October 2023 was a big month for me (and Ready Aim Dodge)!
My indie VR game is a Staff Pick on SideQuest!
My indie VR game on Meta was chosen as a Staff Pick for SideQuest, and it stayed on the homepage of SideQuest for a month (give or take a little). It may be that every game that gets submitted is chosen as a staff pick, but I don’t think so, and I don’t care. SideQuest was a game-changer (pun intented) for a number of reasons. If you follow their handy guide, they have bots auto-create postings for you on Reddit, and they work some SEO magic that benefits your game. When you first put your game on AppLab, it’s basically hidden from the world and impossible to find. Following my release on SideQuest, my game’s AppLab page has links to it and is now indexed on Google. Instead of telling people they need to message me, and I’ll send them the exact link, I can now tell them to Google “Ready Aim Dodge,” and people can find my game in search engines now! Yay!!
Ignoring SideQuest…
Up until now, I had completely ignored the SideQuest platform. Having visited the site once in the past, I remember the hurdles I expected to encounter.
Hurdles I expected with SideQuest:
- It’s going to be difficult to setup.
- I’m not sure it’s compatible with the code I’ve already written.
- It’s going to be a lot of work to setup another sales page.
Hurdles I actually encountered with SideQuest:
- None
It turns out, SideQuest is able to pull your listing from Meta with the click of a button, so the setup is fairly effortless. I did have to provide a main image or video (I can’t remember which), but I was able to reuse the same video I already uploaded to Meta’s AppLab, so no issues.
The efficiency of SideQuest…
I’m amazed that for a such a small company (especially relative to Meta), SideQuest is able to do a LOT of stuff…and quickly! I actually had staff members reach out to me within days (it may have been in the first 24 hours) to tell me they enjoyed playing my game.
I took advantage of their free key program (give them keys to giveaway to their members in exchange for advertising credit), so I earned a little bit of money to use for some free advertising on their site. I have yet to use it, as of today, but I have plans to in the future.
Advertising my free game on SideQuest
I’m a little OCD, and right now Ready Aim Dodge has a perfect 5-star rating on Meta’s AppLab. My thought is that people are going to review my game more critically if they pay lots of money for it, so I’m keeping it free for the time being. When I finally use my free advertising credits, I think it makes sense to keep the game free to get as many players (and hopefully reviews) as I can. If you’ve never released an indie game, you should know that it’s nearly impossible to get people to review your game. I currently have over 350 active lifetime users and only 6 reviews! Aaaahhhhhh!
Anyway, I need to boost my number of reviews and my number of players before I set a price on the game again. There are a few other things I want to do as well…
Improvements for my indie VR game:
- Figure out how to get players to review my game
- Figure out how to get feedback from players
- Use feedback to figure out what I can improve
- Add more campaigns for the tower defense game (because I like playing it)
- Continue posting to this devlog
