I got approved by one of those credit card gateways so now I can take credit cards on my website (with a whopping maximum of $5 per transaction!) Anyway I put my game up for sale (the Windows version), and I don't know how to really spread the word about it. Hopefully I can make back enough to pay the monthly fee (it's only 10.50 but still)... Anybody got any good ideas on how I can spread the word a bit? I've posted on all of my sites/accounts like my website, twitter etc...

Maybe send places like PC Mag a comp copy to review? They get swamped with stuff like this but it doesn't hurt.

Hopefully you didn't forget to post the link there too.

Anyway, selling PC games is tough. I don't know what to say other than you probably won't make many sales, but at 10.50 it's still worth it to try.

I've tried sending demos and stuff to magazines, but they make it very difficult to find contact information of any kind. You basically have to buy the magazine and even then they make it hard to find. This usually involves sending a disk to them, which you will probably not even get a response... I kind of loathe them for that...

This may or may not be interesting to you.

It takes money to make money, in this case, spectacularly little (the price of a few magazines? Srsly?). OTOH, maybe somebody can come up with a seductive line on reddit or something.

[EDIT]

I think the problem is informing people that the game exists, not getting paid.

Arthur, it's not the price of the magazine that bothers me, it's that they don't so much as send a response whatsoever that they even received a CD demo. You just don't exist to them unless they happen to try your demo, but from my experience it's not even possible to address a CD for the right person because that information isn't available anywhere.

It's because they get swamped with this stuff! It's the media equivalent of "make money fast". Be creative, be open minded, find a way! Use the force, Luke!

Well, for PC World:

PCWorld Communications
501 Second Street
San Francisco CA 94107
Main Switchboard: (415) 243-0500
Main Fax: (415) 442-1891

One down, lots to go...

If you don't make much money, maybe follow the example of others and give the pc game away for free but create another version for ipod/android/xbox that is chargeable and the traffic from the free version should driver the others.

He already is selling iPod / OS X versions.

I've got two addressed to PC World (though I don't think they do many/any games) and PC Gamer. Anyone else I could send a CD to?

Well I don't know if you want to sell your game just in your web page, otherwise you could use RegNow (Digital River), I don't know how it works but you set the price and your percentage, something like that, and then a lot of webpages can sell your game (obviously they'll also take a commission).

I already registered but I'm targeting Softonic

Try mailing Rock, Paper, Shotgun. They're my favorite PC website and they spread the word about various indie games. (They got some exclusive interviews with Notch too!)

Steam.

Send the game to Valve through their business portal and have it approved. They approve everything that they think is "fun". It doesn't even have to have polished graphics or anything.

Do this.

It must be done.

Thanks. For a long time I considered our game to be not up to Steam standards, but I think with all of the updates we've done it may be there, so I created an account for them and sent them an email. Wish me luck!

Good luck!

I will just wait until Steam's standards drop to my level before submitting things. It seems easier that way.

Marketeers/promoters won't tell you this on a public forum, because they like to maintain the mistique of their profession, and it borders on illegal/immoral depending where you are in the world.
But knowing the industry from the inside, most "people" do this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shill

Just do it "creatively" as marketing types say, i.e. create a layer of plausible deniability incase you are caught at it, or similar be smart and don't get caught.

That depends on how deeply the politicians are indebted to the shills.

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Could you upload a demo to miniclip.com?

miniclip looks to be all online (flash) games, or did I miss a whole section? It even says "Welcome to Miniclip.com, the leading online games site, where you can play a large range of free online games".

What about
http://www.indiegames.com/
and
http://www.gamedev.net/

To be honest, get your website "sorted", make it more friendly to use. Make it more simpler to navigate. For example group the different os version of the game together on the same page.

Add a PayPal option, I wouldn't expect people to be happy to give their credit card details to an "unknown" site like yours. At least give people more payment options.

I know it's not much help here, but if you consider doing an html5 game, here's a link to an online store.

What about the forum scene? Have you made posts in forums that you regularly visit that are game-centric? Word-of-mouth is a great tool...

Thanks for the advice. This is the only forum I visit regularly. The others I go to once in a blue moon. It would feel too much like spam to show up there only to post ads for my game. Part of the reason I didn't link to it here. Was more looking for marketing tips than anything. I'll send these cds out to the magazines, and hope to hear from Valve. I'm not really upset if I don't make any money (though I'm making some from the Apple stores)... though I'd like to make enough to live on eventually (I'm eating the government cheese right now, disability benefits). I don't need a lot.

You could also send it to Intel Appup if Valve doesn't want it. Our game sold 12 copies on Appup in just a bit over a year

I thought AppUp stuff had to be compiled with MSVC and some MSVC specific libs... which I'd probably break the T&C of use unless I bought a copy of MSVC.

No, they just only "support" msvc, as in you can bug them on the forums about it. Otherwise any .exe is fine from what I understand as long as:

• It uses the authentication protocol, for which they only provide an MSVC library. However you can use MSVC express with it. If your game only can be compiled with MingW this is tricky of course, but you could create a secondary .exe doing the authentication and run it from some batch file which only starts the real game if authentication succeeds.

• You need to package it as an .msi package conforming to specific requirements (installation must be absolutely hidden, one single dialog showing or one single required mouse click and they won't validate you). While MSVC is the easiest way to do that (just create .msi project and delete every single dialog from it) there are other ways to package an .msi.

But yeah, the first point can be quite a hassle if you also can't use msvc express, and the second point can be quite a hassle depending on how well MSI packagers work (we used the MSVC-2008 trial for our initial version and the MSVC-2010 trial to make an update so I wouldn't know ).

See here for an official answer about using mingw for example: http://appdeveloper.intel.com/en-us/node/2154

Do you have any small video game stores around like, Game Station, Game. If so they like people to drop in demo's and they will leave them on the counter for people to pick up and take away to try. The demo only need's a link to your site and the price and there you go. Some easy marketing.

Well all that said, I only know that the game stores here in Lincoln allow that.

I tried giving cds to the only video game store here, but they didn't want them . That was a while ago though...

You can also try http://playthisthing.com/suggestions

Thanks, but my old beta tester (sniff) already suggested it: http://playthisthing.com/suggestion-monster-2-rpg

The only game reviewer that I watch is Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation. He seems to be pro-indie game/creativity so you could try to see if he'll review your game. If he happens to like it then you could end up with a lot of great publicity. And if he thinks it's shit you could also end up with a lot of publicity ("any press is good press"). If he doesn't care at all about it then you didn't lose anything really as he'll probably not even mention it.