So basically I created my account and released my game two days ago, but right now the only people who can play it are people who I give a download key to. I was able to send it to friends and family since I have their emails, but how do I give a key to a user who's email I don't have, as I can't seem to find a private messaging system.
Maybe this helps.
https://itch.io/docs/creators/download-keys
There is no private message system on itch. Why would you give away the the game to random people, anyways?
Also, there is no beta testing on itch. Games are marked as in development, sometimes for years, and people have full access to whatever the developer uploads or even sells. One might call that beta test. Contrary to steam, you can assume for each and every game the tag "indie" and the equvivalence of early access until specifically an actual release is announced. Some people mistake the words and "release" their unfinished projects, as the act of doing so could be called releasing. To make it even more complicated, even release status does not automatically mean, that there won't be significant updates anymore.
The keys above are used, so people do not have to pay for a paid game. Like for promotion. You can use this for beta testing, of course. But if you do public beta test, why not just publish the game as "in development"?
I cannot follow your logic.
Making a game public will not make people notice it, nor the other way round. Even if it is finished. Itch does not differentiate between finished and unfinished games, unless a user specifically uses that option in browse. There is few places to get noticed for being new. Just have a look at browse and there recent. Look at the games, if they claim to be finished (release status). See a pattern.
I do not want to discourage you, but truth be told, no matter what you do, how good or ungood or finished or unfinished your game is, it probably will not get very noticed either way. There are soo many games on itch. And I did mention that in standard search and browse and tags, feeds, there usually is no difference at all, if a game is prototype, released, or in development, did I?
So the prudent way to do it, is to publish the first draft of the game, as soon as something playable is done. Maybe even start a devlog. Growing an audience if possible. It might not work. But it can't work, if you do not publish. People will not magically flock to your game, because it is finished. You have to have quite a lot of offsite marketing to pull that one off.
Okay, maybe I should give a bit more context.
I know that I could make it available for everyone now and get reviews that way, but I'm afraid that if it gets a bad rep strait from the get go then both people who have played it before or even those who've heard of it via word of mouth will be less likely to check it out again in the future even if I do improve it. That's why I wanted to give access to a select few individuals who could check it before I make it public, so that I can potentially get a strong start if people talk about the game with others. More specifically people who I wanted to give early access to are friends/coworkers with another person I know who also work in marketing and who have expressed interest in playing my game, and I also want to ask for their input on a viable marketing strategy along with doing my own research. I could just ask for their emails, but I figured I'd check first if there was a private messaging system on the platform while I was at it.
I can only suggest, that you check out some other games here. Their comment sections and their devlog history, how people react to certain content and so on.
It also heavily depends on the type of game. Paid, Pay what you want, no demo, with demo, webgame, nieche or trend etc.
You will get strife for AI generated content. And if your game is romance/adult, you will get strife, if there is more than one male in the game. Strife does not mean that people will not like the game, but that there are haters that will give 1 star ratings and bad comments, no matter how good or bad your game is. For most other games the biggest issue is, that many people do not rate or comment at all. You will find active games with no comments for many months. You can stumble upon very good games with almost no ratings.
So unless your game is really awful, people will usually not give it bad ratings, but just ignore it, or rather give you no comment or rating at all.
The thing that confused me, was that you would give the game to people you do not know. Because if you knew them, you would have contact info. And a word of warning, giving out links to your game to basically strangers, even if you exchanged a few words, is too similar to the try my game on discord scam. So people might decline.
There was this kinda tip in the faq that can apply to your beta testing. You can give out one of those keys to several people. But better read it again yourself.
If you'r looking to give out access to your game to a friend, or press, we recommend generating a single key. If you need to generate many keys, like for a promotion on another site, then we recommend the bulk generator.
Individually generated keys give you finer control over the key: you can set a label for easy identification, track how often it’s been used to download, and revoke it if necessary.
Also, I think you can set your project to hidden or something and just give out the link. No need to generate keys, if you have no payment active anyways. Those keys are for the situation where something is paid content but you want to give access to someone that did not pay.
