Unfortunately, it seems that nothing has really changed about these complaints. When we published our game, we faced the exact same issue. But instead of panicking, we carefully read through the forums and the official guidelines.

We noticed that in about 90% of such complaints, the moderation team redirects people to this exact page:
[reference link]
[reference link2]

We made the “mistake” of taking that guideline seriously. After double-checking everything step by step, we patiently waited as instructed — since it said the process could take 1–2 days, or even up to a week. So, there was really nothing to do but wait.

During that time, we kept checking the “Most Recent” section to see if our game had been indexed. However, while monitoring that page, we noticed a serious inconsistency: Most of the newly indexed games didn’t follow the rules described in the guideline. Some of them didn’t even have proper visuals — just a one-line description. The kind of pages that look like a nearly blank A4 sheet…

At first, we thought maybe those developers were exempt because they had published games before. But no — most of them were first-time developers. And this wasn’t just a couple of isolated cases.

In the end, we realized there’s absolutely no difference between following the guideline to the letter and completely ignoring it.Either the system works entirely at random, or there’s a completely different mechanism at play. But one thing is certain: it has nothing to do with the guideline.

So I’d like to address new developers here: You don’t really need to take that guideline seriously, because it’s pretty clear that even Itch.io doesn’t.Your page could be almost empty, your game could be your very first — and still, you might get indexed purely by luck.

After reading through many similar threads in the forum, I can see that these complaints are far from rare — and most of them are absolutely justified. This is a serious issue for any platform and frankly, it reflects a rather unprofessional level of management.

At the end of the day, do you really want to have a set of guidelines that have lost all legitimacy and that nobody takes seriously anymore?Meanwhile, the moderation team keeps copy-pasting the same link in response to every complaint. It honestly feels like a bad joke.

So, what are we supposed to do now? 
Should we try reaching out to the support team — or just sit and hope that one day it’ll magically happen?

If you page hasn’t automatically shown up in the index within a day or so after publishing then it likely means your page is in a queue for human review. This is more common for first time publishers, but we have a handful of automated risk heuristics that can flag your account for review. If it’s still not going up then your best course of action is to contact support and a staff member can review your page. In the meantime I recommend operating your page as normal, as it’s still fully functional and accessible.

Finally, my page got indexed! 🎉

I wanted to leave a few notes here in case they help anyone else who runs into the same issue.

I’m sharing information I learned from a developer I’m grateful to:

Itch.io has been experiencing some issues with payment methods over the past few months. Steam has had similar problems. I won’t go into too much detail, but a little research should make it clear why.

Here’s the main point:
Itch.io does index games with the “Name your price” option enabled, but this process can take much longer than expected — sometimes a day, sometimes weeks.
If you remove this option and make your game completely free, your page usually gets indexed much faster.

(This method worked instantly for me. However, I can’t say for certain that it was solely because of this — it’s possible the support team noticed and intervened.)

I experienced the same problem myself. Luckily, I learned the solution thanks to a developer in the community.
I hope this information helps someone!