Author Topic: Promoting your game  (Read 4317 times)

Offline Sinzygy

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Promoting your game
« on: May 16, 2007, 03:04:40 AM »
How do you go about promoting your games?

Here are some methods that I used in the past:
* add your game to top-site lists
* contact players from previous games
* give friends some invitationcode to get a bonus
* advertise in some newspapers
* post about it in some forums

Does anyone use only one method or found a really good way to spread word of your new game?

Offline Zeggy

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #1 on: May 16, 2007, 05:55:33 AM »
Advertise on websites, forums, directories, put it in your signature for everything :)

Offline codestryke

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #2 on: May 28, 2007, 07:24:19 PM »
Advertise on websites, forums, directories, put it in your signature for everything :)
Yup...

AND...

I can't stress this enough give *SOME* type of bonus for referrals!!! Word of mouth is key, if you can get one person hooked then they will tell there friends.. However don't just say "oh look you got a referral" and give them something.. Make the person who signed up with someone else as a referral get to a certain point in the game before you give them a bonus or else you'll just encourage duplicate players.
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Offline Sinzygy

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #3 on: May 29, 2007, 02:25:50 AM »
or give them a continuous bonus.

for example the top-player (the one who invited the other one) gets 1%  of the money the new player has. This way the top player is encouraged to help the new player to gain an advantage for himself.

Offline dvd871

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #4 on: May 29, 2007, 10:41:45 AM »
or give them a continuous bonus.

for example the top-player (the one who invited the other one) gets 1%  of the money the new player has. This way the top player is encouraged to help the new player to gain an advantage for himself.

If you are going to allow a bonus for referrals I would recommend that you have some sort of anti-cheat routine in place so that players can not refer themselves.  We had this problem a while back.  At a minimum a log that captures ip addresses of players that signup as a referral.

Offline Zeggy

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #5 on: May 29, 2007, 01:13:38 PM »
At a minimum a log that captures ip addresses of players that signup as a referral.

I just log the IP address of everybody that registers :) It's just another column in my players table.

Offline Sinzygy

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #6 on: May 29, 2007, 01:44:14 PM »
I usually register the IP address each time a player logs in.

And when I feel like it, I run a reference script that picks out similar IP addresses.

Offline Chris

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #7 on: June 28, 2007, 12:56:19 PM »
Make it so player gets bonus only when the referred player is active (like +x cash each day the new player logins). This will cut down the number of cheaters effectively.

Offline Sinzygy

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #8 on: June 28, 2007, 01:01:30 PM »
Here's what I came up with:

Player A is already playing the game and invited player B

Player B signs up and puts in A as the one who got him to sign up.

Player A now takes on the role of an instructor or mentor (I believe that's the corretc term) of B.
When B reaches lvl. 10, A recieves a reward based on how fast B reached lvl. 10.

This will effectively help new players and reward others for getting new players into the game.

Offline cpvr

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #9 on: July 04, 2007, 06:22:41 AM »
Has anyone actually tried to get their game promoted in a newspaper? I've never heard about that before. Does it work?
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Offline Sinzygy

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #10 on: July 04, 2007, 08:00:19 AM »
Yep, I did it once and it worked wonders :)

But the newspaper I advertised in is the most read newspaper in the country and every high-school student that goes to school by train reads it. So I got quite some hits coming in after that.

Offline codestryke

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #11 on: July 04, 2007, 02:01:24 PM »
I had two really big influxes of players..

#1 - I got farked.. damn near dropped my server, was registering just over 500 players an hour
#2 - Some DJ's in Georgia started playing my game and liked it so they started telling everyone on the air to start playing

The DJ thing was cool cuz they would send me free tshirts / cds every once in a while LOL

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Offline Sinzygy

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #12 on: July 05, 2007, 01:04:04 AM »
whats 'farked'?

Offline Dasein Fiasco

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #13 on: July 05, 2007, 08:42:35 AM »
Personal Site: www.travisdunn.com
There is neither speech nor language but their voice is heard among them

Offline bullarky

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #14 on: August 15, 2007, 07:40:05 AM »
whats 'farked'?

