Hello Dear Reader, 

I've released my game, Ex Nihilo, on itch about 10 days ago, and I have been working on making it into a success since then. Here are some of my thoughts and observations on the subject. I hope you find them useful, I'd be very curious to hear about what you have experienced also.

Making yourself visible

There are a lot of games on itch, and more are released every day. My game was released on 12th, since then over 500 other games were released, by my rough estimates. That's 50 games each day.

Here's what I did in those 10 days

• added 3 screenshots, a cover art, description
• created a post in "Release Announcements"
• made a post on reddit
• wrote about the release on the forum of three.js - the graphics engine that I use
• spent 20$ on third-party ad
• released 9 small updates, along-side "Devlog"s

Here are the results

I got about 400 legitimate views, alongside some 800 views from some bot net (800 views over about 2 hour interval, yeah, right).

Of those 400:

that leaves about 25% unaccounted, since statistics table cuts off at top 20.

To put it differently, itch.io itself generated about 7% of the visits, or about 28 views. So the lesson here is that you have to plan out a marketing strategy and promote your game, if you want it to be seen.

Engagement

Someone "viewed" my game, yay! There is a big difference between someone following a link to your page and maybe even clicking "play", and them actually spending more than a few seconds playing your creation. On my landing page I have a so-called "call to action":

"The game is under active development, so please leave your feedback!"

After all, comments are a decent way to judge how invested your audience is in your work. In the 10 days I've had 0 comments. That "1" that you see?

So what does this mean? A few possibilities

• presentation has poor engagement, the screenshots are not appealing, the test is not clear or interesting
• the work itself is not interesting
• base-level engagement per view is too low, you need a lot more views to see any level of engagement

Profit

I have decided to put the game up as "donation-ware", you pay what you want, or nothing at all if you wish. No minimum price. My total earnings are 1$. It was a friend who donated that after I sent him a link to the game. Bless his soul :)

Lesson: try out different payment models, and have wonderful friends.

That's all for now, I'll add more info later on as time goes on, provided there's interest in the topic. 

What has your experience been like? Got any tips to share?