Promoting your game

[Sinzygy]

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?

[Zeggy]

Advertise on websites, forums, directories, put it in your signature for everything

[codestryke]

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.

[Sinzygy]

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.

[dvd871]

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.

[Zeggy]

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.

[Sinzygy]

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.

[Chris]

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.

[Sinzygy]

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.

[cpvr]

Has anyone actually tried to get their game promoted in a newspaper? I've never heard about that before. Does it work?

[Sinzygy]

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.

[codestryke]

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

[Sinzygy]

whats 'farked'?

[Dasein Fiasco]

http://www.fark.com/

[bullarky]

whats 'farked'?

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

[Sinzygy]

I apologize for this post as it is completely unrelated to anything said here.

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

[bullarky]

Um... ouch! I've heard of a forked tongue before... (sorry - couldn't resist)

[Sakurazaki]

I personally ask friends to join, and then I have a refferal bonus of some sort. And siggies do help a lot. >.>

[beam]

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.

[Zeggy]

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.

[mobeamer]

You have a link for those two sites, Ziggy?

[Zeggy]

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.

[Galaxy-News]

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!

[Josh1billion]

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.

[Kimmybwoy]

Best Advertising is simply posting in forums :D