io/games/made-with-unity

And those are not the same.

Any tag you selected or wrote in the tag selection for your game, including the main genre, is a developer selected tag. Even if it appears elsewhere as meta information.

Especially confusing is the no-ai tag. Any no-ai tag you actually see is a manual tag. And they appear in the genre and tag listing in the meta info box. All the other things are meta information. Either selected or infered. I am not sure, if there are infered meta tags.

So, when you select tags, your only restriction is, that you need to select a main genre. You do not need tags. Not even any "adult" tags.

But if you do select one of the "adult" tags, your get a strong reminder to mark your game as having sensitive content. Maybe it's even mandatory now.

And from a marketing perspective, it is very, very unwise to not select the literal tag "adult" for a nsfw game. People do specifically browse the adult tag. If you do not have it, you do not appear in the browsing list. Just like you do not appear in the pixel art browsing list https://itch.io/games/tag-aliens/tag-pixel-art if you did not chose that tag.

So you seem to currently have 1 main genre and 7 out of 10 tags. If you selected more, I am curious, because I always thought all the tags do appear in genre/tag in the more information box.

3 of those tags are "adult" tags, and 2 of them are redundant. From a quick glance you should consider tags like sandbox, management, maybe dating sim. Your other tags are quite bland. sci-fi is implied with aliens. And it's a first person 3d game. Ok. Do I now know what the game is about? No. That could be Doom from the tags. And I rather doubt, that this is a role playing game.

Role Playing

Role-playing games let you assume the role of a protagonist, customizing their abilities, equipment, and appearances. Through exploration, dialogue, and strategic combat, players navigate worlds, uncover lore, complete missions, and level up their characters.

I would have guessed this to be a simulation game.

But I digress. Any update can trigger the reindexing process. https://itch.io/t/4120453/unofficial-search-and-indexing-faq And support does not answer requests about indexing. And if they would, it does not happen within a few days.

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Wicked Gargoyle Productions2 days ago (1 edit)

Yes you’re right some of the tags do not fit very well to the current state of development. I am a bit hesitant now to change any tag at all in the current situation. Not that somehow by changing thing the game get reset to the end of the review queue or the likes.

Regarding implicit tags. As my game was actually indexed I tested several tags via the discovery page to verify how users would discover the game. One thing I noticed was that the “No AI”-Tag worked for my game despite I never added that one to the tags myself. Which is why I assumed some tags may be added based on the classification. Which then lead me to the initial disaster by removing adult tags and see which ones remain so I could then add those missing I deem necessary.

Edit: Just verified the No AI thing. If you click on Content No generative AI was used it will lead the user to https://itch.io/games/tag-no-ai which makes me assume the No AI tag is implicitly set for those games.

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redonihunter2 days ago (2 edits) (+1)

The no-ai tag is a mess. No one gets it. It is ill conceived and ill implemented. There was only recently added that additional line about generative ai usage and this is still confusing because of choice of words. They call it ai assitance and no one knows what that means. It means nothing. It means that there is at least one of the ai questions answered with yes. Graphics, sound, text, code.

If you do answer with no, your game gets a imaginary tag, that is not a tag. But can be filtered, as if it were a tag. Confusing? That's because it is. If you answer with yes, your game gets up to 5 imaginary tags that are not tags. One for each category and one general ai tag. And those tags are actually filters that apparantly have a different name, now that you can filter them.

AI Assistance

The the filter section is called ai assistance is ok. What is not ok, is that there is a subcategory called assistance. It makes people think that is some kind of different way of using ai in developing a game. But it's not. It's just the yes flag to any of the other 4. It should be named "any of the options" at that point.

And add to that all the developers that manually added a no-ai tag... It's a horrible user experience. Most people never read the public comments where some discussions might shed light on this.

Sorry for ranting. But you are a prime example, why I believe this to be ill implemented.

Anyway. Just ignore your indexing status and do whatever you would do. Chose your tags however you like and update your page however you like. No one told you about indexing status, so why should you care. And if you arbitrarily wait for indexing, it could just as well happen that your game gets temporarily delisted again if you change the page. So just ignore it. Itch's stance is, that you should do external promotion anyway, so they see indexing as optional and are not in a hurry.

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Wicked Gargoyle Productions2 days ago(+1)

Yeah I’ve read that about external promotion. Which in theory is fine but in reality it is hard to promote things to a none existed community if someone wants to build one here to start somewhere.

In any case promoting on any other platform is as good as here, I would start from scratch there too.

Guess I have just to do my thing then. Thank you for your time shed some light on this confusing tagging / indexing matter. Much appreciated!

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