Promoting Games: Advice Request

You could ask smaller YouTubers if they want to play your game, maybe this could help a little.
Most of the time they agree and it is also very interesting to see a Let's Play of your own game.

The market is obviously extremely crowded now, at least for mobile and PC. Can you link your game? I found the most important factor is identifying your player/buyer/streamer persona first and then do some research where they’re hanging out and who are the important influencers. I mainly use Twitter to identify people interesting for me, be it freelancing contacts, press or business people. I think Twitch is not really worth the effort for retro styled single player games, but I may be wrong. Discord is a great thing to connect with your players, but I don’t really find the time to use it. I also think every indie game needs at least an own website (not just FB) and a DevLog. You’ll also need a well crafted press kit on your website, game journalists are super short on time and have to cover a huge number of titles at once, so you need to supply them with good footage and text chunks yourself. I’ve one example on my side, there are lots of others out there.

I also ty to attend local events if possible, there’s nothing more important than meeting people in real life, that’s also where the greatest potential can be found, both business-wise and for growing as an artist, designer or coder.

Quote from Wiiman

[MENTION=14770]Banduck[/MENTION]
That's definitely a unique idea I think I will try out. Any suggestions of good youtubers to hit up?

A good way to find smaller youtubers that would be willing to play is to search for let's plays and reviews of a game or games that are similar to your own on youtube. The smaller the channel, the more likely they are to play.

Smaller youtubers will not help, it will only cost you free keys and you are not earning anything. The only thing you can do is:
A: Use twitter/instagram/imgur and tweet everyday for years.
B: Go to as many events as you can spreak with as many people there, show up on many different events. it really is the best way to get in contact with the people.
C: Submit you game to all sorts of prizez (indiecade/indigo

Never give away free keys to small youtubers, you giving away all the control. we destroy our own business

Currently, the video game market is oversaturated and in the year of asset flips and shovelware thousands of games release a day, while the time people have spare stayed the same.

I think you need a quality game to have a chance of getting noticed, but even then above average and excellent games have trouble getting a crowd and sell e.g. on Steam.

Here are some stuff that could potentially help:
• Use social media and communication sites like Twitter, Facebook, Discord servers, etc, anywhere that has outside access to large amounts of people.
• On Twitter, you can send tweets with the popular hashtags like #gamedev #screenshotsaturday and anything else relevant.
• On Discord, you can make your own server to invite people into, or send updates to popular servers.
• Ask presenters such as Youtubers and Streamers to broadcast your game, given that it presents good, fits the presenter, is entertaining that way and so on.
• Kickstarter, if your crowd notices you enough and the game looks like it has potential, they'll fund it. (Of course there's the difficulty of having the crowd notice you first)
• Of course there's participating in public events, meeting new people and showing your game, given that, again, it presents itself good, you have a good escalator pitch and can answer questions. You should never underestimate this, you might not know how many connections a person has and how important they are.
• Have a main domain where people can view your game, get some information, play it and have a press kit (which Julian mentioned).
• If you are about to release a game, make sure there are many people informed, following and waiting to buy your game. It can quickly bury and hide from view if you release out of the blue and nobody knows about it.

I don't actually know if most of these are effective. So if anyone has first-hand experience or have sources with them, it would surely be interesting to read.

Quote from Wiiman

Well guys the project I am currently hoping to advertise is completely free, I just want more people to play it. Does that change the approach any?

I don’t think there is a difference, building an audience is super hard these days and having a free game does not automatically work in your favor, the main lacking resource is your player‘s spare time and free games are often associated with low quality standards, even if that is not true. Most people would rather try to play one of the 50 games bought and never installed on Steam than going for a new hobby project on Gamejot or Itch. Some free games like AM2R were hugely successful tho, but in this particular example the game had more than average commercial quality.

trial and error is the key.

I did bunch of crazy things, wasted few hundred dollars, paid ads, paid install, tried to outsmart google with working shady tactics, then google cracks them down then tricks don't work anymore, got some apps/games suspended. BUT, I did not stop, create publish promote create publish promote......
I became wiser as months go by... Knowledge is knowing what to do, wisdom is knowing what NOT to do. As I build knowledge, wisdom, and understanding, I got myself good organic growth (1m+ downloads) , and I still have lots to improve on.
Only tip is Try and Try, understand what people on your niche like, surprise them, do the effort, make it fun and shareable, reiterate, hire professionals, spend, invest money... all the good stuff.

What Strategies worked for me might not work for you, what worked for you might not work for me... you just need experience. so go ahead and get it.
Facebook Promotions, paid installs (worked at first) , admob ad promotions, twitter, hiring fiverr people, seo, website/landing pages, etc... all those did not work for me, I end up wasting time and money.
But now that I got followers and Good experience, if I do Facebook promotions, twitter, website stuff, I will gain a lot from it now than back then when I was a newbie.
I did now hire an artist than relying on cheaper alternative (cheaper artist is not bad, it's just Luck based, sometimes good, but most of the time you get what you pay for). Many strategies will uncover as you try harder.
I wish you all the best!

Quote from Julian82

I don’t think there is a difference, building an audience is super hard these days and having a free game does not automatically work in your favor, the main lacking resource is your player‘s spare time and free games are often associated with low quality standards, even if that is not true. Most people would rather try to play one of the 50 games bought and never installed on Steam than going for a new hobby project on Gamejot or Itch. Some free games like AM2R were hugely successful tho, but in this particular example the game had more than average commercial quality.

100% agree with this. Usually the free games that become famous are older titles that had a lot of time to circulate and came out when there wasn't so much competition. The other famous free games have special reasons. Having Metroid attached to the name certainly doesn't hurt, for instance. My first game was free and over an hour long, so I thought it might be successful with some luck. Couldn't even get it to over 500 people playing it. Even when your game is free, I think you have to have something very unique, or preferably multiple unique things about the game.

[MENTION=12521]Julian82[/MENTION] I noticed that you ran a successful kickstarter campaign for Outbuddies. Would you say that having a kickstarter helped get more of a base for your game? Or do you feel you already had that support before the campaign?

Quote from Megabeard

[MENTION=12521]Julian82[/MENTION] I noticed that you ran a successful kickstarter campaign for Outbuddies. Would you say that having a kickstarter helped get more of a base for your game? Or do you feel you already had that support before the campaign?

Yes it did for sure, but KS does generate far less generic traffic than one would assume. Community building should start about 4-6 months prior to a KS campaign. You should try to make sure there is a crowd waiting to fund you at least 50% in the first week of the KS. My KS was planned quite badly and the game's assets were not ready back then. I was lucky to have some good friends and my family members who helped me a lot to get funded, but the campaign never took off. My goal was very humble tho and I had never planned to go fulltime on the project, it was mainly done to get the extra cash for some freelance work, equipment and licences. KS is a great platform for well known developers which a significant following, but very hard for first-timers. Edmund McMillen, for example, is funding a Please login to see this link. at the moment. He's already more than 1000% funded and made more than half a Million USD in less than two days.