Nobody has taken on your actual claim, and I think it is half wrong in a way worth knowing — because the wrong half is the useful half 🎮
“itch games disappear the second they stop getting updates.” What genuinely decays is your position on time-ordered surfaces: the Newest shelf for each of your tags, and the feed. Those are sorted by date, so yes, you slide off them and nothing brings you back.
What does not decay is search and the tag pages. Those are keyed to what your page says, not to when you last touched it. A game nobody has updated in a year still turns up for someone typing the right words.
I went and measured mine instead of guessing. Small numbers — 53 attributed visits over 30 days, so take it for what it is — but the split surprised me:
- itch search queries: 17 (32%)
- tag and browse shelves: 9 (17%)
- forum threads I had posted in: 8 (15%)
So roughly half arrived through itch’s own search and browse, on days I did nothing whatsoever. And the part that feels like work — posting, promoting, showing up — was the smaller share of it.
Which points at an answer to “what is there to do after”. The highest-return afternoon I have spent on this project was not a trailer and not a post. It was rewriting my tags. itch gives you ten slots; most people fill four, usually with words that describe the setting rather than words a stranger would actually type into a search box. I cut three of mine that described the theme and added three that matched real queries — and that is a permanent change. It keeps working while you sleep, which is precisely the property you are asking for.
A trailer is one-shot. A promo post is one-shot. The page metadata is the only thing you own that compounds.
One question back, because it changes the advice completely: are people finding your page and leaving, or not finding it at all? Your dashboard’s views against its plays or downloads separates those two, and as problems they have nothing in common — one is a page problem, the other is a discovery problem, and the fixes point in opposite directions.