I hadn't heard of it either - almost sounded painful!

Offline Sinzygy

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #15 on: August 15, 2007, 09:25:39 AM »
I apologize for this post as it is completely unrelated to anything said here.

Here's what I thought what 'farked' would be :D



Offline bullarky

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #16 on: August 16, 2007, 12:52:31 PM »
Um... ouch! I've heard of a forked tongue before... (sorry - couldn't resist)

Offline Sakurazaki

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #17 on: October 20, 2007, 05:48:21 PM »
I personally ask friends to join, and then I have a refferal bonus of some sort. And siggies do help a lot. >.>

Offline beam

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #18 on: November 26, 2007, 12:22:25 AM »
My latest game, Robot Fight, never got very popular (~450 players) despite me putting it on game directories, putting it in my signature, etc, and I consider it one of my better ones. I think the reason EF was so popular was because it was open source even before I took it down, so that helped draw a lot of people to it. At the time of it being taken down it had about 2,500 members, 250% more players than my second most popular game, Blast Core, ever had.

Offline Zeggy

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #19 on: November 26, 2007, 03:53:01 AM »
Here's another suggestion for promotion:
Integrate TWG and Apex Web Gamin voting systems into your game. Your players will be more likely to vote for your game, and if you get a good rank, those sites can bring in a lot of new players.

Offline mobeamer

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #20 on: November 26, 2007, 12:31:19 PM »
You have a link for those two sites, Ziggy?

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Offline Zeggy

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #21 on: November 26, 2007, 12:49:33 PM »
http://www.topwebgames.com/
http://www.apexwebgaming.com/

You'd need quite a lot of votes to get on the front page though. Those two sites are the top sites for PBBGs that I know of.

Offline Galaxy-News

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #22 on: January 03, 2008, 10:43:09 PM »
You should give us from Galaxy-News a try. Our international portal is still fairly new but we might be providing some of the standard that have been missed?

I?ll just quote our general information text:
?www.Galaxy-News.net is the English portal of one of the biggest web based magazines dealing with browser based games.

We provide a brand new group feature for people to use our official groups or create one for themselves, we furthermore provide a toplist, daily updated news and articles, an event calendar, user blogs and so much more?

Our network of websites is visited by more than 4m users a month. We are used and recommended by the leading browser game developers: e.g. BIGPOINT, Gameforge, Travian Games, InnoGames, XS Software, Webgamic, Imperia Games, Upjers??

You all are welcome to create an account (for free, of course) and join the party!

Offline Josh1billion

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #23 on: January 16, 2008, 06:17:48 PM »
Top site lists
Top sites lists only really work if you already have a large fan base.  This especially applies to the larger top site lists (like Top Web Games, ApexWebGaming).

For example, ApexWebGaming has only given me a dozen or so clicks total because my current votes (~20 per day from my 50-60+ active members) don't equal enough to hit the top lists yet.  On the other hand, WGFriends has given me over 50 clicks because my game is normally in the top 2 to 5 despite that WGFriends is a very small site currently.  So a tiny site has given me about 5x as many clicks as a huge site, because the huge site keeps your link stored away unless you can rack up a large number of votes.

So the trick with top site lists, for me at least, has been to find a small-but-not-too-small top site list.  Small enough whereas it's easy to get on the front page with my current vote count, but large enough where there's actually some traffic to gain.  Game Sites 200 looks to be a promising bet for this balance, so I signed up there earlier today.

Forum signatures
I've received a large amount of clicks from just having a banner in my signature, from certain websites.  The Game Maker forums have been great (I don't use Game Maker anymore, but a post here and there can often result in new members).  The QJ.net forums work fairly well, too.  But on the other end of the spectrum, I've had a non-image link in some web programming forums (DevNetwork to be exact) for quite some time and have gained a relatively low number of new members from there despite posting there much more than on the aforementioned forums.  So basically, that means that gaming forums have much, MUCH more results than other forums (web programming forums in this case)-- more than you'd think.

Offline Kimmybwoy

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Re: Promoting your game
« Reply #24 on: July 05, 2008, 11:33:37 AM »
Best Advertising is simply posting in forums :D:D

 


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