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[test84]

Hi,

It took me 2 years and I've finally ported my award winning game to Steam and published it. It's a small game and I don't expect to earn a lot of money from it, I just want to inform a small portion of people.

The reason that I'm doing it is because the reviews are "very positive", as Steam puts it.

Most of the people that bought the game very happy and we have a lot of positive reviews and recommendations and I believe if we can reach a bigger audience, it might get bigger as well.

I may be wrong as this game and it's theme is not for everybody: Noir, pixel art, etc.

I've contacted some youtubers and very small portion of them played the game and posted videos. Contacted a lot of web sites and almost none of them review the game.

So my question is, what do you think I should do to increase my revenue so I can work on the next game?

(And please spare me the "you had to do it before starting the project", thanks.)

Here is the game in case you are interested to see: http://store.steampowered.com/app/395500?beta=0

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

I hope you understand that a game that was once available in a bundle (in your case: Debut 12 Bundle by Indie Royale ,the Retro Groupee 2 by Groupees) , your game lose a lot of value which makes it almost impossible to market afterwards. No reviewer would want to review that unless you have close ties with the person.

It's unfortunate but the real truth about marketing is:

"you had to do it before starting the project"

All you can do now is to start working on your next game/project and crosspromote your available game while marketing your new game.

[test84]

Why being featured in a bundle is bad? I see it happening all the time for various games, big and small.

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

because of a lot of reasons:

usually a game on a groupee is sold for really cheap. resellers buys them in mass.
your game ends up in a lot of giveaways that promote groups and other things then your game.

-easy availability of the game through resellers
-game quality that is compared to other games available in bundles, which in most case is low quality game. (especially for groupee bundle as it is reputated to exist to allow low quality game to be greenlit)

i'm not sure but if i look at the bundle that had your game in, it costed $0.75 to get your game and a few others.
Your game is worth less than 50 cents in this case.

there's no "prestige" at reviewing your game.

[bateleur]

My recent experience of marketing my Steam game (King Machine) is that it mostly comes down to money. Sure, you can do a few things for free, but looking at the analytics on the Steam page tells the story: almost no actual extra sales.

This makes marketing Rot Gut particularly hard, since it's priced so low that you'd need to sell a huge number of copies to make any investment back.

The press coverage issue is one that I think gets misunderstood a lot. There are two kinds of indie press:

* Sites that get too little traffic to meaningfully affect your sales.
* Sites that only cover big (or otherwise hugely successful) games.

For the ordinary working developer whose income for a single project never hits six figures, press coverage isn't really a viable marketing strategy anymore.