Promoting your game!

Spoonweaver · Post by **Spoonweaver** » Sat Sep 28, 2013 7:59 am

So, you've completed the game you've been working on for a year and you uploaded to the internet. However, you've only gotten 12 people to download it and none of them are commenting. You need Promoting my friend.

When people think of Promoting, some go straight to thinking about paid adds, but there are lots of free and easy ways you can promote your game. Posting screenshots is a good one. Simply talking about the game with people can increase you game's plays by a ton. But mostly, you want to try to get as many people to know that your game exists as possible. This involves strolling around the internet, spreading the word in the best way you can think of. This thread will be used to list all the different places you can promote your game. There's a couple different types of places, so I'll keep them in categories below. Post anything you can think of that's not on the list (even if it seems obvious).

Forums (these are places much like Slimesalad, where people talk about games. Preferably indie games)
http://www.SlimeSalad.com
http://www.CastleParadox.com
http://forums.tigsource.com/
http://boards.4chan.org/v/
http://forums.indiegamer.com
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/
http://www.rpgdl.com/

Social Media (these are super popular general topic sites. They tend to be swamped and hard to get noticed in)
http://www.facebook.com
http://www.youtube.com
http://www.livejournal.com
http://www.tumblr.com
http://www.twitter.com
http://www.reddit.com

Databases (these are sites where you can upload your game. It might be a pain to update them all, but the exposure could be worth it)
http://www.SlimeSalad.com
http://www.CastleParadox.com
http://www.indiedb.com/
http://sandbox.yoyogames.com
http://rpgmaker.net/
http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight
http://itch.io
https://www.humblebundle.com/store

Ports (these are different gaming venues that the OHR can now port to. These all currently require you convert your game to a file type other than .exe/.rpg)
http://www.ouya.tv/develop/
http://developer.android.com/
http://developer.amazon.com/
http://slideme.org/
http://www.appslib.com/
http://apps.samsung.com/

Blogs/Other (these are places that either review games or otherwise promote them)
http://honestandroidgames.com
http://hamsterwheel.mocbjsoftware.com/

Spoonweaver · Post by **Spoonweaver** » Sat Sep 28, 2013 8:07 am

Post the site here even if you're not sure it belongs on the list.
Like, there's been a lot of these tiny consoles coming out and I think we should look into them more. Like the Nvidia Shield, I'm pretty sure we can get ohr games on this, but I'm not sure how yet. I'll have to look into it more later.
http://shield.nvidia.com/play-android-games/

Post here about any play you happen to see ohr games too. even crazy foreign ones like this:
http://gcup.ru/news/o_h_r_rpg_c_e_beelz ... 05-06-3836

Spoonweaver · Post by **Spoonweaver** » Mon Sep 30, 2013 6:05 pm

There's another category of sites that I didn't list above. That's the sites that you don't have too much control over getting your game on to yourself, but by promoting your game elsewhere, you might end up on. Such sites include:

http://www.gamespot.com
http://www.gamefaqs.com
http://games.softpedia.com
http://www.gameanyone.com
http://www.demonews.com
http://www.brothergames.com
http://games.brothersoft.com

There are also a good number of sites that you get your game on fairly automatically by putting your game on OUYA or one of the Android stores.

Post by **TMC** » Sat Oct 05, 2013 11:50 am

Excellent idea; this can be incredibly useful.

How about submitting your game to people to do Let's Plays, reviews, or write blog posts?

For example, if you have a worthy game and would like to see it on the front page of http://www.tigsource.com/, ask Rinku, who is an editor, and has posted OHRRPGCE games there before.

Is http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/ just for Game Maker games?

RMN (http://rpgmaker.net/) is for all RPG games, not just RPG Maker games, and there are some OHRRPGCE games there.

You could also seek out sites specific to your type of game and post there. E.g. RogueTemple and RogueBasin for roguelikes. Of course around here sites for indie RPGs would be most relevant, but you've only posted two RPG-specific sites.

If you're ambitious you could even submit your game to Steam Greenlight just for exposure even if you don't expect to get in (but beware that you'll probably get a lot of negative feedback too, as the bar is very high).

Android 3.1 introduce some new APIs for input devices and the nVidia Shield FAQ mentions games with "native controller support" so my guess is that targetting that API will mean pretty good Shield support without having to do anything Shield-specific.

Spoonweaver · Post by **Spoonweaver** » Sat Oct 05, 2013 2:24 pm

How about submitting your game to people to do Let's Plays, reviews, or write blog posts?

I had thought about making a people category. I'm not really sure though. It seems weird to make a list of people's names. I think the people category should remain private for now.

Is http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/ just for Game Maker games?

I think it's mainly for Game Maker, like RMN is mainly for RPGmaker. But You can submit ohr games there. Slimes and Tim-Tim have been up there for years.

You could also seek out sites specific to your type of game and post there. E.g. RogueTemple and RogueBasin for roguelikes. Of course around here sites for indie RPGs would be most relevant, but you've only posted two RPG-specific sites.

I agree that only 2 RPG specific sites is low. I didn't do too much research while starting this list, and I couldn't remember too many places off the top of my head. I've been adding sites in as I find them. Please post any of these sites you can think of.

Spoonweaver · Post by **Spoonweaver** » Sun May 04, 2014 9:40 am

Hello, I've been looking into using Kickstarter for a few of my projects and so I've been researching indie games on kickstarter and I found this very thorough report of games on kickstarter so I figured I'd post it here.

http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread ... st-Mortems

Post by **TMC** » Mon May 05, 2014 6:12 am

Cool. Though it's weird that they only listed post-mortems of successfully funded games. Don't know whether those are the majority.

