Developer discussion: Publicizing your game

Ooh! Great topic! AdVenture Capitalist hit a nice stride early on, which we managed to convert into a lot of forward momentum. I'll try to list a couple of things that worked and didn't work for us.

  1. The "New" page on any gaming portal site is your BEST friend! The trick to taking advantage of it is making sure your thumbnail stands out. I know that's kind of a minute thing, but when AdCap was taking off, we noticed that the Fallout-style Capitalist character stood out A LOT from other games that launched beside it. Everywhere AdCap subsequently launched, it repeated it always repeated its early success, and through A/B testing we've determined the AdCap character had strong standout appeal.

Please note: until very recently (three days ago, I think?) AdCap has never paid for a single user acquisition, except in Test Markets.

  1. Quiz time! What "social media" site gets the highest click-through rate for AdCap? Facebook? Twitter? No - it's Wikia! The fan-created wikia for AdCap generates more traffic for us than every other social media site combined, in fact! (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc.) Now, mind you, I'm not talking about tens of thousands of impressions, and it's not necessarily going to help someone just starting out per se, but keep it in mind when you're banging your head on the desk trying to cut through the noise.

  2. I'm very glad that many others have had success posting here on Reddit, and I would like to continue to heavily encourage others to use this as a platform to solicit new players. I, personally, have not had the best luck here (I'm not a super popular dude around here), but this remains one of my favorite places to discover new games.

  3. Submit to ALL the sites! Websites like Kongregate and Game Jolt make it easy to get your games on the platform, and the communities there are really passionate about games and are willing to try even rough or buggy experiences. Kongregate is where AdCap really took off. Which segues into the next thing...

  4. Foster your community! When AdCap first started, I responded to every single comment (because I was excited). But being ultra active with the community became incredibly important to our success, and definitely helped us grow our numbers week to week. Being responsive and interacting with players is a good way to build good will with them, which creates buy-in.

There are some other considerations to take into account, such as where you can launch your game (we used Unity, which was a controversial choice, but which allowed us to launch on many different platforms). No matter what though, consider getting some basic analytics in early for you can keep track of where your traffic is coming from.

Extra Credits did a pretty cool video on this topic recently, btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxsEimJ_3bM

As for what I would consider successful numbers - aim for double digit Day 1 retention. If you can get even 15% of people that click on your game to come back the next day, you might be onto something.

Random thoughts. Let me know if I can elaborate on anything here. Good luck!

/r/incremental_games Thread