So this is what happened to me publishing my first game.

I just released a game called neverblink, and I post it on itch.io and gameJolt.  Its a free game for a university project.

I always thoot that itch.io was a much bigger store, so when I started sharing links everywhere I shared my itch.io page. Was a lot of work and spam for actually getting near 850 downloads.

But here is the thing, in gameJolt, only in a few days had  more visibility, more downloads, more feedback, more followers and more video reviews. 

I kind of regret about putting all this effort on itch.io, When I stopped publishing and spamming everywhere the popularity went from top 10 to  0  suddenly, while in gameJolt just posting the game the things went and still going much better.

Have a good day :D

I experienced something similar on Gamejolt - one game in particular that I hosted there suddenly started getting hundreds of plays per day, about a week after I published it, without me really doing anything to promote it. Unfortunately their analytics are not as good as here, so I was never able to tell where the traffic was coming from, which was really quite frustrating. I think their forums are more active than here, and it might have been that somebody posted my game there, but I didn't think to check at the time.

My game "Asteroid Demolition Corps" has done a lot better on itch than on Gamejolt. Granted, it's been on itch a lot longer, but even the feedback I've gotten here has been much more helpful. I recently asked on reddit which one was better and I got mixed responses. In my opinion, post your games here to get feedback from fellow developers and post on Gamejolt to get feedback from a larger audience.