Your Game Is Live and Nobody Is Playing It

The listing is up. The store page exists. You posted about it in three places. And the install counter has moved by eleven, nine of which were you, testing on different devices.

This is the most common state a shipped indie game or app is in, and nearly everything written about it is not diagnostic. It is a list of thirty marketing tactics sorted by how good they sound, which is useless when you do not yet know which part is broken. What follows is the opposite: an ordered checklist, cheapest and most likely first. Work down it and stop at the first thing that is actually wrong, because fixing anything below it will not help until you do.

1. Look at what a stranger sees

Not your listing as you know it. The version somebody who has never heard of you gets, on a phone, in about four seconds.

• Open the store page on a device that is not your development phone, with the app not installed.
• Look at the first screenshot at the size it actually appears in results, not full screen.
• Read only the first two lines of the description. Everything after that is behind a "more" link that most people never tap.
• Ask whether those four seconds say what the thing is. Not what it feels like — what it is.

If a stranger cannot tell what your app does from the icon, the first screenshot, and two lines of text, nothing further down this list matters. That is a listing problem, and it is the cheapest one to fix: the specifics are in the press kit guide.

2. Check the link you have been sharing

This one is embarrassing and more common than it should be. Open the exact link from your posts, your bio, and your website, on a phone, from a cold browser.

• Does it land on the store page, or on an interstitial that asks people to choose a country first?
• If you only have one platform, what happens when somebody on the other one taps it?
• Does your website link to the store at all, or does it link to a landing page that then links to the store, costing you a tap for nothing?

Every extra step between "I am interested" and "installing" loses people who were genuinely going to try it. Two of those steps will lose more than most marketing gains back.

3. Find out whether you are findable at all

Search the store for your exact title. Then search for the two or three words that describe what it does.

A brand new listing with no installs and no ratings will not rank for generic terms — not because you did something wrong, but because the store has no evidence yet and plenty of established alternatives. That is expected and it is temporary. What is not expected:

• your app not appearing for its own exact name, which usually means the name collides with something bigger and you need a more distinctive one;
• the category or the fields the store indexes being left at defaults, so the store has nothing to match on;
• a name so generic that it is competing with every app that shares the word.

Store search is a compounding channel, not a launch channel. Set it up correctly, then stop expecting anything from it this month. Ratings are part of the evidence it is waiting for, and there is an honest way to get the first ones.

4. Work out which problem you actually have

This is the step that changes what you should do next, and most people skip it.

Look at how many people who installed it opened it a second time. If almost nobody did, you do not have a traffic problem. You have a product problem wearing a traffic problem's clothes, and every install you win from here goes into a bucket with a hole in it. Sending more people at it is the most expensive possible way to learn that.

If people do come back and there simply are not enough of them, then it genuinely is reach, and the rest of this list applies.

The uncomfortable version of this check: install your own game on a phone with no notifications from you, wait a day, and see whether you want to open it. Be honest about the answer.

5. Count where you actually posted

Write down every place you announced it. Most people find this list is shorter than they remembered, and that it is made almost entirely of places where they have no standing.

• A post in a community you joined that week reads as an advert, and it converts like one.
• A post in a community you have been part of for a year reads as a person sharing a thing they made.
• Posting once and leaving is worth a fraction of posting once and answering every reply for a day.

There is a filtered list of places worth the evening in where to submit your indie game or app for free. Permanent directory pages and launch-day feeds do different jobs; you probably need both, and you probably did neither properly.

6. Ask ten people directly

Not a post. Ten individual messages to ten specific people, each of whom has a reason to care, saying what it is in one sentence and asking them to try it.

This scales terribly, which is exactly why it works: nobody else is doing it. It also produces the only feedback that is worth anything at this stage, because people who tried it because you asked will tell you why they stopped, and strangers who bounced will not tell you anything at all.

If you cannot think of ten people, that is itself the finding, and it means the work for the next few months is building somewhere to have an audience rather than shipping another feature.

7. The uncomfortable one

Sometimes the diagnosis is that the thing is fine and nobody wants it. Not broken, not badly presented — just solving a problem people do not have, or doing something a free alternative already does well enough.

This is worth considering seriously before you spend six more months on marketing, because marketing does not fix it and the sunk cost gets larger every week. The cure is not giving up. It is shipping the next thing sooner, having learned how to launch it properly, which you now have.

What to do this week

1. Fix the listing so a stranger understands it in four seconds. One day of work, largest effect.
2. Fix every link so it goes straight to the store on the right platform.
3. Check the second-open number before you spend anything on reach.
4. Pick three communities you are genuinely part of and post properly in them.
5. Message ten people individually.

None of that is a growth strategy and none of it costs money. It is the part that has to be true before a growth strategy can do anything, and skipping it is why the thirty-tactic lists do not work.

When the listing is honest and the links are right, put it on the board as well — listing is free, a page persists in a way a launch-day post does not, and it starts on zero and moves on what people who actually tried it do next.

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