Where do you promote your Projects, and what is the outcome?

TPW

Hi.
Where do you promote your projects, and what are the results from it? Have you recommendations how to get active players and feedback?

My experiences so far:
-Reddit: We had barely any upvotes in the big subreddits when promoting there. Only in the Linux-Specific Subreddits we got some "solidarity-upvotes" and a fair amount of clicks (few hundred up to small thousand) on our Itch-Page, but barely no DLs from it. People like to see games there, but they seem unlikely to play them.

-Twitter: Hard to acclaim any attention there; none of our tweets did fly. After Musk bought the place, we left.

-Mastodon: Smaller community than twitter, but much more oriented towards Linux and FLOSS. If we promote there, we got some replies and traffic in the past - smaller numbers than on reddit, though. Higher DL/Click-Ration from there, but still a small amount of feedback.

-Matrix: Few people there, and hard to come through with anything.

-Imageboards: Got some DLs and feedback when hitting the drum on LainChan (a cyberpunk-themed imageboard that is less nazi-infested than most of the others).

-Linux or FLOSS-Specific Sites: Got some attention and some nice feedback from pages like this board, LinuxGaming.de and so on. But since the userbase is rather small, the range is very limited.

-Youtube: Hard to come through. Our Videos have a few hundred clicks, most of them resulting from our Itch-Page - so we rather direct traffic to YT than the other way around.

-Free Youtube-Alterantives: Nearly no usage even from within the fediverse/linuxcommunity. Generated no measurable traffic.

-Youtube-Reviewers, Review-Pages: Got a few reviews from small youtubers (Namely "Mr. Dave Pizza" and "LinuxGameCast"). While especially the DavePizza was really nice, their range is also so limited that it didn't have much effect. And getting attention from bigger players seems not possible, at least for us. When releasing, we send a mail to various sites, but this nearly never gets any pickups.

-ModDB: Making a giveaway there for Mediation5 when it was still priced summoned thousands of (primarily chinese) IPs, but this didn't translate into any DLs. Can't recommend.

-Itch: The normal Itch-Page does produce some Views and from time to time even a DL, but barely creates feedback. However, bringing Mediation5 into this big antiracist bundle a few years ago helped a lot; we have much more DLs on it than any of our free games, and this prevails after making Med5 free as well. However, I don't want to put a pricetag on my projects just to trick people into playing them because they spent a few cents.

-Steam: "The Vaults of Minos" got plenty of clicks (more than anywhere else), and next to no buys. Given that it were 100 bucks and a fucking fight to use their damn API this surely wasn't worth the effort. I was told that it would be possible to cheat the system by buying the game 10x with different accounts and write positive reviews to bypass their low-effort-filters. Won't do anything like this. Maybe turning it free there some day.

-https://www.gamespress.com/: Generated some traffic and at least 2 articles that generated some traffic either. Recommendable.

Modanung

Mainly here, LibreGameWiki and Itch. Three games have let's play videos made by passersby. GamingOnLinux also generates some traffic.

TPW Reddit

After removal of the "warrant canary", I left.

TPW Youtube

Deleted my Google account over a decade ago, and not adding honey to the pot.

TPW

Modanung Besides the promotion I'm not really active on either platform myself.
Did you read Permanent Record? It does a really good job regarding the assumption that we have anonymity anywhere in the net :).

Modanung

TPW It does a really good job regarding the assumption that we have anonymity anywhere in the net :).

Your point being?

poVoq

There are some Twitch streamers that show-case libre games from time to time (although the one that is participating in libregaming.org sadly stopped streaming) and Veloren had quite some success with (Spanish speaking) Youtubers promoting it on their channel.

But yeah, hard to get through with the amount of indie games being released all the time. But for the time being, Mastodon is probably the most worthwhile promotion platform for open-source games if you can get some people to boost it from various instances.

On a side note: Maybe Steam wasn't worth it, but making it gratis there will be unlikely to change that. In fact it might make it worse as it will be sorted with all these F2P gambling titles that a lot of people filter out.

TPW

poVoq On a side note: Maybe Steam wasn't worth it, but making it gratis there will be unlikely to change that. In fact it might make it worse as it will be sorted with all these F2P gambling titles that a lot of people filter out

This is one my concerns as well, on the other side - it can't get much worse than it is atm.

Peter When I read "Promote" it sounds to me like you want to earn some bucks. I don't know if you meant that or if you rather just want to have some players for your game.

If you wanna make money I recommend itch with "Pay what you want".

