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Lost Visibility

A topic by St97 created Jul 07, 2020 Views: 474 Replies: 6

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I've emailed itch.io support countless times with this for almost two months now, and have yet to hear back once. Awful customer service and I've pointed out as much in my one-way conversations with them. When my game first launched, I was racking up views. It peaked at 800 a day, and slowly declined to a few hundred daily. It stayed like that for a few months. I reached a thousand downloads within a week. As an offline user, I was able to find the game relatively quickly given the tags, or if I searched for the name. I don't know what happened starting in May, but the visibility cratered. Coincidentally, it was around the time that I selected the "18+" option in meta-data. I could no longer find my game using its tags. When I'm logged off, I can no longer find the game by typing its name. I've been getting daily downloads of <10 a day for the past few weeks.

Any suggestions for what I can do? I doubt this is the natural course of visibility for most games on this site. Like I said, the views flatlined like it ran into a truck. Beyond removing the "18+ tag", I don't know what to do and any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

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No Time To PlayModerator4 years ago

Support has been backed up badly since spring, first due to technical issues, then to the BLM bundle. The situation is ongoing. Issues had to be prioritized.

Your game is perfectly visible in a search, and it had the normal evolution of most games, traffic-wise. All I can say is: watch your analytics. Revise your tags. See what you might have missed. Make your devlogs more meaty. Quality over quantity, because search engines index them. Speaking of which, don't neglect your creator profile either. It's by far my #1 source of traffic. Also, you don't seem to have a Twitter account (maybe for the best) and I don't remember spotting a mention of your game on the LemmaSoft forums either. For that matter, interact with people right here in the community, too, because that's how they hear about you. Hope this helps.

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St974 years ago

The problem is that support hasn't made any communication about working on other issues. It's not very professional to simply ignore requests. And I'd think this qualifies as a technical issue, given how many developers on this site are dealing with the same thing

Thank you. I'll look over the tags and edit my profile but I'm not sure how you're saying that my game is visible in a search. Perhaps it's different for you because you're a moderator. Like I said, as a secondary user (non-dev/moderator), I can't find my game via search. Only way I can find it is through searching my name as a developer. Additionally, I can't find my game by searching its tags. It's hard for me to believe that visibility for my game would be stable for months and then suddenly drop 90% of its usual traffic overnight and that's considered normal? I'd have to imagine that there's a system issue.

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No Time To PlayModerator4 years ago

Our admins have communicated the situation with support on numerous occasions lately, through multiple channels. And search is optimized for exact matches. I simply searched for your game's name. That would be while logged in, by the way; NSFW games definitely don't show up otherwise. And that's why I suggested double-checking your tags. They're probably not the best selection.

As for why your game's traffic dropped so suddenly, you said it yourself: that happened when you marked it as NSFW. Makes sense, really, since a lot of people can't see such games at all. It can't be helped.

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St974 years ago

Ah okay. Thanks for clarifying that.

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Afloof.devModerator4 years ago

The only thing I’d like to add is, getting a lot of views/downloads the first week a game is released, and have them reduces the following days is normal. It happens on all games.

Apart from that, I would imagine the 18+ option is a tricky one. I don’t know a lot about the Itch demographic, but wouldn’t be surprised if there is a high percentage of young users, or users that may not be looking for that type of content. I have no data to back this up, just speculations.

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St974 years ago

I understand. The thing is though most of the traffic that was coming in was overwhelmingly from the erotic tags. Like over 95% so I'm pretty sure those guys knew what they were getting into. My game is also clearly listed as "adult" in the description. I never assumed that the downloads and views would sustain that early level, but after it settled into its own niche and was getting consistent visibility for a few months, the fact that it cratered overnight does not seem like the usual trend to me.

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