Hello everyone!
It's a little weird, but one of the highlights of game development for me is making the game page for itch.io, even when 99%+ of my sales are on other platforms, it is the customizeability of itch.io pages really hits my inner designer and it is the only part of marketing I enjoy. I think, my strength is in making my pages visually pleasing by tying the look of the page to the look/themes of my games.
But what about the actual content on the page? So far all my (commercial) games have been visual novels, so my pages always heavily focus on the story aspect. But what else is important to you? I think screenshots are a given. I would not buy a game if I couldn't see a single screenshot of it first. But I think the game page should probably have sections for:
- Quick tagline to sell your game in one sentence
- List of features
- Gameplay hook
- Story hook and characters (If your game is story focused)
- Appropriate credits and links
- Maybe controls/start up instructions?
Anything you can come up with that I missed? Also what do you think is a good length for a page? Is it bad to make your page too long? Am I thinking about this way too much? :D
If you have thought about this too much as well let's share what we have learned. Here is my "wisdom":
- I sometimes go through the game pages of featured games to learn about marketing and maybe trying to work out what kind of page cathes the eye of an itch.io staff member. A lot of the time the featured games don't actually have all that fancy game pages. Just a few screenshots and and plain text, especially if they are browser games.
- From what I've gathered having gifs helps a lot because movement catches your eye and communicates gameplay ideas effectively.
- This is more thumbnail/cover point, but faces are really good at attracting attention when you have very little real estate. This is why all the mobile game icons are just character heads. It's a little sad, but I do notice I'm clicking games more often if the thumbnail features characters and I rarely click thumbnails that only have a logo/game name.
- Borders of the page are not visible on mobile (But do people often browse itch.io on mobile?)
P.S. Please share the best game pages you've seen, because I wanna see cool ones