I tried to do some reading about how things are handled and it's purposefully obscure, so my hand is kind of forced in making a topic. I understand it's annoying but an automatic boost subject to set defined rules to put everyone on equal footing would probably fix these discussions.
- How long after a major update (an actual major update, more than a month from initial release, and with massive amounts of content) can I assume that ich.io is ignoring my game instead of waiting to put it to recent ? Is there a way to know if the manual review already happened, or what prompted the decision if it did and never got accepted ? Even knowing what prompts the refusal would be a massive step forward.
- I understand that ich.io is not supposed to do advertising for devs, and I'm not expecting it to do that, I'm doing what I can to bring some numbers from outside, however it also has a "most recent" option and it's a natural expectation to assume that the most recent updates should end up there at least, especially since some of them do, pushing others further down.
- It's also very apparent from advertising on other websites that itch.io brings the highest amount of attention to a new game by far, meaning that in order to bring traffic to itch.io from outside, one basically has to be pushed to recent by itch.io in the first place (which seems to be a coin flip) to kickstart the feedback loop of people noticing the game. Meaning that even in order to do proper advertising elsewhere, becoming a beggar in these kinds of discussion threads is a necessary step.
/t/6592949/my-game-never-appeared-in-recent
I saw this fine gentleman going through the same rite of passage as I do, and I'm happy to see their game is now thriving in the most recent section while mine is still nowhere to be seen despite being updated around the same time, so I was wondering if maybe trying to create a thread had an effect.
Sorry for the annoyance, but obviously when what's at stake is either the absolute void of nothingness or having a chance to meet one's potential audience, people can't afford not to try, part of promoting a game everywhere is also to make sure it can be promoted (naturally through recency) on itch.
It also seems to me like making the boost random from a devs' perspective heavily encourages them to "game" the system, meaning release updates as fast as possible, with as few content as possible, since it's better to be ignored by the algorithm 2 times in 3 months and be picked up on the third, than to be ignored once after a 3-month delay for a big update, leading to 6 whole months of silence.
So it's a negative circle of "It seems my game won't reemerge from the algorithm depths when I put effort in an update, while some others will arbitrarily get boosted with devlogs boiling down to a single bugfix, so I can't afford making actual real updates if I want a chance to compete", which I'm pretty sure is exactly what itch.io is trying to avoid.
Thank you in advance for any information you could provide on this.