But hang on, is the idea to just use KS for publicity and monetising an otherwise difficult to sell game? I assume you don't have any actual development costs, unless you want to pay an artist for something.

There's two big sites missing from your Databases list, itch.io and the Humble Indie Store. Both let you either sell your game or give it away for free. itch.io seems to be trivial to get a game onto and offers a nice format for browsing for games by screenshot, while the Humble Store is probably more difficult, though I don't think it would be too bad.

As bonus, Here's an interesting interview with itch.io founder, Leaf Corcoran.

Also, http://www.castleparadox.com/ohr/viewto ... 7382#87382

Spoonweaver · Post by **Spoonweaver** » Wed May 07, 2014 5:56 pm

Indeed, tmc, indeed.
Thanks for mentioning these two sites, they look great.
In fact, I assume I'm missing a lot of big sites from the list still. Hopefully, we can continue to collect them.

As far as Kickstarter, I think the answer is basically both of those things. Kickstarter certainly seems to draw in a lot of attention for indie games, whether that's kickstarter itself or just people advertising their own kickstarters. And yea, the money would basically be monetizing a difficult to sell game. I was thinking of basically raising money for it on kickstarter and then offering the game for free after it was done. Which makes ouya viable. (Ouya's "all games are free" stance being the biggest thing wrong with the system in my eyes.) I'm not sure if people will have much of an incentive to actually donate to the kickstarter if they aren't buying the game though, but I think I'd like to try any ways.

Moving on to the thread you linked about Pixelwars. I'd like to know what actually caused that large spike in downloads. I hate to down play the game's success but I think it might be because the game shares a name with a few other things. The fact that it only has >1% of it's downloads still installed bodes badly, but it's 3.6 rating seems promising. So, I don't know what to think. In any case, AppBrain seems like a pretty good site if games with ohr graphics are getting 100k+ downloads. I'll be adding that one to the list.

Post by **TMC** » Thu May 08, 2014 4:29 am

I think I've heard that KS game campaigns which state they will release the game for free do poorly. (But that's hearsay; look for some real sources). Of course the whole original point of KS was to finance something and then typically give it away for free if successful, but probably the majority of users now treat it like a store. Still, it would be great if you manage it.

AppBrain doesn't host apps; it lists download statistics for the google Play store. Still, it lets you promote your game further so seems to be worth including.

I was surprised by the highly positive reviews of Pixelwar because although I haven't managed to play it, all that I've seen is that the tiles are surprisingly badly used.

Meatballsub · Post by **Meatballsub** » Thu May 08, 2014 1:31 pm

I considered using KS to help fund the original music needed for Ruin, but I've almost completely decided against it at this point. I actually still have a draft of Ruin's "pitch" on the KS website if I end up changing my mind. I pretty much have the music covered now, so I doubt I will use it at this point.

The thing I've noticed with most successful KS games is that offering it for free afterwards is not near enough. People expect apparel or in-game contributions, both of which require time, effort, and possibly money. If successful, I think the promotion that KS could give a game is great, but it's worth mentioning that it comes with a huge price.

You might get some funds and "fame" out of it, but then you have to deal with dozens (or potentially, hundreds) of people while fulfilling your promises made to them during the campaign. In my situation (at least for Ruin), I'm not sure if it's worth all of that mess.

It's also worth mentioning that any funds you get from a successful Kickstarter is taxable income, at least in the US. If you don't use those funds for business (game) purposes in the same year that you receive them, you could be hit with some pretty hefty charges on your taxes.

I still think that KS is a good idea for those serious about their games, but it is worth weighing all of the points before actually doing it.

Post by **TMC** » Thu May 08, 2014 8:09 pm

I think you're pretty spot on with those comments, KS sounds very time intensive.

KS is a way to get people involved once they're excited, but you aren't going to get people excited about your game that way if they wouldn't be anyway.

When it comes to indie games that look great and look fun, there are heaps of them on KS and they do quite well. But something that looks less exciting, such as something with less flashy graphics or turn-based decision-making games, these get less attention. I don't know who a funding campaign for a sound track would even attract...

Meatballsub · Post by **Meatballsub** » Thu May 08, 2014 8:40 pm

Well I was more vague with the actual reason behind needing the funds on KS. I pitched it as a "if I don't reach x amount of money, then I won't be able to publish the game" rather than "I need it for music", specifically.

That is how a lot of indie games have done it, it seems.

Spoonweaver · Post by **Spoonweaver** » Mon Dec 22, 2014 5:37 pm

Having started up Twitter recently, I remembered this thread and figured I could expand upon it.
I'd like to collect a good amount of hastags to tweet to for indie game devs, thus us. I know that you can basically hastag anything, but what I'm looking for here was quality hastags that people actually follow.

Hashtags so far:
#ohrrpgce (no reason not to start our own)
#indiedev
#gamedev
#screenshotsaturday
#pixelart
#pixel_dailies
#indiegames
#videojuegos
#freegames
#technews

Matokage · Post by **Matokage** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 3:41 pm

>4chan
You would be breaking 4chan's rule 4
"You will not post or request personal information..."
What I mean by that is, you will be breaking your anonimity

Spoonweaver · Post by **Spoonweaver** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 5:22 pm

Not true. you just have to post it as if it's not you. I mean it's sort of lying. But this is the internet, it was built on lies!
If you didn't want to lie you could always get someone else to promote your game there and then you'd promote theirs.