Hello.  I have tried contacting Support about this, and received no response after several hours. I am having a VERY negative first-time experience with Itch.

      I launched my game Verzaken! today.  First, a copy of the game was somehow downloaded even though no payments were made- I have my game set to a minimum price. How did this happen?

     Next, AFTER I had confirmed Verzaken was visible in both search and browsing recently added, I went back about an hour later an looked again. My game is NOT VISIBLE IN SEARCH OR BROWSE, even though it is listed as Published in my dashboard and everything looks OK. 

And before you ask, in Settings, the checkbox that says "Unlisted in Search and Browse" is UNCHECKED. This should NOT be happening. This is my FIRST GAME LAUNCH, and already I am having a very negative experience (no reply from support still!). I am very close to giving up on selling on Itch and just stick with GameJolt and Steam.

PLEASE HELP!   Support, if you are reading this, PLEASE REPLY! What's the point of using a broken service? If this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone, and I am justified to be upset. PLEASE HELP ME TO FIX THIS. I do not want to stop using Itch. I like it.

First of all, your game isn't supposed to show in searches and listings until it's been reviewed. That usually takes around 24h, certainly more than 4 (as of this writing). Dunno why it showed at first. Did you set a minimum price before publishing it, or after?

Second, by default you are opted into itch.io's press system, which means journalists can download your games for free, presumably in exchange for writing a review. Look for the Press Access tab in your account settings, under Misc. You just have to uncheck the box and save if it bothers you.

Either way, hope this helps.

   It doesn't bother me, if that's what happened (being press). I did set the minimum price before publishing. I assume it was probably press, as I am opted into the press system, and that is OK with me. I just didn't put two and two together.

            It is curious why it showed up for the first at least 10-15 minutes then? I didn't know about the review process, and had I known I would not have worried. You see, when I saw it show up in both Browse and Search, it caused me to assume publishing was instant. I'm not upset that that is the case, not necessarily, not as long as that is the expected behavior. 

 I hope it's easy to see how my thought process worked through this. I thought something was wrong! I apologize if I came across brashly- given the assumptions I made, I was feeling rather concerned, and hope I didn't cause undue annoyance.

Thank you sir, you've been a great help! I appreciate it!

If it showed up at first then it's likely you published it without setting a price on it. That could explain the downloads you're seeing. By the way, your game is still published and accessible directly by link when you publish it, it just takes some time to be indexed in our search and browse pages.

Edit: I looked closer at your page and I see that you do have press system enabled on it. That means anyone with a press account has access to download your game for free. Those downloads will reflect on your stats.

   Thank you for explaining!  Now that I know it regards the press system, I have no worries. I am 99.9% certain I had the price enabled before I published so while you say thats the technically likely scenario, I swear it's not the case.... but no big deal at this point! It was all a misunderstanding on my part, and now that it is cleared up I am very happy with Itch so far.