How do you do game promotion in 2024?

[Kwing]

I've been making games on Newgrounds since I was 13. Back in 2008, a Flash submission needed 250 votes before being blammed or passing judgment. Even a crappy stick fight or cursor maze game made in two days could get 5k views, and this isn't an optimistic "could" but the AVERAGE case.

After spending two years developing my first Android game, creating 26 videos with a release schedule on YouTube, and promoting the game on every community I've been a part of, I've gotten only 15 downloads in a week, and I know real-life friends account for several of those. I thought my expectations were pretty humble: 100 downloads and $25 worth of $5 donations to recoup the cost of a Google Play Developer account. But I'm nowhere near that, and $99 per year for an Apple developer account is absolutely not sustainable with numbers like this.

I get that things change a lot in a decade and a half. Even on Newgrounds, site traffic is way down and now more so than ever it functions more as a community than as a platform. High-quality games can level out at under 1k views. Some submissions can get portal awards and still only get 500 views. One of my first front-paged games (in 2015) got 40k views, my most recent one (which also podiumed in a Game Jam) has about 10k.

And obviously this isn't even touching on how different the mobile game market is. Google Play doesn't push new games up to a baseline number of downloads/ratings nearly to the extent that Newgrounds does. Everything is algorithm-based whereas Newgrounds' judgment system ensures every submission gets at least some minimum amount of views. There's also a cultural difference where people are a lot more hesitant to try a game that they have to download.

On the other hand, the total amount of traffic on the Google Play Store is astronomically higher than Newgrounds' traffic was even during its peak in traffic. It's hard not to expect that the law of truly large numbers anything should be able to get some number of downloads.

All that being said, what the heck are the rest of you guys doing? Are there obvious glaring flaws in my process? Or is everyone else stuck in the same boat?

[MSGhero]

At 3/5/24 11:37 AM, Kwing wrote: All that being said, what the heck are the rest of you guys doing? Are there obvious glaring flaws in my process? Or is everyone else stuck in the same boat?

You're competing with 100k+ other developers with the same story along with a decent handful of studios that can afford to make high quality anime to promote their games. Not much you can do without a pre-existing audience or getting lucky/standing out in a unique way.

[Yomuchan]

At 3/5/24 11:37 AM, Kwing wrote: All that being said, what the heck are the rest of you guys doing? Are there obvious glaring flaws in my process? Or is everyone else stuck in the same boat?

Well, newgrounds doesn't get much in the way of traffic like it did in the glory days so it won't work as the last word on distribution. Despite that, newgrounds can still work with most 'play in browser' games even now, which makes it a bit more accessible to people - which I think is pretty important.

So yeah - number 1 rule: Don't ever stop making games. See, one or two games might not look like they're doing much - but a small collection of games that stay up with no red flags raised gives you that "this game dev is legit" feel. People will be more confident downloading your games when they can see that you've got more content that has stayed up longer with no trouble whatsoever. That'll draw in views, and then reviews that bump up your ratings.

Next, I noticed your game has ads. Sure, it helps make some money but ads in a game made by a dev with one game on their googstore portfolio kinda feels miffy to a lot of people. My advice would be to start off with a game with no ads, and just have a donate button somewhere that doesn't get in the way. Aim for views and downloads first, monetize afterwards when you've got a proper following.

Lastly, marketing aint easy, but it's something us solo gamedevs have to do to get by. Don't be afraid to ask for constructive criticism. Use the newspost feature on newgrounds and ask people to try out your new and upcoming games. Ask for feedback from friends and family if possible. Make a neocities.org page to list out and put game demos there too - every little bit helps.

It's a hard climb, but I wish you the best of luck!

[Skoops]

Advertising is a job in and of itself, and it sucks for people that typically devote time to humbly making novel experiences because it's essentially 95% repetition of a single selfish message which is "download my thing."

I don't know how it is nowadays, but it USED to be halfway decent odds that you'd get some returns making video ads and spending money to push them on social media. I have no idea how it is these days, everything sucks and is getting worse.

If you want to see a masterclass in generating interest and a following for cheap, look at Summoner's Greed. Mediocre game, seen and played a million like them. But they made so many ads masquerading as memes, like a new one every day, that it became a success just by being kinda funny and never going away. I think I only saw one paid ad from them and it was this one that kicked everything off:

After that, every time they popped back up it was either the fact that they fed the algorithm so well that they'd just pop up that way, or someone would actually be sharing one of their memes. They found this niche of metacommentary on how stupid game ads are these days by parodying them, memeing on them, participating in the same trends ironically, you name it, but it was all content. It was usually low effort and low production value, but any algorithm that prioritizes new content was giving them a hugely outsized advantage.

That seems to be the thing that feels gross and exhausting to most people that aren't in advertising: start saying "download my game" in every space you can, in as many ways as you can, and never go away.

[ZombieGhost]

I'm trying to make something worthwhile too. It's hard these days..

