whys and help on promoting your game
Step 1. Have a game worth promoting.
Step 2. Do the free stuff.
Step 3. Be visible and maybe do real promotion.
I cannot tell if your games are interesting to play, but your profile is empty. The thumbnails for your 4 games are non informative. None of those looks like it would be for a game worth my time. Ok, maybe one of them. Turned out it is not the one you actually provided screenshots though.
Your game descriptions are basically non existing. My answering post is longer then the 4 descriptions for your 4 games combined.
If you have trouble making the game look interesting, maybe imagine telling a friend about a game you know. Would you use only one sentence? What screenshots would you show to your friend to make the game look interesting? What key words (tags) would you use to describe the game?
That is all free stuff. The real promotion things are variable in cost and effort and there are many threads here that ask the same question. So maybe look there for inspiration.
But you should have something you can actually direct people to. What use would it be, to have a link to your game appear somewhere, only for people to click that link and find a game with half a sentence description and a non commiting screenshot. Just look at the games you like to play, how they look and maybe imitate them in your own style.
Here are some few things to do to make your game visible:
Overall, these are my personal opinions. There are lots of other ways to market and promote your games. Se what suits you. Have fun developing.
First is putting the sheer labor and time in to make a polished project, have a game worth playing and visually appealing screenshots, video trailer showing what it is and what is great about it.
Then just promote like crazy once the game is completed and released. Social media posts, comments on communities you are active in.
Paid ads can work if your game is a commercial venture but don't expect immediate payoff. Do some testing and find some ad spaces and settings that can result in net gain. Tweak the ads and do A / B testing to optimize both the ads and the game page. If your campaign is fine tuned well enough that the ad spend is profitable then go all in. If a $1 ad spend = say $1.20 in sales then you can just sort of keep ads running and cycle the earnings through for a while and build up to the point where you have a massive phenomenon. But that's not common.
I am not a game dev primarily, but I am selling assets on itch like photo based PBR texture maps and 3d assets, VFX elements and decals, so that is my focus here. And it is kind of working for me at this point or starting to, as I now have exceeded $400 in sales and have 17 five star reviews, 129 account followers, and various encouraging comments across a bunch of asset packs. Am also working on game dev in background and hoping that I can start ramping that up too soon to the point where a handful of projects are released over the next year. Which seems unrealistic maybe but given some of those date a few years back and are over half finished, it's not that crazy.
It is basically my full time focus now as of mid September. I had an Etsy shop up til end of 2024 and that is over, plus some successful gigs locally this summer (2025) that all mean I can push heavily into massive itch updates over the rest of the year at a pace that nobody has seen happening in the past. I am pretty excited about it but also aware that itch has limitations as a platform - and that it's worth branching out to sell things elsewhere too like Fab, Turbosquid, etc. It's a lot of hard work and creativity and thought and planning poured in but that ultimately is the only way to create a range of truly great products.
matthornb.itch.io <- my page.