Successful (or Unsuccessful) Marketers on GameJolt, How Do You Market Games?

Twitter is a good way to get attention, but I’ve seen really good games that barely get any attention. It just depends on the kind of game you make. I made a game that I thought would do great, but it didn’t do very well at all and I spent months posting everywhere telling people about it, making videos etc, and it didn’t do very well at all. So I made another game and didn’t expect much, and so far it’s my most successful game yet, and I did LESS marketing, so yeah.

But here are some tips. Use Twitter, make sure you put lots of tags in your game description (like #platformer) maybe make a short gameplay video, and try not to annoy people by overdoing anything. Good luck!

I'm affraid the success isn't "méritocratique". It's a word we have in France and I don't know how to translate it in english, but I'll try. I don't think there's a connection between the success of your game and the efforts you've made to did it. For exemple, Marassa, a game that took me one year to achieve, has less success than Rush Death, a game I've made in one week.
And as UnoWayGames said, I did more marketings for Marassa than for Rush Death.

I'd like to say that "quantity" and "quality" are just not related in any way. Things that score because of quality alone are rare (to non-existent). It mostly comes down to how you bring stuff to attention, and sometimes it's just dumb luck.

Market your project before it begins then grow followers and a suitable audience over time then when you are comfortable your game is going to be a success and generate the revenue needed to pay your expenses back to the bank then go

I don't agree. The first time you show off a game is when it gets the most attention. Following a game for years is tiring and by the time it releases you feel like youve already played it because you followed every step of development. You'll be disappointed that few people actually play it compared to how many are following it.

You need an absolute solid demo with something at the end explaining how much time and money you need to complete it. Only rarely show off snippets of development, until that demo is 100% solid.

I can make GTA 6 but can I sell it to as much people, no.

Perhaps..

Would Instagram be a good place to gain followers before publishing your game? I don’t get much luck with twt hashtags

I don't think so. On Instagram you can't attach links to your posts unless you pay for ads so the only way for people to go directly to your game page would be through your bio and you can only place one link there.

Also, you have to keep in mind that most people on Instagram use the app on their phones so it would be harder to promote a PC game.

I'd assume that it can work if you have many thousands of followers. In that case even low conversion rate would amount to a lot of people.

I think that GameJolt itself has a pretty great system of promoting games. I usually just post GIFs / videos / images / articles as devlogs every few days on my game's page and over time GameJolt starts showing the game to people. Also, GameJolt rewards you for using the devlog feature by potentially featuring your game, either in Featured games section or in Hot games section.

I usually manage to get a couple of thousand of views per each game that I publish (which aren't crazy numbers but it's a great start IMO). You can publish few smaller but high quality games to first get some followers and then when you feel more comfortable you can start working on larger more ambitious projects.

IMO you should still post on social media even though it probably won't be successful at first. Long-term it should hopefully get more and more attention to your game.

I'd suggest you use Reddit in addition to one other social media channel. You should focus on only two IMO.

DISCLAIMER: I'm obviously not super-successful dev but this is just from my experience and from what I heard.

Hopefully you find this helpful :)

Email marketing, discord and twitter

Is Gamejolt, itself, a good place to post art and games?