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A month after I published my game, the number of game downloads was only 160. Although the game is innovative and unprecedented, and all of its design and innovation.
Is this number of downloads acceptable?
What is the reason for the small number of downloads?
Wait, because I didn’t make funded ads for it?
Is not our submission to advertising companies part of the monopoly?
What can someone who does not have money do to promote his game through advertising companies?
Should he leave the game development field only to the big and rich companies?
Are there places to promote our games outside the control of advertising companies?
I would like to hear important advice on this matter.
Got to try to build up awareness, a bit of buzz for your game. Small number of downloads is because not many people know about your game and the market is entirely saturated. It would be a major stroke of luck today to just release a game and have a few people stumble upon it and become super fans who make it take off on their own.
Be active on twitter, instagram, facebook and/or reddit. Use hashtags that fit well - e.g. #unity3d.
There’s a pretty active Unity subreddit here: Reddit - Dive into anything
People are showcasing their works all the time. If you haven’t done that already, consider doing it.
Developing and publishing for mobile can often be quite difficult simply due to the sea of games you are competing against. The most immediate thing I noticed is you have not updated the game for almost 20 days (3 weeks) which, for mobile games, basically means it’s dead. You should really have a strategy of adding content (even if it’s just an extra level) once per week in order to communicate to people that you have not simply uploaded and abandoned the game.
Marketing your game with literally no budget (especially mobile) is an almost impossible task. Unless by random chance your game goes viral than I don’t think you will see an explosion of users. However, there are certain things you can do. There are youtube channels that promote interesting/cool games. You could contact them and send a link to your game. You get coverage and they get content.
The fact that you make no mention of statistics (play time, engagement, etc) makes me think you are not using analytics. How can you make your game better/see what users are doing if you don’t use analytics? so I would suggest maybe adding them and looking at things like “how many users complete x amount of levels” “what is the average play session length” "are there particular puzzles that aren’t completed before the game is closed (this could indicate a puzzle is too hard and needs to be changed)
If there is any chance you can scrape together £20-£30 you could take advantage of Google’s ad stuff (Just google “£75 free google advertising”. You could use this to do youtube ads for your game.
Are you on social media? Use twitter and hashtags to expose your game to new potential players.
Other than those things I really don’t know what else you could do with zero budget. You normally need some money to advertise a commercial release if you want more than a few hundred downloads.
Well I would argue that you should focus on youtube ads and take advantage of Google’s “Free $75/100” credits. Create two video adverts.
a 5 second unskipable ad
a 10 second skippable ad
Spend $20 - $30 and see what results you get in terms of click through rate and downloads. What you want to figure out in terms of marketing is Cost Per Acquisition. This is “how much does it cost to acquire a new user”. I guess if you aren’t monetizing your game(?) this doesn’t matter as much and you might want to stick to “organic” marketing like reddit etc
If you go down the route of advertising using Google then I also suggest researching a little before doing so - instead of going in blind. (google have a ton of resources for this)
Having recently set up google ads for a casual game I can tell you that you wont get any useful results with such a low spend. I wasn’t even able to get impressions in high user value markets (US, UK, Australia, etc) with a budget of $100 per day. I eventually upped my spend to $500 a day and started to see some impressions and clicks.
What useful and valuable advice. Thank you with all my heart.I really needed such information.
I thought that updating the game frequently was a negative thing. But it appears otherwise. I will work on the constant update then.
I also discovered that the game icon does not express the content of the game and shows it more childish, so I will try to change it.
I thank you again for this advice, although I was hoping that you would put me links to some sites or youtubers who could hope for such a game as this one.
Unity 3d is a good place for dev logs but that’s not your target audience. You will not gain much sells from there, though its a good place to learn to promote anyway.
Make short cool show off videos. Skip logo, first few seconds should be something cool.
Well I could but it would sort of defeat the purpose of you getting better at marketing. You know, teach a man to fish and all that. However, ask and thee shall receive.
[Disclaimer: Not sure if all will still be active but guaranteed to find a lot of sites still doing reviews as list is a little old]
You are a great person , I have exhausted you with me. Thank you very much, my friend, for the good work you have done so that many others may benefit from it. Thank you again .
Add a link to your game in a signature for all forums you are active on, including here. It may not make much difference, but it is also easy to do. It would also be helpful to have a link to your game in this thread. Additional opportunities might be related to the theme or other elements of your game, and someone might have a suggestion if they knew about the game.
Links were removed from this thread because this is General Discussion, not MWU or Connect. Discussion of promotion generally is acceptable in General Discussion, promotion of one’s individual game is not.
It very likely doesn’t look appealing enough for your target audience. You can’t fix that with advertising. I looked at screenshots of the game (easy to find your thread here since you haven’t posted much yet, I encourage others to take a look too) and I can’t tell from the looks of it how the gameplay experience would be like and what the appeal could be. That’s a big issue for a mobile game imho. Also it doesn’t look “pretty” enough imho. I would spend money on an artist long before you spend money on advertising.
I have to agree with @Martin_H , from looking at your game it looks like you have a nice gameplay concept, but the art and definately UI does not really make the game look inviting (or make it obvious what the game really is) so your screenshots need to be better if people are to be attracted. That + a short gameplay video is what people use to judge whether or not to download a game, and often its done very quickly (they may only look at your screenshots for a few seconds before swiping onto another game to look at).
But also the main issue here is, if this is a mobile game: welcome to the market. This is a very competetive market and games by big studios struggle here, so without having a proper launch and post launch plan before launching its often very hard to compete post launch. Unfortunately if you were not featured already, and are not in talks with apple + google to get featured, then your chances of being featured now post launch are low and without being featured its very difficult to gain a following on mobile, due to visiblity issues.
So treat this as a soft launch and start improving and only launch in other territories once you have finished that process. If you already launched in multiple territories: that ship has sailed unforunately and you will have to try and improve what you have.
I also second the idea that spending money and time on art is more important than the marketing right now.
I am still new to the forum and ignorant of some forum rules. Links have been removed from the topic by the forum administration, and I do not know whether it is permissible to put the link in the signature! Thanks for your interaction with me.
The game took only one month to be produced. The second month was for designing icons, publishing the game, and producing a propaganda film. My focus was on the idea of the game more than the outward appearance because I thought it was aimed at a specific type of people, who love puzzle games and who are mostly interested in the idea of the game more than its aesthetic appearance. Thank you for your kind advice.
Thank you for your interaction with the topic. I think I will do more to improve the appearance of the game, although I still think that the original idea of the puzzle is the idea of the game.
By the way, I am a painter, an architect and a designer, I mean, I do not need a designer or a draftsman, but as I said earlier, I focused on the idea at the expense of appearance. Thanks for your valuable advice.