Neverending parkour Post-Mortem

        After months of waiting and countless attempts to stand out, I decided to stop with the development of "Neverending parkour". I can say that I had something to learn from it both in terms of development and self-promotion (marketing).

        As it appears in the description of the game, I created this game for the "7dfps GameJams" (2022), in the hope that it will attract the attention of a large number of players.

What went wrong?

        Unfortunately, the results were not up to my expectations (as you can see in the Game Analytics). I mention that I got this result because I also tried games from other game developers and thus everyone expressed their opinions on each other's games (this is not a rule, so if you play someone's game it does not mean that it will also play your game, but there is a high probability).

What were the players' feedbacks?

        Opinions were not very positive about the visual quality of the game, but many were not bothered by it (also, the audio part still needs to be worked on).

        Also, most players complained about the sensitivity of the mouse, so we added a menu so that the player can also adjust the sensitivity of the mouse (I still received comments related to this problem even after updating the game with the possibility of lowering the sensitivity).

        If you want to see more comments then visit the GameJam page and you will see better what I am talking about (you can ecen try the game).

Why was the game not monetized at all?

        Well, first of all, because the game was not very "attractive" and because I was surprised when I saw that itch.io does not monetize you according to the number of views or downloads (at least that's what I understood from the discussion you can find in the link the following "https://itch.io/t/1048532/how-much-money-is-earned-on-itchio"). So, I left the donation option, but obviously with the low quality that my game had, it had no way of attracting people to donate to my game (to clear up any kind of misunderstanding, so that you can accept donations you have to put the "0$ or donation" option for each game and then a button below the game should appear with the text "Support this game").

        Secondly, the games that can be run on the browser cannot contain ads (in my case Unity Ads do not work for WebGL type games), thus failing to find a "passive" way to earn money (I could have forced the players to pay for the game, but considering the quality of the game and my number of views, I can say that this would not have been a good idea, because people tend not to pay for something that is not visually pleasing or in which they do not have confidence to pay).

So what are the conclusions?

        Itch.io, in my opinion, is very useful when you want to highlight your game (entering different GameJams) or when you are at the beginning of a big project (with very good graphics), but you want to achieve only a demo to see the reaction of the players (here it must also be taken into account how well viewed you are on itch.io, for example: if you just created an account on itch.io and uploaded your demo, it would it might not be viewed, and that's not because the game is bad, but actually it had no way to reach the attention of the players).

        That doesn't mean you can't use itch.io in other ways too (you can use itch.io as a way to sell your 2D or 3D models, even items that might attract viewers).

Now I am working on another project, one also with reasonable graphics. For more discussions, you can comment on my itch.io page or on instagram (https://www.instagram.com/andy_andrew_entertaiment/).