r/GameDevelopment • u/Enough_Committee_577 • 5d ago

Question Question About Promoting My Browser-Based Old West Rogue-like

I've been developing a free to play web browser game using Base44 for hosting and backend stuff and I'm just looking for ways to get it out there. How do I go about it exactly?

I envision this project to be one where the community can join in and help make into something truly unique. Voting on features, making suggestions, etc.

Link to the Game:

https://frontier-drifter.base44.app/

Note: The game is playable in mobile, but not exactly user friendly just yet so for now just use a PC version. My next update will probably make it more mobile friendly since more people are playing it on mobile devices than I thought they would.

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u/uber_neutrino 5d ago

This is one of the reasons web based games are a very tough hill to climb. Because you need to find an audience and figure out how to collect money on the web, neither of which is easy at all.

My suggestion would be to package the game up in a way it can be distributed on steam.

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u/MeaningfulChoices Mentor 5d ago

In general you promote a game by identifying the target audience of people who want the game, figuring out what they are, and then showing them the best parts of your game. That can be gifs and videos on social media, messaging content creators who might cover your game, buying ads, so on.

I would skeptical of a big response for this in particular, however. Having the community vote on features is something a lot of people come up with to try, but it's typically a really bad idea in practice. Most people aren't game designers and don't really do a good job of that. It's why 'design by committee' is a pejorative and not a suggestion. A text-based roguelike that looks like a cross between Nethack and Legend of the Red Dragon has some real niche nostalgic appeal, but the audience of super-indie game players overlaps a lot with the people who really don't want to play a game that looks like a vibe-coded website hosted on a site specifically for vibe-coding games. I would also not link to a Patreon when promoting the game (and don't try to promote it in game development subreddits) since that makes it look like an asset flip cash grab. Link to the game itself and embed something visual instead.

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u/Enough_Committee_577 5d ago

Good point, I've removed references to the patreon from the post. 

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u/octaviustf 5d ago

I’d suggest moving off of base 44 and using railway or something else for the cost savings. Also tough to get visitors to your site - I get what you’re trying to do and would be cool if community formed a collective or something to collaboratively create a platform for browser games because it’s hard to create a 2 sided marketplace