How to Advertise your FOSS game

Have a nice new FOSS game that no one knows about? Make it known through these (rather obvious) tried and tested ( not really ;) ) methods:

Forums


A Delicate Balance
Make a nice generic post with a couple (not too many!) screenshots, relevant links etc. Also, remember to stick around and answer questions and generally contribute to the forums you are posting to, you don't want to be a spam bot ;)

Post on the FreeGameDev forums! Fastest way to get an article on the blog, and a bunch of helpful people willing to give you a hand with development ('' previous parenthesis ;).

Linux Distro Forums: Always a safe bet (links go to relevant gaming sections)



Propaganda


0A.D. video posted in 2007 that still attracts players

Make Video for Advertising goodness! Videos > Pictures > Words when it comes to marketing.
Upload to Youtube/Vimeo/Vidsiteofchoice and attach it to the posts you make on the sites mentioned below


Post everywhere! The more places you have presence, the more eyeballs fall onto your work, the more players you attract. There are lots of places to post to, so give this task to some of those pesky FOSS hangers-on who don't code or make art (Like me! :D)

General game databases:

  • ModDB / IndieDB : ModDB recently split into two, IndieDB is where you want to post if you have a standalone game. Also, these sites are huge so it will be harder to get noticed
  • GameBoom : The site sponsoring OpenGameArt, Gameboom wants to host communities for (preferably FOSS) games
  • IndieGameMag : Haven't had success with this one, but it allows for user submissions so...
  • The Indie Gaming Source : Another database for indie games, nice categorization and more indie than IndieDB ;)
  • GameJolt : For freeware games only! Gives you hosting space for files as well, kinda like sourceforge like site for games - the development tools :P Has a special section for open source games



Linux Only

If the game runs on Linux, here are a couple of Linux gaming sites where you can post to:

  • Linux Game Database  : Nice database for all kinds of Linux games
  • Gaming on Linux : A community like news site for Linux games
  • Linux Games : Another blog (hiss :P) that allows for user-submitted articles
  • Penguspy : Another database like site but with strict quality moderation 
  • HappyPenguin / LinuxGameTome : Most well known Linux game database, it has been down/sickish of late though... It's served the community well though, so lets not talk bad of it 


Web Aggregators:


Kind of hit-or-miss because they require people to vote for you... Getting your audience right is key, reddit's subreddits are good for this

  • Slashdot : The g.old standard for geek/open source news aggregation, a tad difficult to get published though 
  • Reddit : /r/linuxgaming , /r/gamedev , /r/indiegaming , are good subreddits to submit too, not all of them at once though, that'd be spammy ;)
  • FSDaily  : A free software specialized news aggregator
  • Flattr and YouTipIt : Aggregators with cash backing (but more on those later ;)
  • Wikipedia : If you're lucky, Wikipedia can point a lot of people at your game. However, it isn't really a place to market your game/service, so you have to have some kind of proof that your game is noteworthy


 Micro/blogging

 Use Identi.ca / Twitter to get news to your readers fast. Identi.ca has nice groups, such as !fossgaming and !linuxgaming that you can join and post news to. Having timely updates show users (ones that don't know about commit logs) that the project is active, and all that social media stuff :P

Blogging in general is good as well, keep people updated = keep people excited and interested = get people playing (for example proprietary/open source game developers Wolfire)

Development Centric Advertisement

Knowing who you want to market to is an essential ingredient to a successful campaign; while you might pick up developers on more general sites, specialized, development centric sites have a far higher ratio of developers/users


  • Freshmeat : A database of open source software, with lots of game projects on it
  • Sourceforge : The biggest open source project hosting site (not researched, ain't Goat an exemplary journalist), it does have the best project discovery features as well. You don't necessarily have to host your code here; it's still a good place to have a presence on
  • Engine forums: If you use Ogre, post on the ogre forums, if you use blender, BlenderArtists is a good place etc. Not a very difficult concept ;)
  • Engine Databases: If your game is codeveloped as an engine (which is horrifyingly prevalent) DevMaster is an example of a place to post your engine on. Rather successful in my experience with Syntensity
  • Gamedev.net : A pretty active game development community


Release Early, Release Often!


And repeat all steps above on every release. Golden rule and all that

More!

The internet is big, Goat's memory is bad! Comment below if I missed anything and I'll update the post.. Or maybe move it to a wiki page...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular

RubyWeekend, but also PyDay

Image
Yesterday the first RubyWeekend ended, which is a two and a half days Ruby game creation competition. The topic was "Pirates Versus Zombies!" Seven contributions were made: kiba's digital piracy parody The CopyPirate [ video ], atiaxi's tbs Port Town [ video ], satoshi's console-based footracer [ video ], jlnr's ZombieSoccarrr [ video ], ippa's Zombie Horde [ video ], jacius' Election Year: Zombies vs. Pirates! [ video ] and trejs' Caribbean Onslaught . The submitted code had to be released under an OSI -approved license and all media under one of the Creative Commons licenses (alternatively public domain for both.) The contest is being hosted on the forums of Rubygame , which is a SDL -based Ruby media library. Most submissions are based on it, some use Gosu . Ninjapix, probably PyDay #2's winner Another competition ended on Saturday: PyDay #2 - a rather fresh 24-hours Python game making contest and the smaller brother of Ludum Dare ,...
Read more

Open Source Game Engines

Image
ScummVM FIFE OpenTTD Today is a game engine special on Free Gamer. These are the projects that take your favourite [old school] titles and provide not only a native port but also fix all the nasties that had you saving and loading or even resetting your PC in the past. I remember the days of autoexec.bat and making every byte of that 640k count. Well these won't give you that fun but at least you get to play your old games! Let's start with the exciting FIFE: Flexible Isometric Fallout-like Engine . Started as an attempt to make a Fallout engine, it is becoming more ambitious and there are even rumours of a FIFE-based game in development. It should be able to run fan-made Fallout mods like the aptly named Fan Made Fallout . I have a pet favourite among RPG engines - GemRB . (I respect the steady progress on a difficult project.) This Infinity Engine emulator aims to be able to run the Baldur's Gate titles and even improve the experience they offer. The development...
Read more

Anticube 2 - a game within a game

Image
So, as I sometimes peruse various forums, the occasional gem pops up. This is one of the best hidden gems in Open Source gaming. Anticube 2 is a map for Tesseract / Cube 2 that is inspired by the game Antichamber and NaissanceE . If you are unfamiliar with those, that means it is an abstract FPS puzzle game where things are not quite what they seem. Or, as the creator Lord Kv probably better explains: Anticube 2 is a puzzle map for Tesseract. You'll find yourself in an interactive, dynamic, non-euclidean world. Supported by 5000+ lines of Cubescript and GLSL code, this map will do things no other Cube 2 / Tesseract map has ever done before. Here is the trailer: There is also a gallery of screenshots for you to check out. I won't include them here because, to be honest, the screenshots won't mean much for this kind of game. I'm calling it a game, even though it is just a map for a game. You can tell it is worth checking out because of the reactions it elicits from...
Read more