You may have noticed that as part of our last few seasonal sales we introduced a new way to browse pages on sale: The Sale Explorer. We've been tweaking how the Sale Explorer works to make it a better user experience for end users. This guide is to help developers understand how pages become eligible to show up in the Sale Explorer.
For basic eligibility, your sale must meet the following requirements:
- The sale is published and live right now
- The sale has no "Sale Conditions" like coupon codes or ownership requirements
- Each project page in the sale is indexed individually. If a page in your sale isn't eligible it won't block other eligible items from being indexed.
- Free projects show up only if they have paid files that the sale discounts
- The project page must be indexed in our regular browse pages
- The project page meets the Limited-time sale criteria outlined below
- A bundle with no discount on the individual games (0% off) shows its games only under the "In bundle" filter
The Sale Explorer index updates in chunks and is heavily cached. If you just published a sale please check back in an hour or so if you want to verify your page is included.
Limited-time sales
itch.io makes it very easy for developers to set up promotions for their pages. We're tweaking our rules for sale indexing eligibility within the sale explorer to focus on promoting content that is truly on sale, and to limit the promotion of pages that are continuously on sale. This includes detecting developers who create back-to-back sales, or developers who continually edit the start and end dates of their sales.
To decide whether a sale is limited-time, we look at:
- Sale history over the last several months, not just the current sale. Changing a sale's dates, ending and reviving it, or replacing it with a new sale doesn't reset that history.
- How long the current run has lasted. Sales separated by only a short break count as one continuous sale.
- How much of the past few months the project has spent discounted.
- Whether a live sale keeps getting moved forward. Pushing a running sale's start and end dates later to make it look new counts against it. Extending the end date doesn't.
- Only real discounts count. Being in a bundle with no discount on the individual games (0% off) doesn't count toward any of this, so leaving a bundle up permanently won't affect your other sales.
If you have any questions, please reply in this thread.