I just published my Oculus Rift game recently.

I announced it on this forum to get some developer based feedback.

I would now like to find some good places to gain some traction with "normal" VR consumers. ( People who are not gamedevs )

I was wondering if someone is aware of some nice places to gain some users for my game.

PS: This is not a commercial project. I'm just looking to enlarge my user base.

Marketing question. Moving to Business forum. See some of the other marketing threads on this forum.

That's a tricky one at the moment - obviously, you need to try to find places where your potential users are - but with VR hardware still a niche interest, that's a bit trickier to locate than more traditional markets.

My best suggestion at the moment would be to try to find groups on Facebook, and relevant hashtags on Twitter.

Perhaps others working on VR titles (@slayemin ?) might have some more specific ideas.

Thanks,

I don't much like posting on Facebook, because then my personal contacts get spammed by my hobby posts. I would much rather use a channel that is separate from my private life.

If you aren't ever going to go "commercial", you can spend $100 and post it on steam for free. You can then give away steam keys to people on reddit (r/oculus and r/vive) and just by being on steam, you'll get people who randomly find your game and want to play it. You'll still want to create some sort of a gameplay trailer so people can see what the game is about before they decide to download it -- technically, they 'buy' they game even if they don't give you money, so they gotta like what you're selling even if its free.

1 hour ago, slayemin said:

...

Thanks @slayemin.

I've already published on the Rift Store (no keys required).

I also have a trailer out.

And I've got ~1k downloads and ~10 reviews.

I'm looking to push that to the maximum, assuming that there still exists an audience for VR. ( I might have missed the "hype" by a year or two ? ) 

I haven't done any "marketing" yet, so I was hoping I could increase that number by creating some sort of buzz somewhere.

The question is where?

Haven't really used twitter before, didn't think it was the way to go for discoverability. I mean, if people already knew me, they might follow me for updates. However, would people that don't know me  discover me on twitter somehow?

(I've never really used twitter before, so maybe I'm missing something about how it works)

3 minutes ago, SillyCow said:

However, would people that don't know me  discover me on twitter somehow?

You could try joining in on #screenshotsaturday .  Basically you can filter posts based on hashtag, and #screenshotsaturday is pretty popular - if you can post an eye-catching screenshot you might grab some attention.  There may be VR or Oculus specific hashtags as well that you could try.

Sorry for being old & naiive ( #get_off_my_lawn ? ) So people generally follow hashtags on twitter?

I've never used twitter before...

6 hours ago, SillyCow said:

I don't much like posting on Facebook, because then my personal contacts get spammed by my hobby posts. I would much rather use a channel that is separate from my private life.

It's time to create a business account separate from your personal account. 

2 hours ago, SillyCow said:

I haven't done any "marketing" yet, so I was hoping I could increase that number by creating some sort of buzz somewhere.

In other words, by starting to do some marketing.

Free marketing will eventually hit a limit (exhausting your friends lists, and network limitations), so when you have saturated your free marketing supply (twitter, facebook, reddit, forums, etc), you'll get diminishing returns on effort spent. I highly recommend getting a google analytics backend tied to your landing pages so that you can measure how many people are coming to your pages and where they're coming from. You will want to get a rough baseline on your traffic and then when you create a marketing effort, you can see whether that had an effect or not in moving the needle. Think of it much like performance optimization in gamedev where you profile your performance before modifying code. If you don't measure it, you can't improve it. And if you can't tell what works and doesn't work, you're just throwing oatmeal against the wall while blindfolded and hoping something sticks.

You may be able to see some marketing actions are more effective than others, and some marketing efforts are going to vary during time of day or time of year. If you've exhausted all the free methods for marketing and you still need more people, you'll probably want to consider paid advertising (which is surprisingly effective). But if you're going to pay for advertising, you pretty much are a commercial product, even if you give it away for free.

Also, it should go without saying, but it bears mentioning: The best advertisement you can do for your game is making it a high quality game -- something friends will want to talk about and show to their other friends. If people find something in your game worth talking about to other people, you will get lots of free advertising with no effort on your part. If you are the creator of the game, you are in a great position where you can design the game to have cool / memorable moments other people want to share. If you make it easy for them to share, even better --its especially challenging in VR games, but check out beat saber as a shining example of this. It's even been featured on the late night show with Jimmy Fallon ? How many other games have been compelling enough that guests will play it on live TV for their audiences?