Hi! I made a game, you can check it out on my profile, but I noticed that it gets very few views and downloads. I'd love for you to try the game. I'm not going to update the game. I'm moving on to another project
That's normal. You have to consider that your game share the shelf with thousands of games that are uploaded almost daily. It's recommended that you share links to your games in other platforms, forums, YT, etc. You know, self-promotion, but even that. Like I said, is normal if you don't have hundreds or even dozens of downloads. So don't get yourself down. :-)
Two things decide this, and neither is the game.
One, the shelf. Thousands of uploads a week, so the itch front page is a lottery. More polish won't fix that. A doorway with existing traffic will: a jam, a genre Discord, a short clip where people already go to watch games.
Two, you said you're not updating. That's the harder one. On Steam especially, the store surfaces whatever moved most recently. No patch, no devlog, no post means no trigger to pull anyone back, and the player curve just drains. One small update resets that clock.
I read this exact pattern for a living, on live numbers, so if you want a second set of eyes on your page, my profile's the door.
One lever nobody has mentioned yet: tags are shelves 🎮 Every tag has a Popular listing (a lottery for a new game) and a Newest listing, and Newest is where niche browsers actually look. I cut three broad tags on my own game, added the ones that describe it exactly, and it landed at #1 in a newest-tagged listing within days. Open the tag pages your game sits on and look at page 1 of Newest; if you are not on it, that is the fix.