This suddenly just struck me:
Why is there no play testing area on the forums???
Just an area where people can post their WIPs (preferably in webGL) and people can play it and give feedback.
Opinions?
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Canāt you already do that in the WIP forum and the Game Design (Feedback Friday) forum?
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Or you release to Steam EA and get paying play testers 
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While this is true, I can see a lot more feedback if there was a section specifically dedicated to this.
I imagine seeing a section where every single thread is going to link to a build and forum members can casually go to it whenever and give feedback.
And it would definitely live by the motto āShow, donāt tellā, encouraging more would be devs to get to it.
Feedback Friday is currently handling this to a limited degree.
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Feedback Friday is about play testing specifically a minimally viable product, or vertical slice. Iād like to see, and what I think Not_Sure is getting at, is somewhere for testing more complete games. Like alpha/beta quality builds.
I know Iād like a place to give out some Steam beta keys and let people criticize the hell out of what Iāve been working on.
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Probably because people are afraid of other people stealing their games.
honestly - i donāt think there are enough people who have playable games.
I donāt think feedback friday ever really had more than like two entries, in terms of ālargeā games - its really hard to do feedback from forums i think.
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Well put, there is alot of talk but very little to show 
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RIP WebGL
A lot of people simply wouldnt show them here I think.
For example, I have a major project that I have taken to publishers and gotten lots of interest on, but I wouldnt post anything about it yet on the forum nor do I have anything publically visible yet.
I am guessing a lot of people that are frequent users of this forum are in the same boat, working on something super secret and tasty, but unwilling to show it to the wider world yet.
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If you look into
Made With Unity
you can see plenty of game made in Unity.
āProblemā is, most people post they already made game, without previous marketing, or even showing up on the forum, or with at most few posts. So these are as quickly buried as posted.
Edit:
For example this one
Made game, posted on forum and start kickstarter.
It speaks itself about game dev culture and selfishness during development, just to hide as much as possible. As result ā¦ forgotten, even may be potentially good.
Promiting for devs are not that important, its more important to promote a head of release for your potential customer base.
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@AndersMalmgren , thats the point, providing I understood you.
If someone make first appearance of the game, at the day of release, ignoring development period, is mostly already too late. Tons of crowd founded campaigns fails, just because of such negligence.
Yeah, but unity forum is not the place. Though it sounded on the other guy above that they keep it a complete secret, thatās dumb
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I definitely agree with that.
However, I donāt see reason why not to start at Unity forum. Then of course, to use all means for marketing.
He was referring to all of the people who have signed non-disclosure agreements.
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Thatās probably a very small portion of the Unity user base. And reading his text again ut most definitly does not sound like he are talking about People under nda
I think you should laser target your audience. Thatās smart. But thinking laser targeting is enough is foolish.
Mostly, natural selection is process of circumstance. In other words, dumb luck. So each avenue of marketing you do not use carries unmeasurable.lost cost of missed opportunity.
Hidden within the forums may just be that one person who, through some bizarre circumstance, is the key to getting your game the big break it needs.
You portion your time of course, but if you aināt inserting yourself into every little nook and cranny you basically taking on more risk than necessary. There is no downside at all to increased visibility. So if you got a devblpg anywhere by power of copypaste it ought to be everywhere.
I donno, I tend to think that associating with the unity forums too heavily is still a negative, because thereās still some stigma around unity itself - and that if your pitch doesnāt revolve around being ācrowd drivenā ie: kickstarter early access, that it could actually hurt sales.
Simply, if someone googles the name of your game, if a unity thread comes up - I think thatās enough to sway some customers away from buying the game.
I could be mistaken there, and things could be changing (they always are) - but 2-3 years ago when sterling was ranting about unity asset store flips, any association with this community would be a negative - especially with the hyper engaged customer base thatās most likely to buy small indie titles.
I wouldnāt want a game I really care about to come up associated with these forums in casual searches. Maybe in 3-4 more years, but still not today. That might miss out on some big break, but I think more likely its just gonna cost you 1 in 20 customers or something around 5% of sales.
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