I released my first and only game a week ago and haven't seen many visitors and ZERO people posted on my community board. I even released a new patch with new units, new passives, and reworked abilities plus an overhauled map editor. I'm wondering if I'm not using itch.io correctly. The devlogs seems to be for games in development whereas my game is released. It doesn't seem to be the right place to post patch notes either. I'm not trying to "self promote" here so I won't post the link directly to my game (Echolumination) but you can search/try it as it's free and public.

Any suggestions? Do people hire advertisers or something?

Hey! People usually start advertising since the moment they start developing, that's why writing devlogs and releasing demos is so important to promote your game before launch. 

I've seen teams promote their games on other platforms such as Bluesky or X, and Discord servers are a great way to get an audience as well. I'm sorry to hear that your game is not getting traction, but unfortunately players won't be able to play it if they don't know about it. 

As for hiring advertisers, a handful of developers do that, but it's not a must. What's important is to get your game out there and players will appear naturally.

This is a great space to self-promote, though! Asking for feedback on your game, even if it's finished, may help you improve new builds and use that knowledge to implement it on new games. I hope you can get more players to try it!

What the?

What did you expect? Instant fame? You published 3 days ago. Itch does not promote your game for you. It does not work this way. Internal promotion on Itch itself just does not happen. There is about one place where you are allowed to promote your game and that is meant to promote it once and views on that post are < 100. Often < 20. And that's only people that read the post. Not people visiting the game. Passive discovery on Itch happens via tags.

/games/last-7-days this is 5000 games. Why should I play your game? Or even see your game at all? There is a new game every 2-3 minutes published. How many of those will go "viral" or get any kind of attention to boost them to high places in a popularity ranking at least for a few days? /games/top-rated/last-7-days less than 10% and you do not know how many of those were previously famous or did advertisement.

/board/10021/devlogs is a deprecated section of the message boards. It got replaced by /devlogs

Your game is 3 days old. What kind of development diary would you even have to tell. And why would anyone care and specifically want to read you talking about your game.