Hey everyone! Our studio is new to game jams, and we’re trying to understand how the rating system works. It seems like if you get a few early ratings, your game stands out, but if not, it can get lost. Any tips on how to get more visibility and ratings for a new jam game? We’d really appreciate any advice or support!
Unfortunately sometimes your game just doesn't get recommended in the random page to the right people/it's not near the top. But with your game, It might be because of the .rar, or something else I'm not aware of. It's also worth mentioning that browser games typically do better. It also typically helps if you pop into rate for rate forums (or do one yourself), but of course that's not to everyone's taste. It sometimes feels like that's the only way to get ratings! I'll rate you and your teams' game sometime soon, hope that helps!
If you want the absolute best tactic that would be just reaching out to other fellow devs and just try their games in return for a Rate, which while is easy and simple to do, is a really unfair as your practically just switching votes and not actually getting any advice most of the time and so what i like to do is Try peoples games and then Leave an honest tailored review for their game based off my gameplay experience and then i also rate them what i think seems fair for the Quality and accounting for their experience in game dev, After that i then just leave a tag to my game along with a short message like "try my game as well :D" or "Here's my game btw"
and then i just leave the rest on them, if they have the time and your game seems worth playing then chances are they'll respond and try it out willingly rather than just trading vote for vote. Also staying active as much as possible in the community is really useful and it allowed me to get a lot of rates early on.
i hope this helps, also id love try out your game (don't worry you don't need to rate my game or anything i just wanna help a fellow dev out, nothing in return all i ask for is the link to your work and ill try it out and give tailored feedback :D)
So
Yes, if you start early you get a good push since the popularity here is kind of a positive-feedback-loop, the more popular the game is the more people will see it the more popular will become.
But, that is not to say all is lost if you don’t start early, I started working on marketing the game 3 days late and reached around 80 till now. It is a combination of focusing on actively helping the community get helped back and knowing how to do it.
At the start the best tactic in my opinion is sorting by karma and playing the games with high karma that reply to their comments: those games are the most likely to appreciate feedback and compliments and thus the more likely to rate back, so rating those games will 1: increase your karma making you more visible 2: get you ratebacks from your comments.
after people start having enough from ratings and rating backs all of this starts getting slower and less results but it still works, this is when I switch to community posts and start doing R4R posts since if someone is looking for them they definitely didn’t have enough votes yet. so play their games, do an honest comment, and reply to that post. also make your own posts!
though there is a couple of things:
more ratings is good not necessary for getting a high score it is necessary for a more accurate one, games with lower amount of rates just have more extreme scores (either very very high or very very low) since it’s the average of less people.
You definitely have to give more than what you expect to get back, right now I have rated 135 games yet only got 80 ratings which is not at all a bad ratio so focus on helping!
small tip: while minmaxing is not really how jams should be, karma is based on the person who rated the most in your team, not the sum, so the optimal tactic is having one account rate and comment not having it thinned between multiple accounts!
So
Yes, if you start early you get a good push since the popularity here is kind of a positive-feedback-loop, the more popular the game is the more people will see it the more popular will become.
But, that is not to say all is lost if you don’t start early, I started working on marketing the game 3 days late and reached around 80 till now. It is a combination of focusing on actively helping the community get helped back and knowing how to do it.
At the start the best tactic in my opinion is sorting by karma and playing the games with high karma that reply to their comments: those games are the most likely to appreciate feedback and compliments and thus the more likely to rate back, so rating those games will 1: increase your karma making you more visible 2: get you ratebacks from your comments.
after people start having enough from ratings and rating backs all of this starts getting slower and less results but it still works, this is when I switch to community posts and start doing R4R posts since if someone is looking for them they definitely didn’t have enough votes yet. so play their games, do an honest comment, and reply to that post. also make your own posts!
though there is a couple of things:
more ratings is good not necessary for getting a high score it is necessary for a more accurate one, games with lower amount of rates just have more extreme scores (either very very high or very very low) since it’s the average of less people.
You definitely have to give more than what you expect to get back, right now I have rated 135 games yet only got 80 ratings which is not at all a bad ratio so focus on helping!
small tip: while minmaxing is not really how jams should be, karma is based on the person who rated the most in your team, not the sum, so the optimal tactic is having one account rate and comment not having it thinned between multiple accounts!
