Hi everyone and itch.io moderation team,

I am writing this post because I am deeply frustrated and losing my motivation as an indie developer.

Two weeks ago, I published the demo for my psychological horror game, Haunted Echoes. The launch was incredibly successful; the game started with amazing momentum, gaining hundreds of clicks, views, and downloads within just a couple of days in the horror category. The conversion rate and player engagement were highly promising.

However, after I carefully updated some tags and posted a devlog, the game completely vanished from all search results and tag listings. I know how the system works, and I strictly followed all the rules regarding the indexing queue. I haven't touched or spammed the dashboard since then, expecting the automatic process to clear it.

The issue is, it has been weeks and my game is still completely hidden from public search.

Because of this delay, my game has lost all of its initial algorithm hype and organic momentum. This has seriously broken my motivation. I was planning to constantly update and heavily support the itch.io version of my game to build a solid standing in the category here, but being completely invisible for days for simply updating my page feels incredibly punishing.

The game is still live and fully functional via the direct link, which proves there is no violation or ban on the project—it is just stuck in the index system indefinitely.

Please, could a moderator look into this and manually re-index my game? I just want to get back to developing my game with the motivation I started with.

Game Link:

The game has now been indexed and appears in search results. However, as I mentioned earlier, it lost its initial momentum; before being indexed, the game used to get nearly 200 views and around 50 downloads a day, whereas now it receives only 3 views and 0 downloads daily. Those 3 views likely come from my YouTube video. Before being indexed, the game ranked under tags like "horror," "news," "new," and "popular," and was generating clicks from those sources. Essentially, because I’ve dropped in the rankings across all categories and tags, users no longer see the game. If your game gets indexed, this will likely happen to you too, so I wouldn't get your hopes up too high.

Only one of all the games on my page can be found in the search ... I wrote to the support team yesterday, but I don't think I'll get a response