Friendly reminder that for almost two days now there's been an official answer pinned to the top of this topic. Obviously some people have seen it, yet the discussion continues to revolve around the same old points, and by now it's just a shouting match. This isn't helpful anymore.
The explanation post from leafo, while an explanation for erratic behaviour and ups and downs, is not a sufficient explanation why the game of OP was suddenly sorted last in the browse of popular games. (It only made clear, that it is not something to do with the account)
I did eventually find our game at the very very bottom of the popular page (took 5 minutes to scroll to the VERY bottom)
Something happened. And it is prudent to assume it affected more than one game. And to happen in such a way, to include it, but sort it last, the sortin algorithm must have thought it to have near 0 popularity. Even when allowing for generous adjustments to mix in boosts for new games, this is too inaccurate to be considered normal behaviour. Either the data was wrong or the data processing was faulty.
I understand you're a mod and all, man. I respect your role here. But let's go...
1. You work thousands of hours for two years to create a game, monthly updates, a lot of spending with art assets, self-promotion on different sites, maintain a beautiful page.
2. You get good results, and you are satisfied with it.
3. A year later, the admin decides that you don't deserve the result you have and takes it away from you because others need attention.
Now, my artist and I were materially harmed by this, a concrete thing. Me and many other devs... And yes, unfairly. I just ask for a little empathy from you, and pls try to understand the side of the people who are suffering from the staff's poor decisions.
There are over 850K games on itch.io, and who knows how many creators. Even if only 1% of them work as hard as you, that's still a lot of people. I don't see them come here and complain about a feature they were told isn't reliable, demand an official answer, then ignore that answer and insist they must be somehow targeted.
In an earlier post you used the word "meritocracy". You might want to look up why that word is extremely problematic.
the admin decides that you don't deserve the result you have and takes it away from you
You assert human agency. And then base your reasoning on this, as if it were true.
If it were true that someone decided your stuff should not deserve your results, you would have been de-indexed. You are not de-indexed.
While it looks like something did happen that was out of the ordinary and screwed with ranking big time, your game will recover. There is a pool of people looking for games like yours. While that pool might grow slowly as new people discover itch, you still have an area to expand in that can be considered finite. If you do not reach them today, you will reach them tommorrow. But the other way around is also true. If they already checked out your game, why should they do so again.