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When should I publish my Christmas game?

A topic by HH Richards created Nov 27, 2020 Views: 393 Replies: 7

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I've made a Christmas game! I know that whenever I publish a game, it's the first week that it gets the most attention before it tails off. So my question is about the timing.

When should I publish a Christmas game?

I know that I could publish it right now, but it seems to early, and if I'm going to have a spike, I'd rather it be.. you know... actually near to Christmas!

But I worry that if I publish too late, I will narrow my window of opportunity.

If you've published a christmas game in the past, I'm interested to know your thoughts, and if you have a planned schedule!

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Afloof.devModerator3 years ago(+2)

If your aim is the Christmas holiday sales, I think Itch will announce those dates (if they haven’t already), and you can publish your game a few days before that sale starts.

Keep in mind that after you publish a new game, it has to go through some review, and unexpected things might happen, so it’s always best to do things a few days early and have enough time to fix them.

I don’t have any marketing experience on the matter, so I can’t speak about numbers. Hopefully someone with more experience in that area might be able to provide more details.

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HH Richards3 years ago

Oh very good point about the review period. When I published my first game, it took a while (maybe a week?) before it even appeared on the games list. Although that could have been because it was really far down the bottom of the list.

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HH Richards3 years ago

My new game right now is set to "Draft" on Itch.io because it's not quite ready yet. Do you think it's worth setting to "Published" even though it doesn't have a game file yet, or should I wait & publish it when the game is available to purchase? Is there any benefit in publishing a game that isn't ready to purchase yet, I wonder?

Or is that missing an opportunity to get traffic only when the game is available to purchase?

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Evolutionary Games3 years ago(+1)

Your game is only indexed on itch.io when there is a file to download. If you publish it now, it will show as free (because you can't charge for a non-existent file) and there will be nothing to download - people will possibly look at the page but then move on and forget about it. If they search for a Christmas themed game, yours will not appear because it won't be indexed.

When you add a file in it, it probably won't appear under new releases any more and you will have missed that window of opportunity.

You should publish it as soon as possible, because people are starting to play Christmas games - but don't publish it until it is ready.

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HH Richards3 years ago

This is great, thanks for the advice! You've answered what I wanted to know basically, whether to publish asap, or wait until there's an actual file to download - and I'm going to wait until it's ready!

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HH Richards3 years ago

Ok I've posted my game now: https://hhrichards.itch.io/lewd-mod-xxxmas

I was very nervous about hitting that publish button!! I published early in the morning though, I'm not sure if that's a bad idea or not. But this was the only time I had available. I guess we'l see. Although I'm hoping it shouldn't matter too much!

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HH Richards3 years ago

Ok I forgot about the 2 day delay that itch has for new paid games. My game currently can't be found in the search. Yesterday right after I launched, I put a demo on Newgrounds, which pointed people to the full (paid) game here on itch.io, got a ton of traffic, & for a while my CTR was really good (like 4% - I don't know about anyone else, but I consider that a good CTR).

But I forgot that my game won't appear in the "new & popular" until someone at itch reviews & approves it. So that now when it appears in the search, my CTR will be a lot lower, it's dropped now to less than 2%.

I know I might be over-thinking this, but maybe if I'd done this again, I'd wait to put my incoming links in place until after it appears in search, so that I could take advantage of the high CTR (because I think a high CTR on itch gets your game further up the top of the list).

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