For those that don’t know me, here’s a little introductory paragraph so you’ll know where I’m coming from. I’m Ciprian, 26 years old and I used to make games up until October last year. I wanted a break from game making to learn some new things and explore software development for a little while (you can read my r/gamedev post about this from last year). Now almost a year later I’m back and I find myself lost and feeling like having to start over. In this post I’ll talk about my latest experience with trying to build a community of followers again and using reddit to do so.

The infamous stegosaurus tail back in the day when tweeting about a game

In 2016 driving traffic to my Itch page was easy and reddit moved mountains for me.

Up till last year I was making games as a hobby and not for commercial gain. Even so I had a pretty neat traction, mostly thanks to people from my little twitter circle of friends (like DarkestKale, Bums, Thomas Noppers) and fans that would share my games and talk about them on places like TIG or reddit. But after loosing contact with twitter for about a year I find myself a bit lost. “Back in the day” my work process was easy:

Start working on a new game idea/prototype

Once it was playable, I’d post it on twitter and people would play it and share it

If feedback was good enough (as in it wasn’t a horrible monstrosity) I’d make an itch.io page for it and keep updating the game till it reached a point where it was sell-able

The page would wind up on reddit and I’d get a huge visibility boost (1–2K page views vs the regular 20–30 views I’d get normally)

Now most of the people I’d use to hang around with online and share projects and ideas have left the industry (and went into software development), stopped making games or are just not online anymore. And most of my fans and followers that were non-game devs have moved on (can’t blame ‘em). As such step 4 and a bit of step 3 from my work process was nullified. Instead of starting from the bottom again I wanted to try and side-step the organic part of promoting my projects and instead take the plunge and do a small reddit campaign. If people won’t share it there on their own I will, with a small campaign. Thus I got to explore reddits ads from the perspective of a small time game dev with a shoe-string budget.

Current reality

The cold hard facts

From the get-go I knew how this would turn out. I posted on twitter about my expectations and I was spot on. From my previous experience at Mobility-Games working on Frozen I know that you either go all out on your promotion budget and sink in some heavy cash or you just throw your money away. In short: the more you put in the more return you get on your investment. So with a 50$ campaign I did not expect to make my money back, but I wanted to confirm some data. “Back in my day” the default conversion factor (from views to purchases) looked like this:

Nr of sales = Nr of views / 1000

In my exact case with games like Mutant Gangland or Rogue Sweeper the conversion factor gods were more friendly with me and instead I’d get a better conversion rate. In Rogue Sweeper’s case I got 192 sales from 11387 views. For Mutant Gangland 3700 views got 144 sales. Overall the people that would reach my itch page were driven there by at least some interest in the game and were far more likely to buy/download said game than someone else arriving there randomly or via an ad served on a website where they happened to click it because it looked interesting. But back to the reddit ad campaign. What I did was do some A/B testing.

A — the 50% sale and regular reddit post on a targeted community

I decided to take one of my older games, updated it and re-release it to test the waters. In order to get some eyes back on myself and my games I discounted the game by 50% and since most people that bought it only installed it on their Android phones I targeted the r/AndroidGaming community. I had a previous, really great, experience with that subreddit so I was sure I wouldn’t get banned for posting about my own sale/game there. After one day on the front page of the community I had 215 people access my website and sold a total number of 8 copies (2 of them were people that previously bought the game but saw an update incoming and wanted to support me — Thank you guys). Not enough to live on but this was just a small post, from a small dev, targeting a specific community with a game featured on a third party store that targeted a really niche audience. And I spent 0$ on that post. From the comments and private messages I’d have probably sold 3 times as many copies if the game was on the play store from that post alone.

Data: 0$, 215 views, 8 sales. Conversion factor? 3.7%

B — the reddit ad campaign targeting specific sub-reddits

I had a few bucks lying around that went unspent from last months budget so I decided to put them to good use and try out a reddit campaign. My plan was to target 3 specific communities: r/roguelikes, r/androidgaming, r/indiegaming. The most likely 3 communities with people that would be interested in the game I was offering. The first part of the campaign involved me throwing 50$ at reddit to see what I can get in ex-change. It ran for 3 days and it looked like this:

Roguelike Creative

Let’s look at the data. The ad was displayed almost 57000 times across the 3 sub reddits and it brought 128 people to my game’s page.

And brought me a wooping total of 2$ in revenue. On twitter the day the campaign started running I posted my expectations and I was more or less spot on (I expected 5 sales).

The conversion rate ended up being a bit better than I was expecting in terms of views-to-clicks but was still under whelming especially with reddit touting 8.1m possible views during the campaign time. Wait so 8.1 million views? How did I end up only reaching 57K people with the ad? Well reddit’s system does something really smart (for them). When you place an add you have a total budget that can be spent during those days. But not all that money will be used because each ad slot that CAN display your ad has many bids on it. You can bid at least 1$ for a slot and if no-one outbids you in that time period your ad will be displayed. In my case that’s what I did and as such out of 8.1 million possible slots I only ended up getting 57 000. So let’s recap:

Initial budget: 50$. Actual money spent: 17.8$. Audience reached: 57K people. 126 people accessed my page, 2 copies were sold. Conversion factor? 1.58%.

Closing thoughts

From my small A/B experiment on engaging with people directly or side-stepping the whole organic process by using ads I can say the following: Unless I’m willing to spend a whole lot of cash going on the ads route isn’t going to work for me. For a small guy with a shoe-string budget money is better spent on getting better assets. However do note one thing: Data presented here is from a small pool with a small reach on an extremely specific niche. Also note that Android Gamers were targeted and the chances of them buying and installing a game from a third party store is much much smaller than selling the game to them through google play. And remember this was a small experiment aimed towards me trying out the waters to see how I can get some traction back.

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