Post by barta in How to promote your game. anyone???

Viewing post in How to promote your game. anyone???

I visited the page, and for a start I'd suggest you try using better tags. Try the tags itch.io suggests, instead of inventing your own. Notice that if you search for 'new-2019', your game doesn't appear. Only things with 'new' or '2019' in the title will appear. I could be wrong, don't know exactly how it works yet, but i guess coming up with new tags, other than those itch.io provides, doesn't do anything.

Also, i'd suggest you improve the description a little bit, and everytime you upload a new level, be sure to post a devlog.

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No Time To Play5 years ago(+1)

To clarify, all the tags were added by the community, Leaf just gave special status to some of them. You can always add a new one, but if it's too specific and nobody else uses it, what's the point. For instance I have the tag "urban" on a couple of my games. You'd think someone else would have used it before or since, but no. Something like "still life with flowers" will be even less popular.

That said, devlogs are very effective as a marketing tool. And promoting outside of Itch.io is important too.

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barta5 years ago(+1)

So, correct me if i'm mistaken, the only use of adding a 'personal' tag to your game, would be to wait and see if it would be given special status anytime in the future. The special status tags are the thing bringing the most views, at least in my analytics - and after the game appears on the front page in case it manages to. Because the search function doesn't seem to care about personal tags, it just seems to care about the title and subtitle.

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No Time To Play5 years ago(+1)

That's right, the freeform search looks mainly at titles and subtitles. But tag search looks at all tags that are used by enough people. They don't have to be given special status, just somewhat popular. And a tag only used by one or two creators simply doesn't cut it.

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barta5 years ago(+1)

There is a tag search, you say? I've been looking for it before, didn't find it. I guess it was hiding in plain view the whole time.

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No Time To Play5 years ago(+1)

I mean the tag filtering system. There's a quick-find box for them, too, but it's only for selecting existing tags. You can't exactly type "min" and find games tagged "minimalistic".

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barta5 years ago(+1)

Is it automatic? I mean is it possible for new tags to start appearing there on their own, whenever they become used by enough pages, or does each and every tag require a manual input, by the people behind itch.io, before it has a chance it can be found in the 'browse all tags' page. I assumed the latter, and by 'special status tags', i was referring to those tags which can be found there.

The portal would perhaps benefit from a tag search of the kind I meant, anyway. for example, for my game I considered adding an 'history' or 'historical' tag, but having no way to see which one of the two is already the most shared by the most projects, if any, I decided to stick with suggested tags, even though they were less relevant.

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No Time To Play5 years ago(+1)

Far as I know it's automatic. All that admins do is mark some of them as denoting engines/tools or genres, so they can be used in more ways. And for what it's worth, the tag field on a project's edit form should have autocompletion, so you can at least see which tags and tag forms are popular enough (if not how popular exactly) and make a decision.

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