I've heard the VR community are pretty receptive to new games, have you tried marketing to them specifically?
Viewing post in Why won't anyone download?
I'd love to know what that means. Like, what is "Marketing"... and not like a dictionary term but as real-life steps. I've tried bugging some people in YouTube that review VR stuff, to no effect. I can't seem to post on Reddit because I'm lacking some sort of access to it. I don't know much about Reddit as I rarely ever use it. I only found out about Itch.io after alot of internet searches specially about how to "market" an indie game. I'm all out of ideas here.
This isn't even a new thing. All my life I've made amazing things and never had a clue as to what to do with them. This failure to connect is especially biting as making video games have always been a life-long goal of mine.
And yes, the VR community *SHOULD* be eating this content up. They are DEFINITELY desperate for games. But unless it's on Steam, I don't think anyone will touch it. I had high hopes for Itch.io, but it seems it's just not a significant player in VR, at this time.
Well in this case, I basically meant posting to different VR subreddits, just because I heard that someone had quite a lot of luck in one of the VR related subreddits. Are you making sure that you're following the rules of the subreddits? Your post might get eaten by a spam filter if you're new and/or you don't follow the rules. I think it'd be worth looking into that more.
For the record, I'm definitely no expert about marketing. I'm pretty shy about sharing stuff, I'm just making games for fun. But I'll tell you what my understanding of marketing a game would be. First off, from what I've heard, if you want people to play your game, marketing can't be an afterthought, it's generally as much effort as making your game. It isn't something that you're supposed to do only once your game is finished, it's supposed to be a gradual build up of anticipation while you're developing it.
Some things you can do are:
- Find games/indie games (and in your case VR communities) and tell them about your game (facebook, reddit, post using VR related hashtags on twitter/tumblr, make nice gifs of gameplay, etc).
- Pay money for some advertising.
- Contact youtubers/media outlets and ask them to try it out. Try smaller content producers rather than just big names. If you're contacting someone to write an article, make sure you do most of the work for them (write about your game, include some cool screenshots, so that writing the article would be really easy for them).
- Keep a dev blog to garner interest slowly while you're making the game. Maybe make some tutorials if they would be of interest to others.
- Have a mailing list so that you can let interested people know about new updates or releases of your game.
Good luck!