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Given a chance for free promotion, why don’t developers promote their game?
Game devs currently have a free opportunity to promote their game in a kooky experiment that's getting good eyeballs. What are you waiting for? Why haven't you promoted your game yet?
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On Wednesday (November 20, 2013) I launched an experiment. I posted a list of 112 of my favorite kid and family games to a public Google doc. Anyone and everyone had the ability to edit it.
Anyone can edit it, even those with games that are not family friendly. (There’s a section for that, too.)
The doc is still posted (and publicly available for editing) at http://bit.ly/1fHpSYv
Why would I do this?
A lot of people ask me for the games I recommend. It was time I wrote down the list.
I’m growing an email list for a curation service that I’m beta testing and figured this would be a good experiment. (You can sign up at http://eepurl.com/HQrEz)
I was fascinated by the Startup School notes experiment, where people were encouraged to contribute to a public document detailing a set of lectures.
I wanted to see if developers would take advantage of free promotion when given the opportunity.
So what’s happening?
The list is growing. It’s now around 150 games.
That’s a lot slower than I expected, especially considering I shared this with a lot of developer friends and developer lists.
Why aren't you promoting your game?
When I talked about it with colleagues and friends, a few have joked about putting their own games in, but few have actually gone so far as to add their games. A few have also joked about putting their games at the top of the list, but no one has done that either.
I think that's being short-sighted. It’s free promotion. Hundreds of people have seen the list so far. Yeah, sure, that’s not going to make you a zillionaire, but are most developers in the position to turn down even the chance of a few more users? What if this list does catch with the press? Can you afford to not be on the list?
Still feeling creepy about self-promotion? Then make the changes anonymously.
Yeah, I’m poking the bear with this post. Obviously I don’t want people to be total jerks and destroy the entire experiment. But seriously. It’s free promotion. It takes 5 minutes. Anyone?
I'll report back...
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