Hello everyone! I did release my game for like 4 days ago, and I got around 240 views. Any ideas how to share my game so more can find my game?
Write so many tips about marketing / share you can.
I sometimes test things when not logged in, or as my Game Jam alternate account, so sometimes my own views do get tracked.
Another thought is that as far as I can tell, itch tracks "views", so if anyone looks at the webpage, it counts. If they don't actually play the game (it's a web game, they actually have to click it to play), it can still count as a "view".
Will you give us coverage? ;)
Have a look at my game, though I'm pushing the iOS and Android versions more. https://polypogon.itch.io/wisdom-collector It's definitely not a "gamer's game", though it's even harder when you are trying to figure out how to target the casual crowd.
Launching on Itch.IO versus other shops:
Funnily enough, as my first products here are asset packs for creatives / game developers in the game assets section, the fact that Itch.IO has almost as many developers as buyers is exactly why I chose Itch.IO, well, that and the fact that the barriers to entry are virtually nonexistent - no obsessive curation process with finicky reasons for rejecting giant collections of genuinely valuable content.
I've also tried launching my stock media on the Unity Asset Store, several times, each time was rejected for some trivial reason relating to a subsection of the asset store guidelines. Each time I fix a problem there relating to naming conventions, demo scene organization, etc, in an attempt to get approved, it takes days to fix the problem simply due to the sheer number of items in the package that have to be slightly adjusted one by one to match the criteria of the store. I've yet to attempt Unreal, but that is also a future plan of mine.
So here's how I tackled the promotional and sales challenges for my stuff:
So here is some of what I've got right now, things I am either working on or have already released and put on sale:
You can see that one of the things that's sort of worked well for me already, aside from promoting the content on my websites, across my social media feeds, email lists, contacting all the people I've networked with, using a little bit of carefully targeted advertising, and personally promoting my work, mentioning the stuff in forum posts like this one, here and in half a dozen other major boards frequented by indie developers, was giving people sales out of the gate. My products are released right before holidays or major sale events in general, and then included in a sale with discount from the get go. That helps me to make the most of the launch window, and the brief span of visibility in the 'Most Recent' list, and try to get some sales and ratings right out of the gate, if possible. And if there are no sales initially, I can still try other tactics like releasing small items for free [i.e. a demo or separate free product] with links back to the larger list of items I'm selling. I also try up selling with discounted bundles and attempt to connect each of my items back to the other products I've released.
I've always had a tendency to under price things, according to my family and friends, but in my experience if I don't under price them for the first year or more, nobody will buy them for *months* after they go on sale. I have a routine pattern of setting prices that drop to under a dollar, and then FINALLY someone buys it and exclaims, that it's incredible bargain. And then they rate it or worse, don't - and eventually somebody rates it, reviews it, and it's this enormously glowing review, and then the sales kind of snowball from there, and the prices double or triple afterwards, or more, but people are still generally amazed at the value of the item and still post very positive reviews.
That's exactly what happened with me on eBay; I sold a more limited smaller variant of this same stock media pack as far back as 2013, on a DVD, and nobody bought it until I sold at a loss, dropping the price to literally one cent. Someone bought it. Reviewed it, stellar review. Same thing soon after when I was selling made to order commissioned artworks [pastel, acrylic, gouache, colored pencil] at large sizes, for 99 cents. It was a money loser too for the first year, I think my profit margin was usually -500% or worse, and sales were sparse, I probably lost $400 and so so many hours spent doing work that was costing me money. Now I've got 320+ ratings on my eBay account, 100% of them positive. And both those product lines have now begun selling profitably there. The same essential tactics, I suspect, will apply successfully to Itch.IO, with the main difference being Itch.IO, as a digital storefront, has no shipping cost attached to it, which makes losses mostly just hundreds of hours of time worked making things, but at least not also hundreds of dollars in cash on top of that.
I can't say my crazy methodology has resulted in much activity sales-wise here so far - I think 5 sales, 14 downloads in all on Itch.IO at this point - but I do now have over 100 people looking at my assorted Itch.IO pages every day, that is, all of my products combined. The single biggest attention-grabber though isn't an asset pack, and it isn't complete yet [indie game Miniature Multiverse, which has 3300+ views despite not even being released yet.]
My suspicion is that a lot of people are interested in what I've released but the lack of responses and ratings from previous buyers has most of these potential customers in a condition of uncertainty. "Is it really any good?" they're asking. And everyone's kind of on the fence, waiting for someone else to go first and review it, so they know exactly what to expect [from an unbiased source, not the vendor who inevitably is biased in favor of his own work]. Reviews are helpful for game devs, but there's not as much of an infrastructure in place for reviews of game assets, which is a downside to that particular niche, aside from the fact that the game dev community is smaller than the number of people who play games!
But in short, my personal answer to the question about promotional tactics is ultimately summed up as this:
-publicize as many places as possible, tell everyone you can. Advertise and network and promote as much as possible.
-accept losses out of the gate, or at least set prices very very low from the outset to drive those key first sales and more critically, those first few reviews.
-have some freebie out there to direct people to you much better paid items.
-have multiple items on sale, and be sure to connect them together with links. Bundle them.
I don't know if this personal strategy is going to end up resulting in a ton of sales in the case of Itch.IO but I do know it has worked for me on eBay and I know I'm getting a lot of views on Itch.IO now. So maybe this will work here too, given a bit more time.