After a long journey of developing a game on my own, I feel fortunate to have a programming background. At least I wasn't starting from scratch, and I learned all the technical aspects of game development along the way.

Then came the day I sought feedback for my game. I released the demo here. Since I didn't post from my personal account, but from a new game studio account I created, the game didn't get indexed. Yes, the account is new.

I've set up Unity Analytics in the game, and there's a popup at the end directing players to a Google form survey I've made. That form is connected to Mailchimp for email marketing. I prepared all of this, but I got zero downloads. Not a single one.

So, I tried driving external traffic to the game's itch.io page. I posted on Twitter, TikTok, and shared the link in several Discord communities I'm part of. The most disappointing platform was Reddit, which I thought had the perfect audience for my game. I did get one valuable comment on a post, but all my other Reddit posts were removed. I don't fully understand the rules, or maybe my new Reddit account looks suspicious, or my reliance on AI for writing English text wasn't up to par. I don't know. What I do know is that I haven't gotten any downloads.

It's only been three days, but I'm starting to evaluate my efforts since they haven't yielded any results.

There are still other options I haven't tried: reaching out to streamers, moving to Steam, or finding a publisher. I'll consider these options, but it's clear that game marketing is tough.