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How to Promote your own Video Games

Stop waiting for others to notice and get your games out there

This is for all the people who might have their very own games sitting around, whether on their hard drive or a website. You might’ve gotten a few downloads here and there, perhaps a comment or two, and even a sale once in a blue moon if your game was commercial quality.

The world of gaming keeps on changing, so if you aren’t getting your games out there into the world
then you’ll be dead in the water. It’s not all doom and gloom however, as there are actually quite a few ways to promote your games. Read and find out how you can start promoting your own games now.

Promoting Games is Only a Piece of the Puzzle

Promoting your games will only do you so much good. You must also learn how to properly make money from your
video games.

I recommend seeing the online video course "How to Make Money from Video Games" to find out how you can make
real money from games.

Learn How to Make Real Money from Video Games Now

The Methods

Most of the methods that you read below are for both free and commercial games, regardless of your experience level. Certain methods however require more care to be taken, so read up on them for more info.

Do the methods in this order of importance depending on the kind of game your submitting.

Small Games / Freeware:
- Using services to submit to a large number of sites
OR
- Using submission tools to submit to a large number of sites
- Submitting manually to major sites
- Having a demo\trial included on site’s shareware CDs
- Link Exchange with related sites
- Submitting to a related games publisher
- Advertising

Medium commercial+:

- Using services to submit to a large number of sites
OR
- Using submission tools to submit to a large number of sites
- Having a demo\trial included on site’s shareware CDs
- Submitting manually to major sites
- Submitting to a related games publisher
- Advertising
- Link Exchange with related sites

Not such a bad method, particularly if you can find a game publisher that deals with your sorts of games and targeted audience. Game publishers might do some advertising and promotion for your games as well which would leave you more free time to focus on the game rather than publishing it yourself.

Typically game publishers are about commercial games, although freeware might be accepted in certain areas.

If you want game publishers to publish commercial games for you they would usually want royalties from sales, and may even need an up-front payment. Be careful however so that you don’t get ripped off or have parts of your game “borrowed” for other purposes. Try to see what other people think of the publisher first.

Also, if you want to deal with publishers make sure it’s on concrete terms, rather than obscure wishy-washy stuff. They should show you what's going on.

A possible game publisher to look at would be garagegames.com. This site deals with games from more “independent” developers. Look under Solutions / Publishing to see what they have to offer.

Searching for game publishers in your game’s area is as simple as typing “(your game type/area) + publisher“ into your favourite search engine.

There’s one general rule of thumb that you always need to remember: try to exchange links with more popular sites than your own but be wary of sites with a lower popularity than yours. Search engines rank your site higher if there are more popular sites linking to it.

Ideally you would find the most success exchanging links with sites that have similar or greater popularity than yours AND are in the same general area. Search engines actually rank your site a bit lower if there are many unrelated sites linking to it.

Link exchange is somewhat of a double-edged sword: more people can come to your site but at the same time more people can leave for the other site. Don’t be afraid to terminate your link exchange with the other site if you find that things aren’t going as well as you expected.

Advertising is a bit of a finicky deal. You’ll most likely get traffic to your site but it will cost you, and if you stop advertising than the traffic disappears There are two main types of advertising: pay per click, and pay per impression.

You usually don’t want to ever use pay per impression advertising. The ad could be shown a million times but if people don’t click you’ll end up wasting a lot of money.

Pay per click is where it’s at. You only get charged whenever a person actually clicks through to your site, meaning you only pay for real traffic.

You can set up a contract directly with popular sites related to yours, although it’s more common to use an intermediary service, such as Google Adwords. I personally don’t use such advertising myself however.

As suggested by Joe Youngblood you can also release media related to your game such as videos (trailers, gameplay videos, etc) and upload them to sites such as Youtube and MetaCafe.

If you go ahead and use advertising then use this technique down the line to find out if the advertising is bringing you enough money.
1. Get the total amount of people who visited your site through advertising and the total amount of money that the visitors spent.
2. Divide the number of visitors by the amount of money spent.
3. This will give you your average amount of money gained per visitor, and if this amount is lower than the cost per click then you’re not making enough money to sustain the advertising costs.

Some shareware sites these days would still sell or even give out shareware collections on CDs. Having your games/trials on CDs is a good way to generate publicity, as the company would distribute the CDs along with your game with no extra effort on your part.

There are however potential pitfalls. You should be wary of any company that charges for you to submit your games to be placed on CD. Also if the CD contains lots of shareware your game could still be “one out of many”.

However you should submit your games to be put on shareware CDs if possible, as any extra publicity can’t hurt.

This requires you to do a bit more manual work than other methods. There are quite a few major sites for shareware and games, so the best sites to submit to first would be the ones within your field of course.

You should submit first to Download.com as it’s a popular site that caters for just about every taste, and lists free and trial software. However you should avoid submitting to sites that have nothing to do with your type of game unless you honestly think that people on those sites might be interested regardless.

Believe me you don’t want to submit to unrelated sites, as that may give bad publicity to your stuff for being in the wrong place.

Some things you can delegate to other people entirely, and submitting software and games is one of them.

Submission services usually charge quite a bit to submit your stuff to a load of sites, and they can be real timesavers as a result. Usually they take the entire load off of your hands, and submit to whichever sites are appropriate.

The only real problem with submission services is their relatively large cost and the lessened control that you have over your games promotion. They are however especially useful for promoting commercial games as they usually know what they’re doing.

As there are a lot of submission sites out there you should choose carefully which one to use, and see if it's worth it.
I have personally searched through the Internet and have found a particularly good site called SoftwareSubmit.net.

This is the stuff that they will do all manually for you:
-submit your stuff to loads of sites for you
-optimize your website and submit to more than 700,000 search engines and directories
-they even provide a detailed report of the submission at the end
and that’s just the basic package.

Go to SoftwareSubmit.net now and get your stuff out there the easy way, before the opportunity passes you by.

I’m one of the those people who likes to have more direct control over what’s going on, but at the same time I want things to be made easier. That’s where software submission tools come in.

Software submission tools often cost less than submission services, but they usually take a little bit longer to implement. The upshot of this is that you gain full control over how and where your stuff is submitted, AND it costs less at the same time!

Imagine that feeling, knowing that you have promoted your stuff on your very own with the minimum of effort. Then, you’ll get to watch as more and more people flock to your game as a result. I know, it’s a damn good feeling.

I have searched through the Internet for such programs, finding some duds and a couple of good tools, but none of them has the perfect blend of full control combined with the minimum of effort needed as PromoSoft.

This amazing tool automatically submits to 650 sites with barely any work required. It’s easy to use and extremely customisable. It even tells you exactly what goes on with your submissions, and has a high submission rate.

Go get PromoSoft now, and start submitting before it’s too late and your games end up forgotten forever.

That’s all folks, the end to another article. Now stop reading and get your games out there right now!

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