We have been trying to get ahold of Itch.io support for several months now about our game Dixie Ball no longer showing up in search results. So far we have only received automated responses to our emails. We used to be indexed, and got lots of downloads. Now its not even worth the effort to keep our page updated. Could someone from itch please reach out to us?
and got lots of downloads
You have two followers. I doubt that the volume of your success is as high as you think it is.
Itch does has this limbo area between not banning things and indexing them. Being on the index is not a guarantee and they avoid telling people why they de-index things.
I suspect the reason is, so the dev does not think, there is a list to go over to make the game eliglible again. Only for staff to find out half a year later that some of the items on the list are in the game again. So why bother playtesting the game, compiling such a list. There is a reason Steam charges a hundred bucks upfront. Itch is free and you get what you pay for.
They just de-index things they feel is inapropriate to appear in search&browse. And as they said often, devs should not rely on itch for promotion. I mean there are complain threads about not appearing high enough in the browse ranking.
Thanks for the info.
We had about 100 downloads on Itch, this was our best. Second place was Source Forge, followed by Indie DB. We generally got an over 10% conversion rate of page views to downloads on Itch.
We figured this de-indexing couldn't have anything to do with the confederate battle flag, since this game is still listed, where the players job is to stop runway slaves.
We have a website, and are promoting on social media with each update. So far we seem to have had our best luck on Gab.
One can never be sure, and that was speculation and opinion.
That creator has one follower and the game has no tags... If no one reports things, things tend to stay up, regardless, if an admin would de-index it, or not. If that is indeed the reason for the de-indexing. I doubt that the image itself would be reason enough, if there was content reasons.
My stance is, if we allow games where you can kill people (practically all ego shooters) it is quite established that not even criminal things in real life concern the content of games. Games are supposed to allow to do things that you cannot in real life. Like fly. Go on adventures. Be a hero. Or a villain. Whatever.
But that does not mean, that itch has to passively promote anything that comes along. I know of a creator that got deindexed for lots of low effort projects. (At least I assume that is the reason. One can never be sure)
It is frustrating to not know the reasons, but I can think of reasons why they do not tell, as I described.
