The issue is a game launch and trying to synchronize exposure across platforms and your various channels. If you have a date that you tell folks you’re launching your game, then you make a major update when the game is available to time with your launch and they take “some amount of time”. Your launch in terms of exposure is staggered.
That may not sound like much on a single itch game level but if you tell everyone everywhere your game is launching and someone heads to itch from word of mouth and has to dig for it on launch day, thats not ideal.
The issue is the nebulous time frame and no feedback on if your post is actually accepted after the curator process.
If they said “this takes 5 to 7 days” you can plan for that. If you get an email saying its rejected, you can plan for that too. But I’ve had 2 projects now where I’ve made major update posts and have never seen them in any new category at any point days or weeks later.
Transparency is the issue if no one has any answers as seems to be the case. Just perceptions of how it might work. I guess I can make suggestions on the itch discord for some level of information on this.
Its hard to buy in to being involved on the community side of dev blogs here if I’m potentially keeping my game from exposure by doing it instead of just making a page at launch.