Yesterday I received an email from Playdead, the developers of Limbo and Inside, in which they wish me good luck with my game.
Every novice indie developer dreams of earning millions on his game, but then there is one small problem: no one knows about his game. I will share my experience of promoting the game on Steam. So, I have a game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1693100/Fomalhaut_Flowers/
The game is there, there are no vishlists. It would seem that everything is lost. But not everything is lost if you are able to tell people about your game and pour external traffic to the game page on Steam. On the day of the release, with the practical absence of vishlist, the store gave me traffic of about 1300 visits - this is very little, then the traffic fell sharply. I began to think about how to fill in external traffic and from where.
1. VKontakte thematic public sites - neither paid nor free advertising did not give results.
2. YouTube-sending keys to curators is also pointless, their videos are watched by one and a half people, and I failed to reach a top blogger (I hope everything is still ahead).
3. MASS media. It is very difficult to interest a major gaming publication, VGTimes published an announcement of my game, but, apparently, it did not bring results. Writing articles on thematic sites also seemed pointless to me.
4. Twitter - I definitely recommend it, posts with the tags "gamedev", "indiedev", "indiegame" and "indiegamedev" are willingly retweeted and there is at least some sense of movement (you need to look at the exhaust).
5. A reference game, to which you can "sit on the tail". Here I was lucky - even during the development period, many people wrote that visually my game is similar to Limbo (I personally don't think so, but it's clear where the snake grows from). I wrote to the developers of Limbo and, oddly enough, they answered me and wished me good luck with the game - after this news, I have stable external traffic to the page of my game "Fomalhaut Flowers" on Steam.
Summing up, my advice to novice indie developers to promote their game will be this: try different promotion options and think creatively, because you will never guess in advance which of the options will bring the best result in this particular case.
Thank you for your attention, good luck and good luck to everyone in game development!