itch.io

In practice, you release something, and then the platform decides whether to push it or not.

Itch does not push adult games. The only games they "push" are the games in https://itch.io/games/new-and-popular/featured , by the fact that they are in that list and in https://itch.io/games/newest/fresh by the same mechanism. And they do not put nsfw games in those lists. Those lists appear on the main site itch.io

Itch's philosphy, as read between the lines and in the lines on threads about the topic, is: developers need to do their own promotion. They do not even see being indexed as an essential feature.

If there is a certain influx of popularity, that can become a feedback loop to have games appear higher up in the popular sortings. If you search for adult + fantasy games, that's already only 960 games. That's 25 pages and fantasy is not even one of the distinguishing tags. Being in the first 10 pages might be benefitial. Monster girls only has 450 games, non adult games included. A player interested in games with monster girls can visit all 12 pages easily, so being in the lower half would not even matter much.

If you combine 2 or 3 interesting tags, you get to like 100-200 games and one can check them all out quickly in a day.

Either way the goal would be to convert the accidental browse-view into a visit. I believe there is even a statistic about that, called ctr.

But that's all about optimising this passive promotion that happens by accident (and make those accidents happen to your target audience, by chosing relevant tags ;-)

itch.io itself offers a major update devlog option. That is how I have been treating monthly releases.

That's ok. I only have issues with how Itch treats the recent/newest sorting in regards to that. They should just make 2 separate sortings. One by publishing date and one by update (with a cooldown). And not do this arbitrary devlog thing.

Maybe there are tricks I never found. 

As a hint, there are places where I did find videos of nsfw game's gameplay. And some of those videos were even uploaded by the developers.

But I honestly do not know how and where to promote games. This topic comes up rather often. Maybe there are tipps in those threads that can apply to your game as well. The real question would actually always be, how to do it cheaply. I have yet to read an easy solution for this. But then again, if it were easy, everybody would be doing it and everybody would be at square one again.

You have a patreon and seem to be doing this for a while. I do not know your audience, but maybe you might benefit from a discord. At least I see a lot of games with that combo. Patreon, Itch, Discord. You could poll your patrons, if they would be interested or be indifferent.

I am not sure if you already do this, but a thing you can try to do, is variation of your cover image, with each of your updates.

The thing is, your game's title is not really saying much about the game. And neither is the current cover image. The only thing it shows, is your art style. That's not a bad thing to show, but think about it. You show a woman and have a game title that does not have meaning. It is probably a made up name. From that combination, I would assume, this is a female protagonist game, and the prot is named like the game.

Oh, and you still have no rpg tag, but write in the description, it is an rpg. If you are unsure about the tags, maybe ask your patrons, how they would tag the game. They know the game, and are players of such games, they are bound to have opinions about what tags would apply.

The monster girl tag was suggested, because you wrote this Yes, there will be non-human characters in the future