How to keep interest in a web game
Hi all, I posted my first one-day project here about a month ago, a very simple grappling hook infinite runner called Arc Length. I made it just as a personal challenge and didn't really expect much from it. Passing that around my social group (mostly facebook) I managed to get 144 views from friends and the [biased] response was quite good.
When I had more time, as I am currently studying mechanical engineering, I polished the game a bit and uploaded it to Wooglie.com to see if I could get 144 people I did NOT know to play it. It has vastly superseded my expectations, as of posting this it has 7122 hits since Monday which is massive by my own standards. I'm pretty sure a majority of that traffic was gained through the webgames subreddit and the community there has been very supportive.
As with all things, the traffic is slowing down and although I don't really aim to make any money on this, I would really like to see how far it can go. But as I have done nothing like this before I honestly have no clue about how to promote it further.
I have been doing some research and all advice I can find about marketing indie games seems to be focussed on bigger projects, such as press kits and press releases to get reviews, development blogs, landing pages etc, so I'm not too sure how relevant that all is to a simple and relatively small web game.
Does anyone here know much about promoting and marketing smaller games?
Any advice would be really appreciated.
If you'd like to check the game you can find it on Wooglie.com or follow this link:
http://www.wooglie.com/games/Arcade/Arc-Length
When I had more time, as I am currently studying mechanical engineering, I polished the game a bit and uploaded it to Wooglie.com to see if I could get 144 people I did NOT know to play it. It has vastly superseded my expectations, as of posting this it has 7122 hits since Monday which is massive by my own standards. I'm pretty sure a majority of that traffic was gained through the webgames subreddit and the community there has been very supportive.
As with all things, the traffic is slowing down and although I don't really aim to make any money on this, I would really like to see how far it can go. But as I have done nothing like this before I honestly have no clue about how to promote it further.
I have been doing some research and all advice I can find about marketing indie games seems to be focussed on bigger projects, such as press kits and press releases to get reviews, development blogs, landing pages etc, so I'm not too sure how relevant that all is to a simple and relatively small web game.
Does anyone here know much about promoting and marketing smaller games?
Any advice would be really appreciated.
If you'd like to check the game you can find it on Wooglie.com or follow this link:
http://www.wooglie.com/games/Arcade/Arc-Length
Comments
All marketing has to have a goal in mind. Right now, you seem relatively goal-less. I'd suggest trying to prototype different games until you make something where the game markets itself: If playing the game is enough to make people tell their friends about it and thus get new people interested, that's a much better place to start learning about marketing from - as everything you do will be far more effective.
That's not to say that Arc Length is a bad game - I think it looks pretty good for a game with so few assets and barely 1 coloured light, that's a good eye for style you've got, so keep messing with that. Just that the views it's getting are probably from just being in front of people to play and once it stops being "in their path" (by dropping off a reddit page or whatever) then they don't come back to it. Get them coming back with gameplay, not marketing.
Consider adding a best score so far to the game. This will allow players to see how far they have gone.
The atheistic is nice, but if you alter the color as players go further it will give more of a sense of accomplishment.
As @dislekcia said you need to have a goal in mind for the marketing. What is your goal do you just want more people to try out your game? Do you have a commercial goal? Do you just want to experiment with ideas and see the results to learn? Understanding where you want to go is critical in establishing any kind of plan.
If I make the assumption you looking to get more players on Woogle for your game in order to earn potential advertising money then I would suggest you add some kind of share my score system to the game that can be used to gain players form each players base. Normally this would be twitter/facebook. I am not sure how easily you could do that on a web build though.
I will admit I have little to no confidence making money through a portal like Woogle. If your game can draw that kind of player base you could probably do better on other platforms especially if you need to drive all the users to the game. It would be interesting to know more about the platform and get some indication of income generated per play on average. If you wiling to share that information it would be great. For example whats 11,000 plays worth in terms of revenue on a site like Woogle.