We are not in for the money. If something comes out, we take it though ;). But this Promotion isn't meant in the sense of "making money", more like "getting players and responses". Right now, we have 4 games on Itch - 3 of them pay what you want, one with a paywall for the compiled binary. The 3 pay what you want produce more DLs, but less money - and I suppose less factual players, as the paid title produced more feedback until now.

Peter

When I read "Promote" it sounds to me like you want to earn some bucks. I don't know if you meant that or if you rather just want to have some players for your game.

If you wanna make money I recommend itch with "Pay what you want".

If money isn't your concern then I think there are highly specialiased sites. For example a forum dedicated to your games's genre (which is what?) Or a Linux gaming site. Etc.

Edit: I took into account your topic title. I guess now, that you don't want a recommendation, but rather experiences we had. I don't have, but I will publish my text adventure on intfiction org and probably on the German Linux gaming site holarse.de. I read lemmy.ml and the fediverse, but I won't publish it there.

talas

TPW
Well, posting on freegamedev.net gave you 1 steam purchase at least ;-)

Good to hear about your stuff, as you said it was basically invisible to me even though I try to gobble up all the FLOSS games I can.

TPW

Modanung No real point - just thought it might be interesting to you, as you are obviously concerned about your privacy at the digital space.

Peter

@"TPW" I will try your games some day. It seems they are not my taste (except Mahjong which I like) but I won't know until I try them. :) I don't know into which category I should put your games. Which is important for promoting. Maybe "casual indie"?

Maybe https://plarium.com/ in the casual category?

Technopeasant

I only really bother posting about my games here, the old forum, the Gambas-One forums and lately also on Opengameart.

I should probably get around to hosting on itch, but since I don't offer native Windows versions (Gambas only runs on Unix-like systems) there does not seem too much of a point in pitching to the general gaming pool. I have been meaning to see how well my games run via WSL on Windows 10 and 11 though.

I had the honour of having some of my games uploaded to the Internet Archive. My 3D games in particular have even gotten a few favourites.

https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Piga+Software%22

Honestly have put more of an effort to promote a free content science fiction comedy audio series my brothers and I do, but have only had limited success with that as well on YouTube, the Internet Archive and a few audio drama forums.

http://icculus.org/mwm/rover/index.html

By far my most successful projects from an audience perspective have been my various wiki projects for old school videos games (Blood Wiki, Catacomb Wiki, etc), but they have a pre-built audience. Likewise my brother has a fairly popular series on GamingOnLinux where he goes over old Linux games.

Modanung

Technopeasant [...] since I don't offer native Windows versions (Gambas only runs on Unix-like systems) there does not seem too much of a point in pitching to the general gaming pool.

Because there's Linux users in that general gaming pool, and your game cannot be installed using a package manager. Projects can be filtered by platform on itch, which the app does by default. The itch app also automatically updates any installed programs, which occurs by means of patches when using butler to push changes.

dulsi

I have yet to find a good marketing strategy. I have promoted Mojotron on discord and irc during the kickstarter but I don't think that helped much. I created a press kit for Mojotron but again didn't get much coverage.

Modanung

@dulsi Mojotron doesn't show up in search results on itch. You may want to uncheck this box at the bottom of the Edit game page to gain some traffic:

I did not check for your other projects.

dulsi

Hmmm... Mojotron, Fight or Perish and Shippy 1984 are listed as "In Development". That apparently makes it so you can't search for them. That's annoying.

Modanung

dulsi Nope; all my projects are marked In development as well. They show up.

dulsi

Modanung Guess it is email support time. I went through their FAQ and it appears they should be indexed. Thanks for letting me know.

Peter

@TPW My Plarium link probably was trash. It is not a general discussion forum as I thought.

You already have tried itch Pay what you want and FLOSS and Linux sites. I think that are already the best free solutions. You can get better resonance only with unfree solutions imho. Like Facebook and Twitter. :(

Modanung

Peter The fees on itch practically turn dollars into cents, with direct payout.
So after six payments over several years I switched from PWYW to no payments, and added a link to the donation page on each project's page instead.

Peter

Hosting something yourself (payment, but other things, too) seems on the first glance a lot of effort. But your donation page is a quite simple solution.

I plan publishing the compiled executable or package of my games on my webpage. Actually a simple solution. (Maybe later the repos, too, but that requires some work, so for now I use notabug.org for my repos.)

Modanung

Peter Each project panel on the homepage has a Tux button that links to the latest GitLab CI build artifact of its master branch. Something like that?

The website's code is also on GitLab, btw.