New project - how to advertise?

[Renex]

hello.
we have launched www.universalwar.org 2 weeks ago and we only got 64 players since then, but they are not active anymore so I would like to know your opinion why would that be. Is the game not fun enough or do we have to advertise it better?
What suggestions do you have to improve it?

[Chris]

If your problem is lack of players and not aboundance of cheaters then disable email account validation and remove not needed fields on the signup page. You can get these back once the game gets older and your priorities change.

[Renex]

thanks Chris for the tip. I am have begun to work on this one. I also want to introduce OpenID on signup/login.

Other tips?

How do you guys advertise a new game? What methods, websites?

[avguste]

That is about the same problem I am facing.
My game http://armoricarpg.novahost.org has about 38 players,currently mostly inactive.
The main reason for that being that I didn't want to advertise yet as myself and my coder, we were/are fixing bugs and adding features.
But my coder suggested that it is time to start advertising,and I agree with him.
So I am also looking to start advertising.

I am think websites such as TopRPGames.com, TWG and such would help

[mdshare]

Marketing a game is an art even if you have a large ad budget

If you have no ad budget start using voting sites to get your game exposed to the world.

A line I always mention:

Voting sites matter, because they are the primary source of new players for games. Without a constant flow of new players joining the game, any online game will gradually lose players and die off. So hence it's important to have your members to vote.

Feel free to use our voting portal http://www.cetopwebgames.com

You can also try to do some cross promotion, don't think that having a banner of a diff game will steal your players...

Or find a game related banner exchange.

md

[toxin]

Yea i am still researching how to best advertise. My web host came with a free $50 credit to Google and MSN so that may help out once i am ready to get the word out.

[davidjwest]

Best way to get players is to make a great game, then word of mouth will ensure an ever-growing number of people wanting to play.  This is what I'm trying to do, but my game is far from great.

 

Submitting your game to game sites is also good, feel free to write a review of your game on my site if you like, it's not busy but you may get a few players from it:

http://www.ogreview.org

Good luck!

If I had time I'd play it, the front page looks good.

[Hypemaster]

I have been searching alot about advertising a game. Best thing is to hype it at first at forums like this. Show some sneakpeak of project, post it on topwebgames wich i think is the best topsite for this kind of games. Also post some story about your game and give maybe people who signup something extra like free premium for a week. This is just to get an initial playerbase. Then signup for http://www.pbbgexchange.com to exchange your banner with other pbbg games. You can also pay for clicks http://www.pbbgads.com. With or without a budget for advertising, i think signing up for pbbgexchange and topwebgames will get you decent amount of players to start with. Then if the game is great they will their friends and they will come.

[genmac]

topwebgames is good, but I've gotten far more traffic from apex gaming and the online games inn

[Hypemaster]

apex webgames yea, forgot to mention them. They are also good. Never heard of online games inn, i will check them out.

[mdshare]

Not sure if this old post of mine will be helpfull.

Was a breakdown of advertising awhile ago.

http://criminalexistence.com/ceforums/index.php?topic=23329.0

[Hypemaster]

Its pretty helpfull, nice to see some actualy stats.

[kazurian]

As posted above, use voting sites, but reward your players for voting, for example, give them more turns or more cash etc. Make a script that will check if the last time they clicked the vote button was 24 hours ago, if so the vote button will appear and tells them the reward for voting, then make the script open up a popup or new tab when the vote button is clicked and check to see what page the user gets to, for example after the bit where you may put in a captcha code on the advertising site, if so then the main game page refreshes with the users reward topped up...

Make sense? if not just ask