My current theory is, that they lost access numbers, possibly somewhat related to this announcement https://itch.io/t/3099694/notice-for-html-game-devs-upcoming-change-to-cdn-domai...
There are 29 games in the popular nsfw text based for 30 days sort. Your's not in it. And there are only 5 games in the 7 day sort. This looks very strange. But I cannot say if it always looks so strange, since I never checked like this. ( The game is around place 110 of 725 for no time constraint.)
I mean they changed the algorithm, I used to be in a number of lists and relatively high up, too. I was in the top five overall Twine tagged games (usually floating around number two to number five) for a long time. My other game, Hex, was usually in the top ten or twenty of that list. In “text based + adult” I was also gnerally on the first page/first load, often both games were. They changed the algorithm on the 8th. The list of popular games in the last X days is still informed by the new algorithm, it’s not like a stored historical snapshot or something.
I mean even if you don’t believe me that my game dropped off a cliff, it did. I can see the metrics. I’m not sure why you’d doubt me.
That HTML hosting change has nothing to do with this issue at all, that might just make some players lose their saved games when it happens (and it hasn’t yet), but it won’t effect metrics AFAIK. Even if it does effect metrics, it hasn’t happened yet.
I thought I saw something strange.
If I search for Tool&Engine "twine" and TAG "Female Female Protagonist" your games appear on the first page.
But if I search by TAG "Twine" and "Female Female Protagonist" your game does not appear.
If I search for "Female Female Protagonist" + "Test based", your two games appear on the first page.
PS: It's not related, but I'm trying your game and it has very good quality, congratulations.
A normal change would not make your games drop so much. However the algorithm now and some time ago worked, it still is supposed to do some ranking based on interactions.
Since there are still games on top of the list, it obviously still sorts them somehow. But there are some massive problems behind the scenes. Servers are changing and I believe somehwere in Asia a whole section was cut off from parts of the hosting servers. There are threads about that.
The algorithm is also supposed to have some methods of preventing cheating. Maybe it is over sensitive to those behind the scenes problems. If they rerouted traffic it might have looked like artificial overinflation of view counts and was ignored, resulting in a lower ranking for some games.
Maybe it is some obscure bug, where only games hosted on a certain load distribution server were affected.
Other than that, a runaway self re-inforcing viral downward trend might be possible due to a small change in the algorithm. Like, you were on edge of page 1 and next day it was sligtly less visits so the algo puts you still further down. Rinse, repeat.
I thought it might have to do with updates, but then I saw a game on page 2 with no updates in a year.
What irks me the most, how the game of OP was apparantly at the bottom of some list. That is why I thought, and still suspect, access numbers were lost or counted as 0 for some time frame.
