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What is the most effective ways to promote my game?

A topic by RedSpiritMask created 2 days ago Views: 167 Replies: 6
Viewing posts 1 to 5
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My life's work took over a decade of work. I put it on Itch and it's only gotten a very small amount of downloads. I created a Youtube trailer for it but most of those views have not converted to downloads. So I am very depressed and I don't know what to do. If you know of more effective ways to get people to download a game please let me know. Also, is there anything else my game page is missing that might be causing issues?

Here is the link so that you can give me advice based on what you see? https://redspiritmask.itch.io/nsala-liberation

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You can add up to five more tags to your game. All the ones you have right now are pretty generic, maybe you should add some that convey your game's themes and content a bit more - for example, "witch" or "africa".

My general advice is to show your game off in communities that might be interested in it (within their self-promotion rules and, if necessary, with permission from the mods). I don't know what communities that would be in your case, sorry. Promoting your game on YouTube is only going to be effective if you have a preexisting audience there, of course.

You could also pay for advertisement but considering that your game is freeware, I would advise against that.

But ultimately, you have to come to terms with the fact that there is no guarantee of your game being massively successful. My view is that indie developers should, first and foremost, make games for themselves. Having an audience is nice, but you should take pride in having made something as massive as an RPG and in the process created something unique to you and expressed something important to you.

An audience may come over time if you're patient and pay your cards right. But as an artist, you kinda have to find intrinsic motivation because external rewards are not guaranteed.

ETA: browser play is also something that will get you more plays because it decreases the effort needed to give your game a quick try. But I'm not sure how easy it is to create web views with your version of RPG Maker.

What you are really asking is, how to do this with no budget, aren't you ;-) 

Because if you have budget, the answer is easy: Hire experts and have a budget for this. That's effective.

There are many threads about this question. But as far as I know, no one has come up with a one fits all solution that works. Promoting a game is not easy.

I see multiple things that might be done for passive promotion for your game. But the cheapest active promotion, apart from being super lucky, would be to find a streamer playing your game, and the game being appealing to the target audience to begin with. So you need something that holds the promises you make in advertisement. Unfortunately, the streamer that did play your game is not really famous.

Thoughts that came to mind, when glancing at your game. (There is only rethorical questions in there)

Why is this for free, if you worked 10 years on it. There is a certain expectancy for free vs paid games. It's different on Itch than on Steam, because of the publishing hurdle Steam has, but in general, the price of something does set a base level of what you will expect and how you will interpret the circumstances. Of course it helps, if the game will deliver what is promised by the price. You will see a lot of cheap rpg maker games on Steam. There is an audience for this. And there is an audience for things that are African, even fake stuff like Black Panther.

So if you consider the game to be as professional as those $ 2-5 rpg maker games on Steam, maybe consider a separate premium release with some extra goodies.

The description and tags are missing how this is an action adventure game and not a typical rpg maker game (unless I am mistaken). This is a huge problem, if this is not clear. People looking for rpg maker games will be disappointed and people that do not like the rpg maker combat style will not give a second look, since they think it is one of those.

That boils down to the general advice to be appealing to your target audience. But for that your target audience has to recognise the game for what it is and find it under appropriate search terms via google and appropriate tags on Itch browsing. And if they glance at the cover and even hover over the cover and see the screenshots, that should be very clear and be highlighted. If all you highlight is the fact that this game features African culture in an educational way .... does that sound like a fun game or like some school lesson in disguise? Do you want to appeal to parents or to people looking to play a game that is not the usual fantasy tropes? Perhaps the first adventure game themed around African art and cultures.

Look here for inspiration https://itch.io/games/tag-action-rpg/tag-rpgmaker . Be it tags used, or how pages might look. Including screenshots. How do people highlight the cool features of their games.

My impression of your screenshots was not good. I have no clue what all this is supposed to be, and how the game is supposed to be fun based on these pictures. Yes I know, that's super hard to capture. There's a reason why there are people that get paid to do such things.

You could include animations how the character does some moves. Or dialogue with interesting npcs you will meet. An example puzzle. Show a skill tree or how you improve the protagonist. Images that look more interesting than holiday pictures of your relatives that they forced on you.

