Marketing Your Games

From YoYoGames Wiki

When you have created a game you obviously want people to play it. Uploading the game to YoYo Games makes it available for everybody to play, but that does not mean that people will actually play it. You have to make sure people find the game and decide to try it out and hopefully give it a good rating and leave some comments. Here are some tips that might help you with getting the attention from the community.

• First of all your game should obviously be good. If it is no fun to play people won’t like it and others won’t play it. At the most your game could be rated low and others won't find it in the listings.

• Provide good help inside your game. When people do not understand the game play immediately they will stop playing and give a low rating. Don’t provide lenghty text help but some nice screens (see the page on Fancy Help). Don’t add separate help documents for people to read, such as a readme text file; as people play the game through Instant Play, they will not read them. You can include them, but don't force the player to rely on them.
  • Fancy Help

• Upload an exe file. Exe files are stand-alone executables [1] that are compatible with YoYoGames Instant Play. Do not upload a gmk file unless you know what you are doing. Gmk files can only be played with game maker, and are not compatible with Instant Play.

• Avoid long download and loading times. Keep your games reasonable small in file size and don’t provide unnecessary data in the files (like the gmk; distribute those separately if you want). Long loading times result in people not playing the game again, hence reducing the number of plays.

• Don’t post preliminary versions of the game as complete games. (You can post them in the WIP section of the site.) A preliminary version will often have bugs and will not be as good as the final version. As a result your game will get poor ratings and will disappear down the list. Also your plays per day will become lower. If you considerably improve your game later, people most likely will not notice it! They also won't be able to re-rate the game.

• Provide the best possible screenshots and provide as many different ones as possible. In particular, make sure the first one is a good depiction of the game play as this one is used in all lists. Don’t use the starting screen or menu for this but a picture of the actual game play. Note that you can use F9 during game play to create a screenshot. You do not need Pro to do this. In the end, graphics is only one of the elements of a nice game (and not the most important one) but it is the most important one in getting people to play the game at all. Also make sure you use actual game screenshots, not i.e. pictures you find on google.
  • Professional Screenshots
  • Creating Screenshots

• Provide a short but informative description of your game. A description like “This is a great game” is not going to get people to play it. A description that is too long will also cause people to not read it, and generally to not bother with the game either.

• Choose an appealing title (but be careful that you do not violate copyright). Titles should sound nice. A good approach here is to use two words with the same starting letter. Like Pyramid Panic, or Roman Races or Mummy Madness.

• Provide a large set of relevant keywords. In this way more people will find your games and it will be indicated more often as related games.

• Send all your friends an email with a link to the game page. (You can use the Send To Friend option on the game page for this.)

• Advertise your game outside the YoYo Games community, e.g. on forums, your own website, etc. You can use the embed mechanism for this. If your game is really good you might want to suggest it on sites like http://jayisgames.com/ for a review.

You might also want to check out the page on How to Become a Staff Pick. Marketing your games is important. Without some marketing your game will not be played so much. So spend a little effort on it.