Hey everyone, I hope this is the right place to post this. I'm new on these forums, I just found out about them, but I wouldn't really call myself a beginner developer anymore, more intermediate. I've been at this for 5+ years now, first with Godot, now with Unity. Although I often daydream of “going pro”, I have a stable, unrelated career which has really held me off from taking the plunge into trying to make money with my games, so I just post a new project for free on itch.io every couple months. Really enjoying building games, exploring genres.

I would like to reach more players though, that is certainly true, I love watching my analytics numbers spike now & then. I have been hesitant to truly get into “marketing” since I feel like I am still building development skills and I don't want to take precious time away from that. Lately however, questions like How can I find more players? and Do I need to try to build a community? have really been burning in my mind, so I thought I'd start off here by asking about that.

What strategies have proven most successful for you personally in finding players for your games? Can it be done these days without social media (I personally gave all that up years ago and it'd be a chore to reboot it all)? Do I need to lay down some $ to get real with this in order to have any prayer of being noticed or can I reach people in other ways? What works best, in terms of hours spent versus players found?

Here's a link to my work so you can see where I'm at with game development and because I know someone is going to ask anyways.

https://lanyard.itch.io/

Anyhow, greetings to everyone, and thanks for any tips.

Hi Tom. 👋🏻 Oh no, not necessarily. The title is kind of a joke reference which probably falls flat. I am aware most people with time enough to play free games on Itch.io are probably kids though. But I don't think I've produced anything exclusionary for any age group yet.

Mostly my games are too short and lacking the depth to have much staying power overall nor really compel players to replay them obsessively. But still, it's nice seeing the numbers go up, regardless of who it is enjoying things on the other side. 👍🏻

I had a look around of course, several pages deep actually, but after a while, it starts to feel perhaps a little outdated? I mean, advice from 2018 like in the pinned comment kind of feels like insight from a different world. Twitter doesn't even exist anymore really, at least not in the same sense and relevance as before. So are gamers on Mastodon? Or "X"? TikTok? Do you really need a whole YouTube channel, which is certainly a ton of work? Some kind of distributed social media auto-posting solution like Hootsuite to cover all the bases? Contact dozens of streamers? A website with a mailing list? Even if you're smallscale like myself, just trying to show off my work a bit to a group larger than my pals?

The options are overwhelming, and it's obviously untenable to give them all a solid go at once, so that's why I'm specifically asking about bang for bunk.

I did get the impression here that there's no silver bullet. I see that. Still, I thought it might be worth asking what strategies are working for folks getting their start with building an audience these days, if anyone does care to share 😊