Yesterday, I was poking around the Publishing section of Creator Portal and, for some reason, decided to look at Campaigns too. I noticed that my map, Sky Heroes Tycoon, was missing from the “Select a published island” dropdown. My other published islands were there, so naturally I started trying to figure out why Sky Heroes was not.
After digging into it, the most likely explanation was that the island had been downranked. That did not make much sense to me. I had received no warning or moderation notice, and none of the reasons I could find for downranking seemed to fit. Sky Heroes is an original game that I designed, programmed, and built myself, and it had already been published for well over a year.
While I was looking into all of this, I decided to do some maintenance on the map anyway. I fixed a small bug, updated the leaderboards, made a few other changes, and prepared a new release. Then, while publishing the update, Creator Portal showed me this warning:
“That thumbnail’s similar to others, so your island may be filtered out of top Discover rows, and won’t be eligible for a Sponsored Row campaign if you use it.”
What?
That immediately got my attention because I have never seen another thumbnail that looks like mine.
Sky Heroes was originally published on January 23, 2025. The original thumbnail used AI-generated elements that I composited together and then edited and touched up in Photoshop.
Original January 2025 thumbnail:
Earlier this year I did a major update to the game, with the final release of that update published on March 19, 2026. I also put substantially more work into the new thumbnail. I sketched out the composition I wanted, composited elements from the game and the earlier artwork together, used that as a reference to generate artwork closer to what I had in mind, and then did additional finishing work in Photoshop.
March 2026 thumbnail:
That March update was a big one. I added an entire roguelite boss-battle mode, more areas, additional progression, and a bunch of quality-of-life improvements. Initially, the map was generating traffic after the update. Then, very suddenly, that traffic dropped to almost nothing.
At the time, I assumed the obvious. The update must not have landed with players. I had put a lot of work into it, people showed up for a while, and then the traffic disappeared. I had no reason to think anything else had happened.
Looking back at the traffic now, and knowing what Creator Portal is telling me about the thumbnail, the situation makes a lot more sense.
Sky Heroes was shadow banned. Epic may call it “downranking” or “filtering,” but the practical result was the same. The island’s visibility was effectively turned off, apparently because the thumbnail similarity system decided my artwork was too similar to something else.
And I was never told.
That is the part I have the biggest problem with.
If an automated system decides that a thumbnail is too similar to another thumbnail, false positives are going to happen. Fine. But if that decision is going to remove an island from major Discover visibility and make it ineligible for Sponsored Row campaigns, the creator needs to be notified.
For months, I had no idea this had happened. I simply saw the traffic disappear and assumed the game itself had failed. I only discovered the thumbnail issue by accident, roughly five months later, because I happened to notice Sky Heroes was missing from the Campaigns list and started digging into why.
I also have no idea what thumbnail mine is supposedly similar to. If the similarity is serious enough to justify blacklisting the thumbnail and downranking the island, then show me what triggered it. What island? What thumbnail? What exactly is supposedly too similar?
I looked through Discover myself and could not find anything that looked substantially similar to mine. At the same time, there are plenty of maps using extremely similar thumbnail styles, along with maps that are blatantly using copyrighted and trademarked characters and other IP they clearly do not own. Spider-Man, Puss in Boots, and plenty of other recognizable IP is all over Discover, often on maps receiving substantial traffic. Epic seems perfectly willing to turn a blind eye to those obvious IP violations, while my original game and original artwork get blacklisted by an automated similarity detector.
For now, I am apparently stuck going back to my old thumbnail because the newer one is flagged.
So I have two questions for Epic:
1. Is there a process for getting a thumbnail that has been falsely flagged reviewed and removed from this blacklist?
If there is, where is it? How does a creator request a manual review?
2. Can creators PLEASE be notified when their island is downranked or filtered from major Discover visibility?
If you are going to effectively turn off an island’s traffic, tell the creator. Tell them it happened. Tell them why it happened. Give them a chance to fix it or appeal it.
Do not quietly bury the island and leave the creator wondering for five months why nobody is playing it.