Hello,

My game Employee A is not showing in Itch browse or search results - it can only be seen by direct navigation. I have heard that sometimes it can take some time for games with a minimum price to be approved by an admin, but I have had free demo files available for 72 hours now and the status of the game's search indexing has not changed. I've emailed itch support over this several times with no response yet.

Will I just need to mark the game as free until the full non-demo builds of the game are ready? Do I need to mark the game as "released" even though only the demo is currently available?

Hey there,

From what I recall, you need to have a downloadable version of the game for it to be indexed. I’m not sure if a demo version counts, I will check on that, but considering your project was published a few months back, that must be the reason.

Will I just need to mark the game as free until the full non-demo builds of the game are ready?

You can always add a full version of the game (even if unfinished), as long as it’s clear that the game is still in development. That should index your project.

Do I need to mark the game as “released” even though only the demo is currently available?

That won’t change anything, I believe the release status does not affect if a project is indexed or not.

Hope that helps :)

Thanks for letting me know. I might just make the game free with donations until the full build comes out.

For what it's worth, this seems like it makes the "free demo" feature for paid games kinda not worth it as a pre-release promotional tool. My plan was to use my demo as a way to gather interest before the release, and I can still do that, but it's unfortunate that using the "free demo" feature won't really work for that.

From what I see on the page no files are available to download. A game is only eligible to be indexed when there are files available to be downloaded as described on our indexing guide here: https://itch.io/docs/creators/getting-indexed

Thanks