Yesterday I received an email from Playdead, the developers of Limbo and Inside, in which they wish me good luck with my game.

Every novice indie developer dreams of earning millions on his game, but then there is one small problem: no one knows about his game. I will share my experience of promoting the game on Steam. So, I have a game:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1693100/Fomalhaut_Flowers/​

The game is there, there are no vishlists. It would seem that everything is lost. But not everything is lost if you are able to tell people about your game and pour external traffic to the game page on Steam. On the day of the release, with the practical absence of vishlist, the store gave me traffic of about 1300 visits - this is very little, then the traffic fell sharply. I began to think about how to fill in external traffic and from where.

1. VKontakte thematic public sites - neither paid nor free advertising did not give results.

2. YouTube-sending keys to curators is also pointless, their videos are watched by one and a half people, and I failed to reach a top blogger (I hope everything is still ahead).

3. MASS media. It is very difficult to interest a major gaming publication, VGTimes published an announcement of my game, but, apparently, it did not bring results. Writing articles on thematic sites also seemed pointless to me.

4. Twitter - I definitely recommend it, posts with the tags "gamedev", "indiedev", "indiegame" and "indiegamedev" are willingly retweeted and there is at least some sense of movement (you need to look at the exhaust).

5. A reference game, to which you can "sit on the tail". Here I was lucky - even during the development period, many people wrote that visually my game is similar to Limbo (I personally don't think so, but it's clear where the snake grows from). I wrote to the developers of Limbo and, oddly enough, they answered me and wished me good luck with the game - after this news, I have stable external traffic to the page of my game "Fomalhaut Flowers" on Steam.

Summing up, my advice to novice indie developers to promote their game will be this: try different promotion options and think creatively, because you will never guess in advance which of the options will bring the best result in this particular case.

Thank you for your attention, good luck and good luck to everyone in game development!

Hi Alex,

I haven't published any games. I struggle with concentrating, and that's when I actually take the time to sit down, open my IDE and try to work.
You've published something, and I think you can be proud. It's playable, it looks fairly polished. Ok, so perhaps it's not a commercial success, don't let that get you down.

I watched a Veritasium video just today, outlining the importance of thumbnails and titles on YouTube videos (but applicable to several other services and headlines)
The reason these are important, Derek explains, is that they help increase “impressions”, bumping them and increasing the likelihood to be viewed - and for click-throughs to the actual video.
A YouTube list entry is, of course, a very small area to explain the whole video; all you get is the thumbnail and the title.

This isn't much different on Steam: This goes both for the featured area as well as the smaller thumbnails and list entries.
On the store page, you have much more room to sell your game; you have the title, teaser videos, gameplay videos and screenshots.
You have the summary and tags, achievements and the quick technical breakdown on the right. You have an area for the rich-text description.

I don't want to be the asshole who tells you that you've done a bunch of things wrong. I'm probably not going to buy your game anyways.
But perhaps it's good that you get some feedback: I think your thumbnails look bland, that the static gradient background gets old and tired after the second screenshot and that the music sounds boring.
Your store page seems like it's lacking something. It might be the variety in the slides at the top, the proper summary telling+selling the concept, or because there aren't gifs with the juiciest details from your game in the description.
I really don't mean to be harsh - I just want to be honest. Could I do better? Nah, probably not, and what do I know about selling platformers? I'm not even into the genre.

But perhaps you can find a way to turn this around, and make your list entries more clickable. Flesh out the store page. Get those impressions.
Best of luck - don't give up on your game.

alextorgames said:

Yesterday I received an email from Playdead, the developers of Limbo and Inside, in which they wish me good luck with my game.

Every novice indie developer dreams of earning millions on his game, but then there is one small problem: no one knows about his game. I will share my experience of promoting the game on Steam. So, I have a game:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1693100/Fomalhaut_Flowers/​

The game is there, there are no vishlists. It would seem that everything is lost. But not everything is lost if you are able to tell people about your game and pour external traffic to the game page on Steam. On the day of the release, with the practical absence of vishlist, the store gave me traffic of about 1300 visits - this is very little, then the traffic fell sharply. I began to think about how to fill in external traffic and from where.

1. VKontakte thematic public sites - neither paid nor free advertising did not give results.

2. YouTube-sending keys to curators is also pointless, their videos are watched by one and a half people, and I failed to reach a top blogger (I hope everything is still ahead).

3. MASS media. It is very difficult to interest a major gaming publication, VGTimes published an announcement of my game, but, apparently, it did not bring results. Writing articles on thematic sites also seemed pointless to me.

4. Twitter - I definitely recommend it, posts with the tags "gamedev", "indiedev", "indiegame" and "indiegamedev" are willingly retweeted and there is at least some sense of movement (you need to look at the exhaust).

5. A reference game, to which you can "sit on the tail". Here I was lucky - even during the development period, many people wrote that visually my game is similar to Limbo (I personally don't think so, but it's clear where the snake grows from). I wrote to the developers of Limbo and, oddly enough, they answered me and wished me good luck with the game - after this news, I have stable external traffic to the page of my game "Fomalhaut Flowers" on Steam.

Summing up, my advice to novice indie developers to promote their game will be this: try different promotion options and think creatively, because you will never guess in advance which of the options will bring the best result in this particular case.

Thank you for your attention, good luck and good luck to everyone in game development!

Vk is the worse platform to promote games, I believe. My felow game developer once told me that the most efficient ones are Youtube and Twitter.