Hi I am an indie game developer and I published my first game on itch io. I just wanted to ask do you have any tips for marketing my game!
If you can please check out my game called The Cat.
Streaming your game is one way to do it. Another is to have a Youtube/Twitter account and post devlogs/trailers/teasers on there. I've had a little bit of success streaming development on Discord with other devs; it's gotten me a lot of playtesters and a handful of followers as well. Itch won't market your game for you, so keeping active and engaging with the community is necessary.
An immediate issue for me is your game's thumbnail. This stuff's very important for promotion because it's the first thing many people will see of your game. Your screenshots look pretty good, but the thumbnail looks like a rushed afterthought and people may be put off clicking onto your gamepage because of it.
I'd definitely suggest redoing it. If you need inspiration, look at the thumbnails of similar games that you like. See what they're doing well, what appeals to you, and how you can apply this to yours :)
I took a look at your game page. If it helps, you can try doing these things to see if your views and download stats improve:
1. The part where you mention that your game is a virus scares me quite a bit. 😨 Try making sure it's not potential malware first., maybe...? If it triggers virus warnings, it's not a good sign.
2. The title of your game seems to have a typo. First impressions always count in marketing, so it's pretty important to make sure we don't have a typo in our title!
3. Maybe update your game cover thumbnail to make it look more dynamic. Perhaps add the title to it in a very nice font? It would make the cover look more complete.
4. Your blurb may need work. Short and catchy usually works!
5. Try adding relevant tags to your game to make sure it can be found (e.g.: horror, puzzle). There's this thing about the average session only lasting a few seconds too - you may want to change that to reflect the actual time taken to complete a session of the game.
6. Try to identify the system requirements for the game and check that on the download zip file. These will help your game get filtered by the search system a little better, since it'll automatically add it to the platform tagging. Right now nobody can tell if your download file is meant for Windows, Linux, Mobile, etc.
7. You can try adding which engine you used to make it too, so other developers using the same engine can find it and review it.
I think that's about it. Good luck!
Sure, I have some tips, but some of them are pretty general. Here they are:
Even if doing a paid app, also do some free releases - This helps people to know what to expect from your games.
Be patient - Unless one has a hit game and a lot of luck, a follower list isn't built overnight.
When promoting on forums, focus on quality of posts over quantity, and try to create lasting impressions, making friends along the way - After all, people may see your game, but they may need to know why they should play your game instead of someone else's. One good way of getting people to play your game, without telling them what to do, is talking about it in detail and in the appropriate channels, which can build interest.
Utilize the dev log function of game pages for updates - This is actually a useful tool, just make sure you aren't doing it all the time, and you're actually doing the updates when you announce something.
problem is marketing methods change over the time .. simply because things change over the time
it seems that nowadays it's streamers and influencers opinion that people go for
otherwise there is just too much noise 🤔
if you want your game to be really popular you need to get really popular yourself first
like I see countless youtube channels with people working on unity games for years
posting their progress and such - with seemingly no chance of them ever finishing it
but gathering thousands and thousands of subscribers
now of course many yt channels will never get there
and I'm not sure those who did how they did it
but being attractive and popular irl seem to help 🤔
it seems to be a catch of 22 to be honest - it is often said you need money to make money
I guess it's true for other things - you need popularity to make more popularity 🤔
it makes sense to become a charismatic figure for this, I think people gain confidence in what you have to offer for the chosen niche even if it is your first published work, I intend to try this on my YouTube channel.
I think another option is to get on the radar of someone who makes niche-based content, which of course adds to the first option