 The title of the game. I do not know what it means, what it could mean, what it is supposed to mean. Not even after reading the game page. For some, that might make the game mysterious and they get get curios. For me, that just means the developer could not bother to make an actual title that would be helpful. If I google Nsala, I mostly get a fish soup recipe, so there is that. Maybe consider adding a subtitle or at least changing the one liner that appears below the title. The one where you currently hightlight that african cultures appear as a theme.

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.

I added the tags that Ratsnake Games mentioned.'m trying to and will keep tryin to promote the game in other ways.

As for what redonihunter said, that streamer played the old version of the game on their own accord. So yeah I suppose I should try to ask some youtubers to play the game on their channel. So it sounds like I should just not mention the educational stuff in the advertisement. I think thats one of the things you're trying to say. Maybe thats true. 

For screen shots I might see if I can add something more, are you saying I can add animated gifs for screenshots?

As for what MatchaMyu said, my game makin tool cant make an in browser play window unfortunately. I suppose my YOutube following counts as an online community but they mostly subscribe for the educational content I make and clearly alot are not gamers so thats unfortunate. I did just promote it on a Discord, I'll try some other Discords communities as well.

When I first put this game out on a small website in 2014, it got some hundreds of downloads with no promotion, I thought that Itch being much bigger would get it more attention but it got much less. I did get some fulfillment developing my game for over a decade but I feel lost now. I started 2 other projects but its not the same. I feel terrible because I don't know what to do with my life anymore.

Yeah, I get that sense of ennui when I finish something too.

You'll find something new to keep yourself satisfied sooner or later. Don't worry. In the meantime, take care of yourself and consider seeing a therapist if things feel too difficult.

I should just not mention the educational stuff in the advertisement

What is your target audience? People wanting to learn. People wanting to play an action adventure.

If your audience is people wanting to play games, it might not help to highlight the educational aspects. Oh, there are games like that. For language learning. Or history learning. And all sorts of topics. And the developers might sugarcoat the learning material with a game, so it does not get boring.

Would you play a game, if you see the educational tag? Or would you assume it is one of those games that disguise lectures as a game? Add to that some rather boring screenshots where different places are shown, just like you would see in history class, and my first impression would be clear - and possibly wrong.

It depends what your game really is. Was some gameplay created around the topic, or was the topic used as fluff for some rpg game? Since you used the phrase "inspired" and not "based on" in your description, I would assume your game is historically as acurate as all those ninja games with black robed fighers are about Japan. And people do not play games with ninjas, because they want to learn about historical spys, but because ninjas are cool and a good excuse to have a fighting game.

Your game seems to have a witch from folklore as an excuse to have a magic rpg game.

Yes, you can use animated screenshots. Just look at the games in  https://itch.io/games/tag-action-rpg/tag-rpgmaker . As a random example, just hover your mouse over the game Echo-Our Voice. Even in the hover screenshots there are animations. And those animations make abundantly clear, that this is not a rpg maker turn based combat style type rpg game.

Look at other examples and think about, if the advertisements those games do, would apply to your game. I am talking about the features those games do highlight with their screenshots and description.

And if your game is such an action adventure, you should also look at the tags those games use. People looking for that kind of game will look there.

I thought that Itch being much bigger would get it more attention

Itch has 1.3 million games and not really a big audience. The most popular developers have maybe 30k followers. And even a "known" developer like Hempuli has only 12k followers. But the game Baba Is You has 20k reviews on Steam. I knew Baba years before I even knew Itch existed.

There is little promotion done by Itch. Compared to Steam, they do zero. On Itch you might visit the recommendation page, but mostly you will browse tags for your interests or visit the popular pages, or both.

But even for the recommendation pages, you will need accurate tags. You have 1 main genre and 10 freely choseable tags/genres. You should chose tags that people will use to find games like your game. And tags that describe the game and make it appealing to the target audience.

https://itch.io/games/tag-educational is actually in the genre list on the left side. Look at games in there and decide, if it fits there or not. Same for the other tags.

The first step is having people see your game in their browsing lists. For which tags are good.

The second step would be to make it appealing to them by showing in the screenshots and desription, that it is indeed a game they would like to play.

And the third step would be to make good on the advertisement promise to get good ratings, instead of disappointment ratings.

That's my opinion about how all this works.