Hi everyone,

My game was published three weeks ago, but it still doesn’t appear when searching by tags or even by parts of its title. I’ve already submitted multiple support tickets but haven’t received any reply yet.

I also posted about this a week ago, but that thread received no response from the admins either.

Is there something I might be missing, or any additional steps I should take to make the game searchable?

Here is the game page: https://akiba4games.itch.io/deepdrawdungeon

Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

I appreciate the check, but there is a big difference between being searchable by full title and being indexed in the discovery system. My game is still missing from the newest card games list and it doesn't appear when browsing by tags like card game or dungeon crawler. Typing the exact name in the search bar works, but that doesn't help with organic discovery, which is the main problem here.

Hello, I think you haven't quite understood how Itch works.

Your game is indexed, and that's all Itch can do. The other problems you're mentioning are because your title and tag aren't the best for the searches you're referring to and because you have a lot of competition.

As redonihunter already told you, if you're not appearing under the "dungeon crawler" tag, it's because you, as the developer, didn't add that tag to your page.

When you use a title name, the admin has explained that the algorithm is optimized to search for complete names, not partial ones. Therefore, if you only use "dungeon," Itch's algorithm will prioritize other pages over yours, and the staff isn't going to change the algorithm just because you ask them to.

For example, if you search for "dungeon" on Google, your game won't appear on the first page either.

Why? Because Google's algorithm returns other pages and content that it deems more relevant to the user, and contacting Google support won't change that. I mention this because you'd probably never think to contact Google because your page isn't at the top of the "dungeon" ranking. But since Itch works similarly, you do contact Itch support and expect them to resolve something that isn't their responsibility.

Remember that Itch has over a million indexed games, and when you search by title, the results are limited to the 30 titles that the algorithm considers most relevant to that search. The further the full title is from that word, the lower you'll rank in the results, which is why you don't appear.

What you need to focus on is improving your ranking. There are several posts that discuss this, but I recommend not relying on organic search results within Itch, because your game belongs to a very crowded genre. For example, if you look at the "most recent" section for card games, the first page is full of games uploaded today and yesterday. Your game is only 15 days old, but that's very old compared to all the card games being published on Itch, and you're competing against all those games and developers. Itch isn't going to help you in that competition.