I'm not good at social media, but a vital part of this is self-promotion to get yourself known and get people interested in trying your work. What platforms do you promote yourself on? How do you do it?
I use YouTube and Twitter the most. I use Twitter because I’ve had it for a while, I wouldn’t recommend starting now if you haven’t, but posting things like screenshots, clips of dev footage (Good, bad, or funny), small rambles about the dev process works well in that setting.
YouTube is a much showier affair, and I do devlogs there, showing off “checkpoints” in development, or any major setbacks that could use addressing. As a solo dev, it also helps as a way for me to verbalize certain aspects of development and solve issues.
Twitter is now a worthless place to advertised, one day you have an account and the next you are banned. It's also very impossible to get viewers because Elon Musk will ruin the way you think the website works. In the past people did get something from twitter but now, not anymore. Unless you want crazy people following you, i recommended leaving twitter.
Yeah, the way discoverability is now, twitter isn’t worth it, and I’m probably an idiot for continuing to use it, but also getting any following to move anywhere else is nigh impossible, which is why the venn diagram of my followers here, on youtube, on twitch, and on twitter barely touch or crossover. That’s one of the frustrating parts of social media. Most of my twitter followers aren’t going to be tapped in to me leaving, so they’ll just assume I died or something.
Maybe those people aren’t the most valuable traffic, but they are eyes, and thus a chance to get a player.
but also getting any following to move anywhere else is nigh impossible
That is of course bad news for crosspromotion or promotion in general. But I can imagine reasons for that. You would have to "hit" a gamer interested in your type of games, that is coincidentally stumbling over your social media. And for itch specifically, not many people even know that itch exists. So not only do you need to hit such a gamer, you also need to hit someone willing to go to this small time game platform he never heard about. But he did hear about those discord try my game scams, so better be wary and only visit steam game pages or maybe gog or one of the others he knows.
Is it working? Do you even get information where your traffic is coming from? I had a quick look. You have nearly 20 times the followers on Twitter compared to itch. Is there spillover from twitter or is your twiter just moderatly popular on its own? As for your yt, sorry, I did not watch your video, I just wanted to know the viewer count, and lets just say, I do not believe that you get traffic on your game from youtube, but that it is the other way round.
I had a look at twitter and itch followers on a rising indie star (>1k followers). They have doubl the followers on itch compared to their twitter. But since they are on steam as well, hard to tell, where the traffic is coming from. I guess their twitter is getting followers from game followers and not the other way round.
Or to rephrase some.Are you really promoting your games on twitter and yt, or do you exist there for people already knowing your game and searching for more information? In my opinion it is not really possibly (or rather allowed) to promote on most social media. Sure you can link to your game in your own posts, but who reads thos ? And linking to your game on other people's post is considered spamming in most cases.
Oof, that is a detailed look into what I’ve got going on. I admit, my social media presence isn’t exactly “focused”, but I have my analytics, and both Twitter and YouTube have added traffic to my Itch.io page. Granted, part of that is, before Elon took hold of Twitter, I did use the promote feature, which got my stuff to a decent number of people for a relative pittance per tweet.
The reason, I believe, that that hasn’t translated into followers on my itch is that I post more information on my other platforms as opposed to here, this just isn’t the place I tend to be most of the time as of yet.
Oh, I am not on twitter, nothing to do with Musk. I just look at numbers and guess a lot. The one dev I looked at had like 5k followers on itch and 2k on twitter. But another one i just looked at had 60k on twitter and only 10k on itch. But that latter is at it for 5 years.
What they have in common besides the obvious success, is that they have not only a demo version, but they both even have playable web version of their game.
It makes access to a game just so much easer it you do not put hurdles for the player. No download required, no paywall. They do sell the full version , it is not donation ware.
Please do not be insulted. But your game pages are ... bad. Really bad. Half a sentence description, one meager screenshot and a price tag with no demo version. Claim of standard assets but file size of 800MB. It looks like you do not even try.
The positive thing is, you did realease it, so I assume it is finished. That is a lot better than most games here. But why such an unappealing page.Did you not ask a friend to tell you honestly how it looks? Would you try even a free game with such a page? No, I did not watch the video. Why should I? There is no story pitch to read nor any screenshots to garner any interest whatsoever in your game. The game tags are as bland as they can get. singleplayer , pixelart, fantasy, 2d, turn-based. Well. it is a rpgmaker game, i get it. almost all qualitfy for those things. You are describing rpgmaker, not your game.
