Getting your game on multiple platforms is definitely good. I wouldn't recommend "spamming" but it's a good idea to post about your game in several locations. Itch is just one community, and there will be players out there who would enjoy your game but aren't already looking at Itch. And if you haven't been already posting about your game before it was released, then who will know that it is finished? Nobody... you are just relying on random passer-by to click on your game. And some of them did, which is good! Your game has only been out a week - give it time. Updating with fixes and new content gives you an excuse to post about it, increasing your exposure. Participate in things like screenshot Saturday, or the 1 screenshot per week thread here on the forum.

Another good way to increase activity around your own page is to comment on other people's pages. Play people's games and give ratings, follows, and meaningful feedback. Some of those people will in turn take a look at your projects, and in the meantime you'll be contributing to the community and helping other developers, which makes you more memorable to people than someone who only asks for attention directed at them.

If you just publish games for fun, that's great. But you shouldn't expect many people to play it if you didn't really do any marketing. There's so many games out there, what are the chances that any random person will stumble upon yours? Very slim. You have to tell people about it. And yes, a lot of people will download it and never say a word. Many players will not take the time to leave a comment, even if they liked the game, so you just have to accept that. Focus on building up your own reputation, making connections, and doing a little advertising here and there. Promote yourself in more than one place.... without a huge amount of extra work you can have a Facebook page, an IndieDB page, and so on. A lot of your post content will easily translate from one to the other, so it's not like you have to write 3 separate devlogs for 3 sites. The point is you want the chance for people to see your game whether they are browsing one site or the other.

I've been reading a bunch of similar posts over the last few days and it seems many people have had similar experiences.  Although this might not sound constructive, I think it's important to remember that a feeling of audience-less-ness is common no matter what your industry or artform is and many people are walking the same wilderness as you are. 

I think for myself personally, I'm inoculated against the disappointment because I've worked previously in publishing and radio and came to realise that the work we were outputting was going out to an audience of functionally zero. Whether that's true or not is impossible to verify, but if you receive zero feedback for your thoughts and labour the result is the same either way. 

But in any case - You're doing the right thing by starting this conversation and voicing your experience. Small things like this build connections (I don't mean that in the cynical marketing sense of the word.) and will bring eyes to your work. You don't have to 'spam', but any sincere expression or communication that you're comfortable with goes a long way at creating a presence online, and whether we like it or not 'online presence' is the rule of the game these days. 

(You've gained a follower in me, anyway.)

ok quindi oggi ho rilasciato il gioco su Steam,

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2195200/Find_The_Key/

Aggiorno qui perché sono sicuro che altri siano interessati, quindi tra qualche settimana forse farò un altro aggiornamento.

innanzitutto quello che si legge su internet è vero, steam ha traffico organico, non ho fatto nessuna promozione e ho avuto circa 200 visite al giorno nel periodo in cui il gioco stava "arrivando" e ho ricevuto 4-5 liste dei desideri al giorno, 

quindi dopo poche ore dall'uscita ho fatto 20 saldi al prezzo di 1, questo è il primo giorno quindi di sicuro è una cosa che cambierà nei giorni successivi, comunque conferma anche il fatto che circa il 20% delle liste dei desideri diventano vendite lo stesso giorno del rilascio,

Troppo presto per fare altre considerazioni sul traffico o sulle vendite dopo il rilascio, ma per ora mi sembra molto buono.

sta andando tutto più o meno come mi aspettavo e questa è una gran bella cosa, se riesci a prevedere come andranno le cose vuol dire che hai capito e quindi puoi migliorare, per trovare la chiave nella realtà non mi aspettavo nemmeno di recuperare in 100 che ho speso per la quota iniziale a causa di 0 marketing, ma sembra che li recupererò in circa una settimana quindi bene,

quindi su come funziona steam penso di aver capito la maggior parte delle cose e quindi come sfruttarlo al meglio, (su youtube ci sono anche molti video)

ecco quindi alcuni consigli se state pensando di mettere il gioco su steam, che sono gli stessi che avete già sentito sui video di youtube.

1. Crea la pagina del negozio il prima possibile e ottieni la lista dei desideri, non appena hai una build e un trailer.

2. crea un gioco che le persone desiderano (vedi i Mi piace popolari per genere e prezzo)

3. Mantieni il gioco "in arrivo" per 3 o 4 mesi prima di rilasciarlo.

quindi se hai molte liste dei desideri riceverai molti giocatori e vendite il giorno del rilascio, per i giorni successivi non lo so ancora, aspetterò qualche settimana e poi scriverò un aggiornamento qui.

comunque dipende sempre da qual è il tuo obiettivo, ad esempio io preferisco creare 100 giochi che fanno 1 piuttosto che 1 che fa 100, proprio perché il punto è creare giochi per me. ovviamente anche fare 100 che fa 100 va bene. lol

non ho ancora iniziato a lavorare al prossimo gioco, le idee sono tante, comunque penso che non lo metterò nemmeno sul prurito, per me è stata una cosa completamente inutile..

so che non è bello dirlo sul forum itch, ma ho avuto 300 visualizzazioni i primi giorni, e poi 0 (letteralmente) i giorni successivi, questo non è qualcosa per me .. è solo la mia esperienza, ovviamente potrei sbagliarmi e poi cambio idea.

spero che la mia esperienza sia utile, aggiornerò in futuro,

Edd

Thank you all for this thread. Very interesting read and at last some real questions are asked and partially answered too.

We even get a few numbers... It might be a bit rude to ask another dev how much views, downloads etc, for his game but at the same time, that lack of feedback here lets you like a sailing boat in the middle of a windless ocean (sorry for my english not 100% correct). You don't really know if you are going anywhere.

