Yes, good advice from all of the people here.
Other notes:
- The game has to be good enough in playablity to hold players' attention in a crowded market, and also needs to look good enough to get them to play it in the first place. Visuals, audio, and interactions should all be solid. If your game has a narrative element that should be done well too. The more effectively you can showcase your game's appeal on its page the more people will respond to it. And this is a factor too - beyond just getting people there in the first place. 'Programmer art' is not going to grab attention. Learn how to do 2d/3d art or find someone who can. Personally, I'm on the opposite end, I am passable at programming and technical stuff but art is actually my forte. So that works in my favor. My weakest spot is composing music - I could acquire stock audio for everything but I've opted to hire a musician I found on itch to compose a score for my game 'Miniature Multiverse'. Sound adds a lot of mood to games, and makes them more engaging and immersive.
-There are a few key numbers involved. The number of people who have any awareness that your work exists, the percentage of people who see any sort of promo for your game who actually click the link to look at your game's page, the percentage of page viewers who bother to download/buy and install the game, and the percentage of those who stick with it and like it... In my case over half a million people have seen banners, blog posts, forum signatures, text links, mentions in articles, webpages of one sort or another that connect to one or more of my pages on itch.io. [This thread included] but only about 11,500 total pageviews of my itch content. [According to Google Analytics] and only 200-odd downloads, mostly on the tiny packs of free content. My actual sales + tip volume is under $50 total but it may still grow once there's some indication of quality from unbiased customers. (I.e. About $50 in sales but nobody's actually reviewed anything I've sold yet) In general, only 8-10% of buyers will post a review. But once that first rating is visible, things can start to snowball and that's what I'm hoping will happen on my content. In the meantime, I've been having some periodic ridiculous bundle sales at 90+% off, the next one is actually 93% off for example. [June 21-July 4, 2020] and I hope that works out well enough to generate some sales and ideally a few reviews too finally. 'Social proof' is what marketers call it. But it's really just a fancy term for reviews or ratings that show that at least some of your players liked the game you released. The ratings are harder to get than the purchases, and purchases are harder to get than simple free downloads. But sales and ratings are - even if difficult - very important, especially if the review is from a well-known gaming reviewer.
Community engagement. You can leverage your existing communities and social networks, and that's a good starting point. If you have a bunch of email contacts, Facebook friends, Twitter followers, if you have a website [and if you're serious about this, you should] these are all places to mention what you are working on and that you have made a game. Ditto for any relevant gaming or otherwise related groups you frequent. I.e. bulletin boards and the like. Forum signatures are great, most forums will give you a way to add a signature or image link, something that is placed at the bottom of every one of your posts. Don't spam, try to make your posts helpful and give them actual useful content. (Like what I'm doing here). Be ready to respond to criticism and feedback, as long as it's constructive and not just vicious and personal in nature. You'll need a thick skin as usual online. You may want to keep tabs on your game trailer video if you've posted it on YouTube (which you should), Instagram and Pinterest can be good places for screenshots and concept art/sketches. I have well over a thousand people seeing my boards and pins on Pinterest every month. That's a good thing, social media feeds [text or media] are good to post updates on every now and then relating to your project. Twitter especially, relevant hashtags like #ScreenshotSaturday or #MondayMotivation can be a source of attention. Try making your own tag too that ties into your project. [in other words, #YourGameName. Then you can search every once in a while, and then politely respond to anyone on social networks who happened to use it in reference to your work. Gives you a good overview of what people are saying about your game.
Finally, note the importance of a launch window. Build up publicity in a way that is tied to the launch day - so you can pull in a sudden, large wave of traffic, enough to push your project up the ranks into the places where people actually can see it as popular on Itch, Steam, etc. This strategy of a 'publicity burst' on launch day is frequently successful. The idea is to hype the game in the weeks prior to the stated day, build a fanbase of sorts before release, and let them know when the game will come out as soon as you yourself are sure you can hit that mark. Then throw out lean, well-targeted campaigns on the day of, including publicity with any gaming outlet that expresses any interest in mentioning your PR materials/package - i.e. a folder of video trailer or trailers, screenshots, a summary of the game's concept, game wallpapers, release date and game title at the top, basic core info and materials that make it easy for a reporter to throw together an article about the game. Paid ads are also an option, with Google, Facebook/Instagram, Bing, Pinterest, Reddit, Twitter... all of these are places you can run a campaign of your own design and tweak it / optimize it for under $60. Facebook and Twitter, and a lot of these really, are great in that you can target specific niche interests, so if you have a game with a particular audience in mind (say for example, 4x turn-based strategy) you could target those who've 'liked' the Civilization series, Stellaris, Endless Legend, etc. That will improve the number of people who will respond to your ad positively and be likely to actually be interested in your game.
In general, games make most of their revenue very quickly after release. This has been shown to be generally the case in recent years, though there are exceptions - games like 'Psychonauts' or 'Beyond Good and Evil' with critical and player acclaim but minimal publicity out of the gate, are usually the exceptions, such games may have insanely long runs, most of the people who bought Psychonauts did so more than five years after its actual release. These games of course didn't get the green light for any form of sequel until around a decade after the original launch and were initially seen as flops. Then there's the scenario where a game starts strong and manages to stay strong in sales for years. The classic example would be 'Myst' which released in Sept. 1993, and managed to top annual game sales charts for Windows for three straight years [1993, 1994, and 1995] which is basically unheard of and I don't think any game's ever done that since. But 'The Sims' came close to doing that in the early 2000s, certainly, and in doing so sold a then-unheard of 14 million copies of its base game by 2002. ...and The Sims did this in a very similar way [appealing to, and drawing in, vast swaths of casual or nongamers, often women, who had never really much played video games before]. But, historical slow-burn or cultural-phenomenon anomalies aside, don't be surprised if the first 48 hours after launch net you 10-15% of the revenue the game makes in its entire run, or if the first month post-launch raises as much as the following year. That's far more common, to some extent with indies and especially true with big games with pre-existing name recognition and fanbases present at the outset. Grand Theft Auto V, for example, cost $265 million to develop, but made basically all of its costs back in the first two days following launch.
FINALLY: Your first project will probably not make an impact in the wider world. But keep at it. Leverage your previous small successes to make better and better games every year. One of my biggest pet peeves is anyone who says I could make "The Next Angry Birds" as if that was not made by Rovio AFTER they'd already launched over fifty other titles for multiple platforms. It was not indie, and it didn't just come out of nowhere. Most overnight successes are years in the making. Yours will be too. Be patient and put in the work. Keep learning, keep building skills, and keep making games. Someday, if you keep at it, things will improve. Your work will get better and your results will improve. If this is your dream, don't give up.
- Matthew Hornbostel, https://matthornb.itch.io/