Your other game, ... , it is tagged single player and short and has one screenshot (of a character and not of the game). At least the pitch sounds mildly interesting.
I can only advise you to lootk at
https://itch.io/games/tag-rpgmaker?exclude=tg.horror
and watch the game pages of some popular games. Maybe you get inspiration.
This thread is about promotion. But imagine you do manage to promote your game page. It is a landing zone for any potential player you have reached on twitter or whatever. What do they see? A non commiting screenshot and a bland game description (oh, and a link to a video I did not watch, see above). What I am trying to say, you could have a really good game and lots of promotion, but with an uninviting game page you have a hard time convert those page views into players.
I do not play rpgmakers very often, but i do know that they tend to be a lot smaller, like really small, under 100mb, and some even have a playable web version.
You claim to use standard assetts, that must mean to my naive ears, that you could export a version that does not require the assets to be bundled and just need the rtp installed. I saw such and it was like 10MB. Bundling them is of course better for some players, but why not offer both.
Your game has 800+MB. So I see three possibilities. Stuff is going on I do have no clue about. You packed a lot of unneccessary stuff into the game in a very inefficient manner. Or you do have content that is not standard assets, but you do not proudly make screenshots and advertise the fact.
But if I understood correctly , you do have inflow from the social media. Just not a lot of interaction.
Sunset of the Elements is the Default RPGMaker MV package with the addition of exactly: -3 1.5 minute or so music tracks -4 sprite sheets -3 500 x 500 pixel PNGs If I had to guess, the reason a lot of RPG Maker games come out a lot smaller is that a lot of them either surgically remove the default package pieces they aren’t using, or they use entirely custom assets that allows them to remove the entire thing and come out to smaller file sizes.
you are correct about the state of my social media. It, like most forms of advertising, has a very low turnover rate. I believe marketing is considered “effective” with a 2% turnover rate? I think combined, everything might give me something like a 1.5% rate.
A quick google tells me, that there is no rtp and that your game should be around 400mb if you include all the assets without compression or removal of unused files. Are your additional files 400MB? Maybe the internet lied to me - again. So I shall do a quick reality check.
https://itch.io/games/tag-rpgmaker-mv
A couple people actually tagged rpgmaker mv. So lets have a look.
153 + web version, 270, 481, web no dl, 379, 188, 277, 116 + web, 112, 153, 400, web , 209, 210
Maybe you included windows and mac version or even html and android in the same archive? Or an accident happened and you doubled the files?
Anyways, I just wanted to illustrate what someone like me thinks when reading the infos given on your game page.
I have to guess that my added files must have added the 400mb, though I’m not sure how. But yeah, my other, free projects are both under 400mb, though there are certainly other factors that might play in, such as the number of maps and events, though I have no way of knowing how much that adds up to.
I hear it is very effective to dm people on discord and politely asking them to try your game.
Joking aside, if you try to promote your game yourself you face two challenges. It is a hen and egg problem. To promote your game you need followers on your social media. But you will not get followers if you promote an unknown game. So you try to advance the recognition of your game and of your social media ... by each other. If you could make one popular, it could promote the other one. But this places you on square one. How to promote your social media channels.
There is no true answer to this. If there were a working recipe for this, every dev would be known and every youtuber/instagram star would be famous. Bascially you cannot apply what any successful dev/influencer did. It is after the fact. And lots of luck. Enough money can help this of course, that is what advertising is and it costs money for a reason.
It helps to have a very good game and to be not too bland. You can try to be visible and findable for people looking for your content. If you were to have a platformer, tough. There are over 100k platformer games on itch. There are literally over 100 games here that are named Tetris here. Of the 1.4k games tagged Tetris only 70 games are tagged platformer. Whatever a platformer tetris is supposed to be. And whoever would search in that combination outside of making a point. But those 70 games are findable for the tetris loving platformer enthusiast.
There are lots of forums, some even allow a little promotion. As a single newbie dev you cannot compete with seasoned devs and companies. But you can try to be found by people that would actually look for games like yours.
Put yourself in a gamer's shoes. Where do you go to find your indie games? And how? Do you hang out on Twitter and search indie hashtag?
Of course it is not a bad idea to have as many social media as you can reasonably manage and update with your stuff. But as I said, influcencers have the same problem. Minus the game development.