How well did your first game sell on the market?

WAAAaaa... Could you please share your marketing techniques? Even making a few cents from each sale, 120k adds up to a significant amount! I use curator connect, and emailing as many Youtubers/videogame sites I can think of, but that's netted me around 2k owners at most, so any tips are welcome...

Bundles...

@Yitzi Litt I did the same thing for Finding Light, I actually spent some money on marketing to get the game out to as many YouTubers and gaming outlets as possible. TBH in my case it didn't pay off. Funny enough, I'm not making a lot from Finding Light by itself, but I am making more from having bundled my three Steam games together.

I could be wrong on this but I believe any RPGMaker user who was making games 2-3 years ago (back during the Greenlight era) had much better luck than they do today. That could be part of @Tuomo L 's success, alongside having a good game of course--and that helped him establish an audience too.

I wish that, after making three games and trying a few different marketing strategies, that I had good advice on marketing. You can use Steam's Curator Connect, Keymailer, Woovit and IndieDB, but they all have their issues and I honestly didn't notice a huge boost in sales as a result of using them--even though I advocated for all of those platforms earlier in this thread.

I've been reading a lot lately about the indie game market, and pretty much everyone agrees that it's absurdly over-saturated right now. I'm not even talking about RPGMaker games or jRPGs in particular. I was reading an anecdotal story from a guy in Spain about how there's hundreds of indie game studios in Spain, and out of those hundreds maybe ten of them are actually making a profit.

It's bad, and I've read some people are even wondering if there might be an "indie game crash" (if such a thing could even happen), simply due to the astronomical popularity of independent game development right now - there's simply too many games coming out and not enough time or money for gamers to give attention to all of them. This is especially a problem on Steam, as many of us have noticed. It used to be that Steam's visibility for new games would be enough to give you some traction, but nowadays there's so many freaking games coming out every day that even Steam can't help anymore.

TBH I'm not really sure where I was going with this (kinda just felt like getting that stuff off my chest I suppose), but I suppose what I'm trying to say is not to be too hard on yourself if your game just isn't selling how you expected it to. Likewise don't spend too much time comparing your sales to other RPGM devs here, especially ones that have an established audience from previous games and/or got a foothold in the market back before it was over-saturated.

All I can say is to keep learning and keep trying new things. Personally, I'm going to look into Localization to see how games perform in other languages. I'm doing this because, well, it's obvious the english indie game market is over-saturated, but I wonder how small-scale indie games perform in other countries in their native languages.

That, and maybe try my hand at the absurdly popular *ahem* erotic rpg-maker game market.

Regarding keymailer, how successful is that as a form of raising your game's publicity?

@FluffexStudios in terms of publicity, after spending some money to get my game featured on Keymailer's front page, I received lots of key requests and, today, there's at least a few YouTubers and Twitch streamers that covered the game and had 1,000+ views and lots of others that didn't have near as many. I sent the game out to over 100 "big name" YouTubers but didn't have any luck. I chalk that up to my game not really being a streamer or youtube-friendly game--by that, I mean that most content creators, especially the big names, stick with action-packed games like FortNite and PUBG, horror games, etcetera.

On that note, I can't remember the last time I saw someone play a jRPG un-ironically besides Undertale, Dunkey playing LISA and years ago when Markiplier and PewDiePie played VXAce games that were made for themselves.

Regardless I probably won't be spending as much on Keymailer again simply because, in my case (yours or someone else's could be different), it didn't pay off. I will say this, though - after talking to one of their PR reps about "key farmers", that Keymailer has WONDERFUL customer service. I can't praise them enough in that regard.

See, there's where you're going wrong. You don't just randomly send it out to the most popular content creators. You have to find the people that already cover such a genre. You need to find your audience.

I've reached out to very small content creators, but all of them have said yes and actually delivered to make videos about my game. But that's because they enjoyed playing those types of games.

@Celianna I actually did what you recommended here alongside sending copies to big names. Keymailer is pretty helpful in that you can filter out people who play certain genres and people who have played and covered certain games. I used that feature to find content creators who covered indie games and RPGs like mine. I had quite a few small content creators cover the game (including one podcast called The SML Podcast) - just none that were popular enough to warrant the money I spent on Keymailer to find those creators to begin with.

The ideal scenario is to get a content creator that has large group of followers and is interested in your game, but usually that will rarely happen. Celianna's way of reaching to smaller content creators is a good way to utilize keymailer, but it's probably not too beneficial if fund is used to discover those creators.