Hello, all, and I hope you were able to have a nice holiday no matter where you were or what you were doing. Also that you will have a nice New Year’s soon. I am still at my mom’s for the next few days but will be flying back soon.

I am writing this because I’ve been trying to think about and get advice about my situation with OW. As you know, it is still deindexed after five months. In fact, my whole profile is deindexed. If you look up "justacarrot" in the search bar you get one result and it’s not my game. Whereas looking up any other dev will list all the games they have made (that are indexed). Ofc, OW would not show up there, but all my other games should, yet they don’t. Just another great glitch from itch. Also frustrating: MVBSLS got added to fresh games recently but it was only in there for about two days and didn’t get the algo boost the majority of other games in there get, so it had zero effect. I only even noticed it was there because I saw it get added to a collection that I know is connected to fresh games. My whole account just feels like it’s getting the shaft tbh. And it’s starting to look like this will never change. It is a bug on itch’s side that they have admitted to, and only they can fix whatever it is that is causing the deindexing, but they do not have the time or motivation to do so. So it’s probably time for me to accept the reality that it will never be indexed again and my account is just kinda shafted. Is there anything I can do about this? That is the question I’ve been mulling over.

The problem is that I’m quite scared that anything I might try could mess up my account and games even more, so I need to be both careful and strategic about it. For instance, itch mods have said that creating new game pages for a deindexed game and/or deleting and remaking game pages can get your new games deindexed immediately and even get your account restricted. So clearly I don’t want to do this... However, I heard from a fellow dev that demo pages are actually encouraged by itch and that doing this strategy helped some of his deindexed games get traffic again. There’s not really a way to make a demo page for OW as it’s not paid... but I do have two quite different versions of OW I could potentially do this with: the OG game and the remaster. If I make a new game page just for the remaster, could this bring some more traffic back to the game? This is the question I’ve been asking myself.

It could potentially be helpful, but I also have some fears about it. First, I am nervous that it would still be considered too similar to the OG game and get immediately deindexed again and flag my account. This would be devastating... I would need to make sure that the two pages are as different as possible with different titles, screenshots, maybe even general design and descriptions, to really ensure that they look like two completely different games. I would probably take everything related to the remaster off the OG page early on so it can sit there without it for a while, too, just in case (e.g., the downloads ofc but also the screenshots and mentions of it). And I’d probably also draw a new cover image and header image for the new remaster page + rework the remaster game files to end after Arc 2 and instead have a screen that says "if you want to play the rest of the game, please play the OG for now" or something like that so it would be less confusing for new ppl. I’d also ofc link to the OG page from the new remaster page. I THINK this would be enough to keep my games and account safe... tho there is no way to know for sure, hence my nervousness about it.

My other fear is that I’d go through all this work and it wouldn’t even help the game at all. Why? Because the remaster has done so horribly already. Almost no one has downloaded it even when it was on the OG page before it was deindexed. So why would anyone download or engage with it once it’s on a new game page? And if no one downloads or engages with it, the release will completely flop and the new game page will drop thousands of pages down in the algorithm and bring in zero visibility, defeating the point of trying to bring in traffic to the deindexed OG page..............

A big part of the reason why OW getting deindexed has been so devastating for me as a dev is because the OG game page ranked very well in the itch algorithm. I think a big part of it is because of its longevity and years of updates: not only has the page been active since 2021, but it was getting Major Updates 2-3 times a year. And even though for the first year, the game did quite poorly, starting in the second year or so, it did start to pick up a bit more traffic. And by 2025, it was consistently ranking within the top 5-ish pages of VNs and bringing in quite decent organic traffic. And that traffic also morphed into traffic for all my other games, since the majority of my stuff is other side games in the OW universe, so ppl that found the OG game and liked it would check out the side games, too. Once OW got deindexed, traffic across all my games plummeted because of this, getting so bad in October and November that I was getting zero downloads across my entire library of games multiple days in a row (which is why I was trying to promote so hard then, but it was having zero effect... which is part of what led to my big mental breakdown lol...)

Why am I explaining all of this? Well, because creating a new game page would never give me back what I’ve lost with the OG game page. When you create a new game page, it doesn’t have any longevity. It has some freshness for the first few days, which is what can help it do well when you first release it, but then it will plummet into the abyss, even more so if it doesn’t do that well upon release. For context, WtDSR, which I released in September, now currently gets like... 4 views total a day because it ranks so low in the algorithm that it is almost invisible. So I’m worried that the same will happen to the new remaster page, especially since it’s not even a new game and did very poorly, so very few ppl would download it or engage with the page and it would flop. I feel like this would make me feel even worse than I already do now.......

So you see my struggle. I am worried that creating a new remaster page could hurt my account, and also that it would be completely ineffective and make me feel even worse.

Would ppl be willing to engage with the new page? If I have a launch for the new remaster page, would ppl download it even if they already have downloaded it? (Or even if they don’t want to play it, since many ppl have told me they don’t want to play the remaster.) Would ppl rate it or leave comments to help with the engagement? I don’t know. This game page will essentially become the new face of the game because it will be the only searchable version. Could it actually hurt the game if the launch does poorly? This all worries me greatly... :(

What do you all think? Would you be willing to help try and boost the new page by downloading and engaging with it to try to help it rank better? I am trying to gauge if I think it could possibly have a chance to do at least ok and not completely flop...

Feel free to let me know your thoughts as fans of my work. I’m going to keep thinking about it a bit more in the new year. If I do decide to go ahead with it, I’ll first remove all the remaster stuff from the OG page so it can sit for a while without it. Then work on the new game page, assets, tweaked files, etc. and probably try to eventually hold an official launch for it to ideally get a bit more visibility for it. But we’ll see. It kinda depends on the vibe I get from ppl. I just don’t want to put in that work if it won’t even help anything and just make me feel worse. So please let me know what you think about the idea!

Happy holidays to everyone. Thank you for supporting me and my stories and characters <3

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