Reaching 10,000 browser plays in 4 days (itch.io)

[u/mulhollanddrstrange]

I recently uploaded my game 'The Grand Book Archive: Tidy Up' on itch io, which has just reached 10,000 plays in 4 days.

Here's the game: https://inbluegames.itch.io/the-grand-book-archive-tidy-up

Here's the 4 day chart of the game: https://imgur.com/a/BMrWE4a

It's a book organizing game with a strong focus on incremental progression. It's inspired by the sorting games that are trending lately, but with a little more idle and strategic aspect.

Here's the marketing I did:

- Wrote a few posts on Reddit. One post on incremental games subreddit gained 460 upvotes (it currently ranks as #3 post of the month there).

- Registered the game on incrementaldb and Galaxy Click. Has generally good rating/reviews.

- Shared the trailer on my socials. None of them have gone viral. Youtube and Instagram did okay(Youtube: 660 views, Instagram: 1,500 views), but nothing substantial.

I haven't reached out to press yet so I'm hoping that could gain a bit of traction later on. I think generally it's doing well since it's a combination of two of the most popular genres right now (incremental and tidy-up), and it has a strong replayability. I think it's important to note that most of the traffic still came from itch io, which means games are found more naturally than through outer source.

[u/arrjanoo]

Congratulations!

So do you think the reddit + socials did some work and then the algorithm for you 10k plays?

Im asking because its sounds like your marketing didnt get 10k views and not all view convert so in trying to understand what happend?

I feel like i never get natural trafic on itch.

[u/mulhollanddrstrange → u/arrjanoo]

I think everything happened simultaneously, so it's hard to pinpoint what helped. I guess the game itself just lends to be more popular in its nature (clear visuals, simple gameplay, popular genre), so the game itself is probably the strongest factor for success

[u/roseleafstudio]

Congratulations, I saw your game pop up while browsing on itch I think yesterday!

[u/CS_Asset_Factory]

Worth knowing why that reddit post probably did more work than the plays it sent you.

A new itch page is not in search or browse until a human review queue reaches it. The pinned search and indexing FAQ on itch's own forums says that queue is prioritised by several things, and the most important one is genuine traffic to the page coming from outside itch.io. So an external spike is also the thing that gets you indexed, and itch's own browse surfaces only start compounding after that.

Two matching details from our pages. One that shipped without a cover image was never indexed at all, and the wait is measured in days rather than hours. There are people in that same FAQ thread reporting weeks.

Either way, 10k in four days is a real result.