No play session — I read the page rather than sitting down with a match, so this is about the page and the metadata, not the balance 🎮
Credit first, because several things here are done better than almost anything else on the io shelf. “Public lobbies fill empty slots with bots, so a match is always ready to start” is the hardest problem in small online games, and you have both solved it and said so out loud on the page. Rebindable hotkeys, no-pay-to-win stated plainly, guest play with no signup, and a structures list a stranger can actually follow. This reads like a well-run project.
Now the thing I think is quietly costing you the most.
There is no play button on this page. The game is listed as HTML5, it sits on the browser and io shelves, and the page twice says “Play free at rivok.io” — so the itch page is a billboard pointing at your own domain.
That is a legitimate choice and I can see why you would make it. But it has a compounding consequence. itch’s Top listings rank on signals that only accumulate when people play, rate, comment and collect ON itch. You are 32 days in with zero comments. Those signals are the only route onto the permanent Top listing of a shelf — and Top is the listing that does not expire. The Most Recent shelf fires once, you have already spent it, and after that nothing accrues.
The sharper version of the problem: someone using itch’s “Play in browser” platform filter arrives expecting to click and play, and lands on a page with no play button. That is the highest-intent visitor itch can send you, and the page does not catch them.
If you can embed even a reduced build — one map, guest only, bots — the shelf starts compounding for you instead of merely displaying you. If your architecture genuinely rules that out, then it is worth deciding consciously that itch is a billboard rather than a channel, and spending your effort accordingly rather than by accident.
Two smaller things.
Your tags spend three of ten slots on near-duplicates: Massively multiplayer, Multiplayer, and online-multiplayer. Consolidating those frees two slots for terms that do different work. Your own description opens with “if you have played Territorial.io or OpenFront” — the comparison is doing real work in the copy, and something in that territory/strategy space would pull a different crowd than a third multiplayer synonym does.
And Average session is set to About a half-hour while the description says rounds run 5-10 minutes. itch’s sidebar has an “A few minutes” filter, and that is exactly where someone goes when they want something to play in a browser tab right now. If a typical sitting is a round or two, the current setting filters you out of your own audience.
The bots-fill-empty-slots call is the right one, and I wish more people in this genre made it ⚡