I feel like we do a lot of discussion about the development of a game, but not much for post-release stuff. I feel like that's a really crucial part of the lifecycle for a game that isn't really being serviced. I'd like to change that a bit.
For context, I released a freeware game on PC/Mac almost two months ago. Here are some things I learned. Maybe they're obvious to everyone else, but hopefully I help somebody.
Reddit is spiky
I was able to get a couple hundred downloads of the game from Reddit pretty easily with just a couple posts on r/indiegames and r/indiegaming. The immediate jump in downloads was nice, but as soon as it dropped off the first page of those subreddits (or even the top 5 posts), it went quiet, and there was no residual discussion in other channels about it. Things simply aren't visible for long enough there to have a significant impact.
Twitter less important than I thought?
I don't have many people following me, but luckily some people with significantly larger audiences managed to find the game and tweet about it, complete with links, videos, etc. From what I can tell, that promotion led to very little in terms of actual download numbers. Tweets fade very fast into the background, and if people didn't catch it right when it was made, they'll probably never see it. So despite a reach of several thousands, I think I got maybe 40 downloads form it. It doesn't help that Twitter is primarily accessed (I believe) from mobile devices that can't play the game (I may be changing that).
TIGsource saved me
I'd made a devlog on tigsource when I first started working on the game, and within a couple months had stopped updating it at all. Now that the game was done, I figured I may as well put a last post on and mark it as finished. That one action is actually the most significant thing I did in promoting the game. There is this weekly "magazine" called the TIGSource devlog magazine that ended up featuring my game near the top (as the only finished game of the bunch). This got it a whole lot of attention, which leads to the next point.
Press love curation
As soon as it appeared in the tigsource devlog magazine, other press places started to pick up on it. indiegames.com. freeindiegam.es. pcgamer. And for each one it was pretty apparent where they'd first encountered the game. Each of those sites mentioned is another layer of curation, but the first occurrence seems to give the work credence, and then other places' job was made easier. I just happened to be lucky in this case.
Finally, neogaf
This thread is also a good vehicle for driving downloads. Based on the number of people that post in the thread and the number of downloads I got, it seems like there are a lot of lurkers monitoring, which is great.
Download numbers by platform
Code:
237 umbragram_mac
562 umbragram_win32
1032 umbragram_win64