Hello,

I'm posting this because our game Bewitched still does not seem to appear in the Recent Updates / Recently Updated section after publishing a major update. This already happened when we first released the game.

At the time, we were told that we should wait, as it could take some time. We waited several weeks, but nothing ever changed. We eventually assumed we did something wrong and hoped that things would work better for version 0.2. Today, we released version 0.2 of the game. We uploaded the new public builds, made sure the page is public, and published a devlog marked as a Major Update.

However, several hours later, the game still does not appear in the recent/updated listings. We can see other games appearing or reappearing in the recent sections after updates, but ours does not seem to be indexed or boosted at all. This is seriously affecting the visibility of the game, especially after a major update that took a lot of work, testing, and polishing to prepare.

We honestly don’t know what we are doing wrong, and we can’t find any solution on our side. We've read every guides and followed every steps but nothing seems to be working.
Please, could you help us check if there is an issue with the project’s indexing, visibility, or major update freshness boost? This visibility is very important for a small project like ours, and we would really appreciate your help.

Game page: https://exquisite-studios.itch.io/bewitched

Thank you very much for your time and help.

However, several hours later, the game still does not appear in the recent/updated listings.

Try weeks.

Up

Can I get an answer or some help from a moderator/administrator ?

thank you,

Exquisite studios

up

but idk how itchio is helping me to build a community

Itch is not doing such things. That's the point. For this to happen by merely existing on Itch you need a lot of luck and a very good game.

Do not expect wonders. Your game is very AI heavy and that's not popular. You are actually doing well. Could be worse, could be better.

As a side note please read this /t/2885012/tips-for-reducing-the-size-of-your-build Your game seems quite big for a version 0.2

why itchio doesn’t and just leave me at the bottom of the search.

You are at the top of search at #3 at the moment. But why would people search your game by name?

If you talk about tags, your game has zero characteristic tags. You use 6 tags to tell people it's an adult game. And the remaining tags tell it's a visual novel. So what do we know about the game by finding it in those tags?

Your description says this: Free-roaming and exploration and one of the screenshots shows the word quest. Are you sure, this is only the genre visual novel - or at all? Your passive discoverability might do better if you would use some interesting tags, instead of so many redundant tags. Why even tag renpy? You have that as meta information.

Anyway, what might be missing in this thread is this bit of information: major updates need "approval" to have your game featured in top of recent again. I guess we can assume that there is a filter that presorts the games maybe. But it is said that this approval is human approval. So someone has to hit an ok button to allow the time stamp update. And your game is only 3 months old. Updates are not major updates, they are updates.

Oh, and if you were to have some distinct tags, you would still appear in the top pages of those tags. Your game is only 3 months old.

This whole mechanic is dubious in my opinion. What about developers that update their game without a major update? There should be two "recent" sortings. Maybe three. And one of them should be by publishing date and be fixed. I was very surprised, when I learned that the recent sorting was neither a pure update sorting (which is easily abused without some cooldown to prevent spam), nor a publishing date sorting, but some unpredicteable mix of those two.