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Writer's pictureRiver Forge

How Did Our Demo Launch Go?

Well it's been about a week since we launched the demo for Glitcheon!

A lot of people have been asking how it's going. Did it do well? What were you expecting?


Well, I'm not really sure what I was expecting, but I'm happy with what we've done so far!


Yaen, Bonicle and I chose to do a staggered launch of our demo, starting with the release of a YouTube video paired with the demo becoming available on itch.io as a temporary exclusive.

First off, the video that was launched isn't ours; Jonas Tyroller made it in collaboration with us, and we enjoyed working with him a lot! The video is fantastic and has had about 22k views so far.



Stats/Number Dump For itch.io Demo

Impressions: ~150k

Views: ~5k CTR: ~1.6% Browser Plays: ~3k

Downloads: ~300

Rating: 5 Stars (12 ratings)

Comments: ~50 Where Did They Come From So, these numbers are pretty good for us, as they've already surpassed a full year of stats for the game jam version of the game.


Unfortunately, making a good game isn't the only criteria for getting people to see your game and play it though, so... where did they come from?

Views Breakdown

itch.io: ~72% YouTube: ~19% Google: ~2% Twitter: ~1% Unknown/Misc: 6%

Views Breakdown: How/Why? It's clear from looking at the numbers that itch.io has internally generated most of the demo's traffic. If we dig deeper, we can see that 54% of our total traffic has actually come straight from itch.io's home page. We never got featured on the home page, but we do know that we appeared often in a random scrolling category on the home page of "Fresh Games." So, why did itch.io put us on the home page so often, automatically, despite us never being featured? It's our assumption that the YouTube traffic, which was mostly concentrated in the first two days of the launch, gave us a boost in traffic through direct navigation which pushed us up as a popular game on itch.io's algorithms.


We know that at least at some point in the first day we became the #2 game in itch.io's "New and Popular" category, but direct navigation from this page only accounts for 1% of our total traffic.


What's Next? The "demo launch" is far from over for us, as we plan to do a staggered launch onto multiple other platforms besides itch.io in the coming weeks.


We're still looking for our silver bullet/golden egg or whatever to help us drive traffic to the next launch site on the day of, considering it worked out well for itch.io. When Will The Full Game Release? The last thing I want to address is the state of development for Glitcheon. Yaen, Bonicle, and I have been working on Glitcheon for over a year now. We started it in January of 2020, and held strong during all the trials that 2020 brought. What we released for the demo is essentially a "vertical slice" of the full game, meaning that it has a comparable level of polish and sense of being complete to what we intend for the full game, minus some content and mechanics. Regarding those additional content and mechanics, we haven't made them all yet! It will still be some time before we release the full game, but we are planning multiple updates to the demo while we plan the details of the full release. Things to look out for in the future will be news on alpha testing for the full game.

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