Yeah no, you are supposed to do marketing. No app store is going to do much for an unknown title. Run some facebook ads, see what happens.
Its not a 1:1 comparison, but I relatively recently released three extensions for Photoshop. They're well made and designed, unique, and would be a boon to a lot of photographers out there. I contacted every place I could find and got reviewed at only one place, Fstoppers. The reviewer really liked the extensions. I got a whopping $1,000 of sales from that and my many months of development time. Frankly, I didn't have a clue where to go from there. I'm a wedding photographer and I had to release them before my wedding season got going. Now that the season is over I still don't know. I've been running Facebook ads but without being able to target professions I haven't been able to work out a strategy that works.
Long story short, marketing is hard and takes both time and money.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/949790/Rogue_Bit/
How do you market such game outside of Steam? How do you reach the programmer/hacker niche that would be interested in playing this?
I tried. Twice. Even made a browser playable demo:
https://roguebit.bigosaur.com/
Mostly got ignored (a single upvote on the post).
> It’s not like this would be any easier without Steam
Of course. This is exactly what I was trying to say. No Facebook ad can match Steam. With Steam algorithm, you can laser-focus the type of players who play this type of games. Without Steam you have to spend so much time and energy.
To be fair, I'm not a fan of puzzle games and this looks like a puzzle game. However I think the engagement issue may still affect other people.
Is the game good ? Are the people who have played it mentioning it to everyone they know and don't know in social media, because it's so much better than others? If not, is there a niche that would be interested in playing this?
I mean, if I haven't yet got the time to play, say, #5 best game in some niche, then I'm probably not that interested in #15, and hearing about #50 would simply be unwanted spam. The function of some curation or recommendation engine that I want is to act as a gatekeeper, to direct my attention to the best games in such a niche and away from merely decent, okay-ish games in the same niche, no matter how their developers might want to reach me.
Zach spent 10 years building his reputation one small game after the other. In a time when there weren't that many game developers around and there was no flood of games like today.
> Is the game good ?
100% positive rating on Steam should answer that.
> Are the people who have played it mentioning it to everyone they know and don't know in social media, because it's so much better than others?
So, what you're basically saying is word of mouth, not Facebook ads that was suggested.
> I mean, if I haven't yet got the time to play, say, #5 best game in some niche
Then you are not the target market anyway. That's why game developers need Steam. To access people who actually have time to play games and focus on a particular niche.
What you wrote just proves the point: without Steam the developer are bust. The market of people who barely have time to play 5 games per year is just too small.
> How do you market such game outside of Steam?
You should probably be asking that to someone with experience in marketing, preferably marketing games. Lacking funds to consult and hire someone/some company with experience, perhaps you can convince someone with the right personality (someone who doesn't see marketing as "so much time and energy") to help out with some sort of revenue sharing contract.
I want to make some indie games myself one day; I'm grateful I had a crash month of attempting to be a knives salesman many years ago because I know if I do make something and it comes time to ship I can't be the one responsible for marketing it.
There needs to be a higher Steam Direct fee to gatekeep out products which are non-commercial. Its much better if people decide to just not make a game, rather than launching it and finding out much later that their time was wasted.
A $500 - $2000 Steam Direct fee would accomplish that.
But there is audience. The game already sold over 1000 copies on Steam and it's been out less than two months.
I think everyone misunderstood my initial post. I wasn't complaining that my game isn't selling well. I was just saying that it's almost impossible to market it without Steam. Steam is crucial to finding niche audiences for niche games.
> A $500 - $2000 Steam Direct fee would accomplish that.
I wouldn't mind a $500 Steam direct fee. The game already earned more than that.