I don't know why, but Nintendo is able to focus on making Nintendo games exclusively, and they know their fans will support them and buy their games. They don't have to try and support other games as a strategy.
But for indie game developers with no following, I've heard it has been suggested that you offer to play other devs games to get them to play your game.
How did professional devs start? How did they gain a following? What actually strategies work?
the thing is: nintendo is not an indie dev. Nintendo is nintendo. They made mario, zelda, kirby, and many more franchises. They also have a giant team of very skilled game developers. Even good indie game devs are not on the same skill ceiling.
If you really want to get as big as nintendo, idk exactly what you can do. Chatting in communities? marketing your game? begging to pewdiepie to play your game? realistically saying, these 3 can indeed give you a couple of players - but making a truly sucesfull game... requires patience, time... and luck.
BUT the idea of "i will play your game if you play mine" is indeed one of the best solutions to get playtesters, and, with luck, maybe even an active player. If you support a lot of devs, 50% of them will at least reply you, 50% of these will actually play some of your games, as a way to support you, and 10% of these could even become casual players of your game. So yeah, playing other people's games can help getting players for your games
You're asking questions all over the shop innit.
lol Funny how the answers to this question are the opposite to a a similar post made less than two weeks ago.
im sure you wont be able to get even close to their success, because you are alone, and you dont have a big publisher behind you, which would pay as you work on a game, which can take years, and you'd have to work also as i assume you also need to eat and live somewhere....
but i also though about this as i was much younger, already dreaming of beeing a level designer... but you would have to look if any bigger company looks for employes, but they are treating it like another job requiring certain skill, maybe also more, like haveing already workin on projects for a year or so, and you need to remind yourself: Success as goal sucks ass and you wont most certainy reach it, but if you do something out of pure passion and maybe then after some time it will eventuallly makke boom or not :D but i reccommed releasing your game on steam rather then on itch only, ive seen multiple devs putting out demos for their steam games on itch with a big "WISHLIST on STEAM" popping directly in your face as you explore the game page, honestly this seems to be a rather good apprach, BUT steam costs 100 per game release and one time 100 dollar for joining steam gamedevs and for ppl outside the us its rather complicated as you need to contact offices to have a certain document dont blame me i forget what it excatly was about also my sur name contains an "Ü" which causes all kiind of trouble, but im assuming putting in "-X-ScornGames" in my case would be okay, i mean if they have my bank connection iban or something the real name wont matter or i need to tell my bank to rename my account or even change my name into "-X-ScornGames", if this is even possible in europe, in the us of course .....
