Original Summary

Two years. 21 games shipped. $5.98 total. I was sure it was a quality problem. Make something good enough, and people find it — that was the whole plan. Then I finally looked at where my traffic actually came from. Over 30 days: 242 visits. New-arrivals/tag feed 56%, other pages on the same site 36%, search 8%. From outside the platform: 0%. Not "low" — zero. So I looked closer, and one thing was quietly deciding everything: the tags. Games I tagged "idle" or "incremental" got 70 to 931 views. Games without those tags got 5 to 39. No exceptions. My best-made game — the one I poured the most into — got 9 views. A rushed one got 900. The only difference was a tag I picked in about 30 seconds. I'd been getting that 30-second call wrong 21 times and calling it a quality problem. Last month I finally posted one on Reddit instead. It went 0 → 23 views the first day → 93 the next. Now Reddit sends me over 200 visits a month — my single biggest source of outside traffic, from a channel that sat at flat zero for two years. One tap finally opened. And I still made almost nothing. My paid pages convert at about 0.18% — roughly 1 sale per 570 visitors. So a few hundred new visits rounds to zero dollars. It turned out I didn't have one problem, I had two stacked on top of each other — and I could only see the second (nobody converts) after I fixed the first (nobody arrives). Three things I wish I'd done sooner: - Figure out what actually decides whether anyone sees your thing — before you polish it. A good product won't tell you. - Measure early, and let something other than yourself read the numbers. I didn't look at my total revenue across everything until month 20 — not because it was hard, but because I was too close to want to. - Zero is data. "0% from outside" wasn't a disappointment, it was a diagnosis. Happy to answer anything about the numbers. (Disclosure: I use AI tools in the studio to help write code and drafts; the pixel art, the design calls, and every number here are mine and real.)   submitted by   /u/Vegetable_Gear_5684 [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：内容涉及商业、投资或市场动态
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SideProject
  • 发布时间：2026/9/22 21:08:02