 For my part I published the 1rst part of my game 6 month ago and had about 500 downloads, (the only data that counts for me) and 5 payment of 2$ and I still don't know if I can consider these numbers good or bad. I also get about 70 people adding it to their collection but as I'm a bit stupid I don't really know how it is beneficial to my game. Maybe I shouldn't complain but I get as little feedback as many here so I don't know... and it's a litlle discouraging.

ok so it's been a month since my game has been on steam, i'm doing an update as promised. I remember that I did 0 marketing, which means that I made the game and put it there, as an unknown developer without saying anything to anyone.

Find The Key su Steam

so here is the total data after one month which is released after 2 weeks "coming soon":

(the price is 0.99)

161 sales

22 refunds

12304 total shop visits

281 wish lists

3 reviews (all negative lol)

after the first few days of visibility as i thought it's back to around 150-200 visits per day organic but i think it will decrease even more as time goes on. the truth is that i don't have a clue if this data is good or not lol

to be 0 marketing 150 visits a day are good for me, it's not about random people but they are people who are interested in what you offer, therefore targeted visits that come from those who are looking for a game to buy.

the reviews are all negative, but they are only 3 out of 160 and they are from very dissatisfied people, this makes me think that all the others beyond the reviews were either satisfied or indifferent .. or that they simply didn't want to write.

the refounds are mostly performance issues, someone who wanted to try with lower than recommended hardware, but someone said it's not fun or that they bought it by accident, the game lasts less than an hour so it can also be any reason..

however from the stats, I see that over 50% of the players played it through, some even more than double the time it took to finish it, which makes me think they liked it enough to play it through to the end. so the things i think i should have done differently..

don't release the game just before the steam discounts:

before the discounts i was getting about 10 sales a day, from the day the discounts started it went down to 0, then it went back to 1-2 as soon as the discounts ended. it seems that when the discounts are on people just don't even look at the non-discounted ones, and having just released the game not even a month earlier i couldn't participate,

price too low:

so also keep in mind the discount strategy, i had put the price at 1, but maybe i should have put it at maybe 4 or 5, then do some discounts periodically to stimulate people who have the game in their wish list, maybe once a month. so I'm thinking of raising the price to at least 4, however I don't know how to evaluate the price issue properly..

I chose 1 because I wanted it to be accessible to anyone and at least to recover the money spent .. and maybe earn something, it took me about 150 hours to do it, which then became 200 with the additional work to be done for steam (localization and full controller support, shop page etc) halfway through the game I practically redid it to better structure the code so in reality perhaps half the time would have been enough, for this reason the price of 1 seemed ok to me, but if I also have to discount it to have visibility. lol

more time "coming soon" before releasing it: as I said, at least 3 months to have a greater impact on release.

and nothing I think is everything, if you have any questions, ask them.

meanwhile I'm tinkering to do something with VR, I tried to do some mechanics and some maps, but I don't know.. with teleportation the motion sickness is at 0, but it spoils the experience. I don't suffer much from motion sickness even without teleportation, but it's not pleasant. so maybe i'll do something where it's stopped in place.. but i don't know yet.

I think VR will boom when they come up with something for leg movement too, but it's a lot better than normal games so I think I'll shoot some skeletons until I can think of something to do. lol

if you have any questions ask them, and I hope my experience is helpful :)

Edd

so I did the demo and raised the price more or less following the advice on this page, so setting it to 5 seemed too much and setting it to 2 too little considering that I will then systematically make discounts, so I chose 3.. however I didn't still the faintest idea of how I should choose the right price,if I did right or wrong or whatever.. some advice? actually now i expect sales to drop straight to 0 forever, however we will see what happens.. lol

about the demo i put it together with the whole game, so people can download it for free, however i saw that others here directly created another page for the demo putting it for free, i guess it's for indexing issues, should i do this? advice on this?

thanks

Hi guys ! 

Interesting and useful as usual. But also a bit sad for the itchio lovers that we are because it seems, no matter what, you automaticaly get better results on steam... 

I don't really have a clue either about the answers to the new questions that were raised except that raising the level of the graphics is always a good idea for Majid and setting a price far too low is certainly a bad idea for Edd. But I know also that this was some kind of experiment to prepare the next games. 

Now if I think about the original subject of this thread, I'm thinking more and more that one solution could be to try to make all this Public Relation experience more fun for us all. As game makers we try to make engaging experiences for people, so why not try to make something engaging for game makers (hoping it will attract other people too). For exemple, in my very little level I'm thinking more and more why not creating a little indie game festival, specialized with games that are close to mine. Nothing new but at least engaging as a PR experience.

Voilà. Just some ideas like that but the key would be to try to have a little fun while raising the awareness alout your games.

so i put it back to 1 and i don't think i'll ever discount, lol

no sale at 3 but the reason is that the demo has been downloaded by 1000 in a few hours since it was public, it means that if the game was free I would have gotten 1000 times in terms of downloads/visibility, of course i know free is different than paid but i really didn't think the price of just 1 made all that difference.. it's 1 dollar lol 

1000x is really a huge gap, that makes me think 3 is too much, as i thought sales have dropped to 0 sales since I set it to 3, so if the demo gives that extra visibility I can put it back to 1 and I don't have to think about discounts..

the thing that free = 1000 per day and $1 = 1 makes me think that 3 is too high also considering the type of game and I really hate this whole thing about the price and discounts, so I put it back to 1 and I stop thinking about it, going back to 1 i can actually see if the demo makes any difference or not.. 

I'll probably delegate this task to someone else for the next games, it's not something for me,  I hate marketing stuff too much lol

And do you see a correlation between the length of your game and the price that you can ask for it ?  Do you think people consider it?