... After becoming visible in the games list. And despite appearing at the top for a number of popular tags.

It baffled me at first and then I realized that almost NOBODY is even being able to see games that are marked as NSFW. I imagine not many people go to their profile pages and specifically enable the visibility of that type of games. Especially when they are probably not even aware of the existence of such option (and content).

This is discouraging, to put it mildly. Especially considering the fact that my game is pretty tame and doesn't even feature full nudity.

If I remove two of the screenshots the game page itself would become perfectly SFW and I'm wondering if that would make it fine to uncheck the "contains adult content" checkbox?

I couldn't say where our host draws the line, but I'm one of those people who uses itch.io in SFW mode even though I would much prefer to see NSFW material. That's because a lot of the "mature" games people post here are just gross instead. It's a common problem across social media, and the reason IMO is that a simple "tame/mature/adult" ranking is simply too coarse. Does it involve nudity? Is it sexualized? Or are we talking someone pushing their weird fetish onto everyone else with little to no warning? But for some reason no online platform goes into that kind of detail, and games like yours suffer through no fault of your own.

Edit: not to mention people in certain countries consider healthy issues like sexual orientation to be NSFW...

I think it would be optimal if people are able to see that such games exist here and choose if they want to see details about it. The common approach in other marketplaces is to simply display a warning and allow the user to decide if they want to see the screenshots, read the full description, etc.

I agree that there should be indications about the exact nature of the content so there aren't unpleasant surprises. For example, various tags/labels could help in that regard.

Hey, sorry you didn't get the traffic you wanted. NSFW content aside, we get a lot of new games a day, so uploading your game is no guarantee that it will become popular. You can help your game get more visibility through us by doing your own promotion and pushing people to the itch.io page. That will help raise the game's 'popularity score', which will keep the game up in the listings longer. Games get a boost in rank the first week they are launched, but since you're competing with everything else coming out you'll want to encourage people to check the game out. 

Hope that helps.

I just posted a thread about the same topic! Personally, I just found out about the NSFW settings a few days ago. I'm designing a naughty game, and to make sure it gets optimal exposure, I'm going to to publish a CENSORED version too, which doesn't need a NSFW rating. And discretely mention that they can enable NSFW content if they want the risky version!

Thanks for all answers and the clarifications! I just wanted to see the result without any sort of promotion, And for those interested - it's 25 views for ~60 hours :)