[Redmage4]

Since your game is so underrated, and your youtube channel isn't at all popular your game won't get much attention. You might also want to look at it from a perspective of general interest. The Across Age series has 2 games featuring nostalgia from back when games were good without pay to win tropes, and in-game currency to buy with actual money. See how the best games got to be that good and try to parody that in yours. Go to game conventions and advertise there, too. A great soundtrack to complement the gameplay will also go a long way.

[Zfert]

At 3/5/24 12:37 PM, MSGhero wrote:

At 3/5/24 11:37 AM, Kwing wrote: All that being said, what the heck are the rest of you guys doing? Are there obvious glaring flaws in my process? Or is everyone else stuck in the same boat?

You're competing with 100k+ other developers with the same story along with a decent handful of studios that can afford to make high quality anime to promote their games. Not much you can do without a pre-existing audience or getting lucky/standing out in a unique way.

Making a game for mobile of all platforms compounds this problem even further because every single game is jammed into one store for everyone with that device. At least for PC, you can diversify into different platforms and stores to cast a wide net of different demographics and possibly even console if you have the resources. By design, mobile will give you the least visibility and the least amount of options for how and where you sell your game.

I know you released YouTube videos as marketing material, but honestly, a short run of material is not going to be enough time to generate an audience for your title. Developers showcase entire years of the development process now, especially on heavily algorithmic platforms like Twitter or TikTok. These devs also take feedback and suggestions from commenters and followers, further strengthening a sense of community before the title even releases. A noticeable example from each platform are Volcanoids and Squirrel with a Gun. I am not saying this is easy, it requires you to design your game in some way to be marketable and visually appealing much earlier in your alpha stage than you would normally prioritize, and marketing, video editing, and community management are a whole new set of skills you now have to master. But, it's probably your best bet if you do not have an already established audience or money for advertising.

We made the same mistake with our game Uh Oh Bartender in 2019. We did everything too fast, barely marketed the title, and it never picked up enough momentum to get into any of Steam's algorithms that make the platform so alluring. We didn't have TikTok yet, but knowing what I know now makes me wish we played the social media gambit too.

[Jin]

The last time I opened Google Play Store, all I saw were dark pattern games. Everyone is stuck with the biggest distribution platforms that reward scummy behavior like dark ads and microtransactions instead of fostering creativity. This is a problem space ripe for solving.

Web is also suffering as every search engine has become near useless, flooded with clickbait articles repeating the same information, optimized to outrank every small scale site. SEO has optimized(utterly defeated) search engines. Everytime you click into a website it's 30 paragraphs of crap you have to sift through to find one line of information. While everyone is coping with the information problem with ChatGPT, the other unsolved issue with broken search engines is the undiscoverability of actual value. This is another space that has potential opportunity.

As if all this junk spam isn't enough, as AI advances are accelerating, we will soon encounter an even larger problem; infinite spam.

People will have to wake up and seek out places that still resist junk. We can see this happening with everyone moving to Discord and other chat apps. Short form videos have captured most of the population, even people who used to enjoy individual creativity. Something has to disrupt the capture of short form videos. Perhaps junk spam will take out short form video someday as they did to search engines and app stores.

Bleak. So how do you succeed? Play the same marketing game as everyone else. Spray your poop all over the internet (I hope your stuff isn't poo poo). Pay for ads, send emails to everyone, email "influencers" to help you market, spread your content organically by messaging Discord users, send friends links.

[josemwarrior]

Listen to the veterans:

https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2021/10/14/common-mistakes-by-indie-game-developers/

Now, if even after reading the article you still want to make small mobile games, it's going to be a bad idea. On mobile, you have 0 discoverability.

If you do it for the web and for free, making small game experiences, on sites like Newgrounds or itch.io, you might get players. But you'll be competing with millions of others doing the same thing. Good luck.

[MahaDeoh]

At 3/8/24 10:07 PM, josemwarrior wrote: Listen to the veterans:

https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2021/10/14/common-mistakes-by-indie-game-developers/

Now, if even after reading the article you still want to make small mobile games, it's going to be a bad idea. On mobile, you have 0 discoverability.

If you do it for the web and for free, making small game experiences, on sites like Newgrounds or itch.io, you might get players. But you'll be competing with millions of others doing the same thing. Good luck.

Yes, I published my game on this site and itch and not many people plays it. Is this because it's text-based game?

[Stevenwarner]

Im struggling to im trying to market on multiple platforms im on the play store a website hosting the game created by me and itch.io along with simmer.io. Its been a painful journey but itch and new grounds seem to help bring in some users. Still not many though.

[VanVeleca]

The trick is, "Give up"

The only way indie games these day succeed is either pure luck or by already having a dedicated following for several years. Just try your best by posting memes and encourageing let's plays of your game, or instead of making a original project, just make a fan game of something already massively popular

If you still enjoy game development as a passion you should of course continue, but you have to be realistic and understand that maybe only like 200 people or so at most might play the game you developed for 2 years

Go for a smaller scale game next time, social media is a tricky and fame may not always be worth it