I've developed a few games under different websites and the such. What I can tell you from my experience as far as getting people to play it...
Game Jams was one way I got people to play my games and give feedback regarding the game in question. Moreover, this attracts people to your page in general to check out other games if the one developed for a game jam is particularly good.
Also a playable demo in browser would make a world of difference. The prototype I recently released for example is meant for windows but I know people wouldn't want to download it, so I rescaled the assets and put up a web version. It doesn't look the best, but it works.
Also time to develop does, unfortunately, not matter when it comes to a game. One game I built took maybe 1 year and gets no views and no plays despite how much work I put into it.
Compare this to another game I had on kongregate I built in a month that had a bug that trivialized the difficulty with music that was so horrible I encouraged people to use the music disable button that became briefly popular. That said I have fun when designing it.
I also have a small community outside of game development. One of my accounts (I develop a variety of games and different accounts for different kinds of games and 0 interaction between them) gets a few hundred plays per day and I genuinely can't explain why that is because I don't advertise at all on that account outside of "Here's a game I made." Post.
The TLDR of game design is though is you really can't expect your game to become popular. For every indie game that becomes a massive hit, there's thousands of games that never make it.
If it does become popular, great! But developing is for you first and foremost for the fun and experience.