I've just released a 6th game on the Itch platform (Tiki Bar Breaker). I think most of them are okay polished and all of them offer some fun and decent gameplay, so I wonder why the number of plays is that low? Is it the thumbnails? Is it the genres? Am I doing the accompanying text bad? Or is this just normal? https://itch.io/c/5812613/tintwotins-collection
I can only speculate on what these hundreds of views mean….
Out of your six game covers, Abyssal Ascent‘s and QUBE‘s are the two that don’t at a glance look like what we’re going to call “AI slop”. The more of the awkwardly glossy covers that are on your creator page, the less interest there is in the games.
On the game page for Abyssal Ascent, the artist or image generator is notably missing in your credits, which specifically names you in other roles. Wary players might bounce from there, lowering plays per view.
QUBE might have been affected by the deindexing drama, when many of the site’s visitors were focused on finding any of the thousands of missing games.
You came to the public comment section, asking what is wrong with your games. What did you expect as a response? People telling you, what they think might be "wrong" with your games?
And now you are dissatisfied with Itch as a whole, because someone nitpicked at your games? After you asked them to.
Your games look AI made and your cover images are AI made and your game description is boastful and reads like typical AI praise. Example:
Dynamic Difficulty: The game becomes progressively more challenging as you level up.
This is as informative as telling me, water is wet. Also, this is actually not dynamic difficulty, if difficulty ramps up with each level. Dynamic would mean, it is responsive to something, like the player's performance.
That you use AI and have games that look like AI made because of circumstances, is not in itself a bad thing. But it adds to a perceived cheapness, especially since you released a lot of games in a short time frame. And of course, the first thing a potential player sees, is the AI generated cover images.
Itch actually is a nice place, you should try out some game jams, if you can create games in two weeks, those are perfect for you. I am serious. Try out some game jams. The public community is a poor representation of Itch. Most threads have less than 100 views.
Another tag suggestion: https://itch.io/games/tag-minimalist
Also, you might ask at the wrong place about your marketing. Ask on your socials, why so few people go visit your games.
And you are correct, that tags do not matter at all - if you market a direct link to your game. But how are people supposed to find your games at a later point? How are recommendations supposed to work, if you tag the games with things that are not relevant. You said that most of your views came from reddit. What about the non-views of people browsing point & click and seeing an arcace game in the popup? What about AI avoiders that see your AI made covers? And yeah, your bubble game is the least AI looking game cover and the one that looks mostly like ingame graphics. If you have enough views/non-views your games will have a clickthrough rate displayed. That might help your analyis, why your graphs only have a spike, presumably when you posted release on socials.
I can only give opinion why some people might not try the game, once the land on the page. I would be detered by your choice of tags and the marketing speech with the feature boasting. I tried some of them anyway. There is nothing "wrong" with your games, but how you present them could be more advantagous. They are minimalist short casual arcade style games. Make your games appealing to people looking for such games. Because people looking for slice of life, point & click or life simulation games will not be happy with your games, and people that would be happy with minimalist short casual games can't find them by tags and thus also not by the recommendation system.
