How to post your game on Reddit?
I often see people posting “I don’t understand Reddit. How can I share my game and where?”. First, I’ll explain briefly how Reddit works. You need to have context to perform nicely on Reddit. Then I’ll give you some techniques to find the most adapted subreddit to your game.
The master forum
Forums have been existing for a long time. But with social media rising more and more, people are leaving forums. Reddit is the perfect mix between a forum and a social media. It’s in the crossroad of those two different tools.
Basically, Reddit links forum through a structure, tools, a domain name and a frontpage. Reddit is the sum of those things.
Your main task will be to find an appropriate subreddit. Subreddits are themes. There is a very large number of subreddits. As a game developer, few of them will be interesting for you.
As most subreddits are small communities, they like this circle they built. Anyone can post, but not anyone understands “the meta”, the culture of a subreddit. But before understanding a subreddit culture, you need to understand Reddit’s one.
What is Reddit culture?
This topic could take 10 pages. The basics are that Reddit is a crowd sourced forum filled of discussions and links. People will submit a text or a link, then discuss it in the comments. In Reddit, the comments are the most precious and qualitative feedback you can get. This social media is heavily based on text. So you need your content to be able to trigger discussion.
I don’t understand this fucking selfpromo rule on Reddit
When you need good content, you need people that love to discuss, will be engaged, and create interesting thread. To enhance this, Reddit put in place the anti promotion rule. Taken from Reddit clarifications:
“For every 1 time you post self-promotional content, 9 other posts (submissions or comments) should not contain self-promotional content.”
You may read this as “I need 10 puppies picture before submitting my game”. But Reddit is a wide social media. Every topic is covered and anyone can find a community that fit his tastes. This self promotion rule is an invitation to become an active member of Reddit.
Anyway, posting kitten pictures or interesting stuff is your choice, I don’t judge it.
So when you have this 10:1 ratio of non self promo posts / comments, you can now start to explore subreddits.
What is a subreddit?
As we said earlier, there’s a subreddit for everything. But every subreddit has a specific set of: css skinning, philosophy, moderation rules, moderators, quantity of followers, quality ratio.
I made an ugly picture to give details about a subreddit’s structure:
Subreddit research
You can’t just spam your content in every subreddit that vaguely fits your game. You’ll have to make a list of subreddit that could be friendly and post your content across time. To find the right subreddits, you can use the search bar.
Across time, you’ll also learn to know the most fitted subreddits. I’ve written a small list of subreddits to give you examples.
Before posting your content
Before posting to a subreddit, you have to:
- Read the subreddit rules.
- Check out the content of latests posts
- Check if posts have flair (aka labels to identify content)
- Read the subreddit rules (seriously.)
Subreddit rules can be really harsh toward self promotion. Some subreddits create a weekly self promotion topic that, obviously, no one cares to read. Some won’t give a fuck. Some will be very picky about this 10:1 self promotion rule ratio.
You can easily search if the link you’re about to post wasn’t posted before. Just type the URL you’re posting in the search bar.
Posting your content
Now, what should you post? Text or link?
It’s up to you. Just keep in mind that Reddit is highly oriented toward discussion and honest posting. If you post a little or long explanation along your post, it’s perfectly fine.
Like other social media, try to post your topic at 6pm EST. European will see it at the end of the day, and US will see it around noon.
Among other things, you can post on Reddit:
- Pictures of your game (through imgur or reddit hosting)
- Websites (don’t forget the thumbnails)
- Articles that speak about your game
- Trailers or video from Youtube
- Tutorial about how you did X or Y on your game
My post failed. I have 0 upvotes!
Look at this. The same link has 50 upvotes in games, 14 in indie gaming and 0 in pcgaming. It can happen, and the text, picture might not be faulty. Just try to keep posting good quality stuff in the right place, and one day it’ll perform better than the other.
What is this small dot in front of my post?
Why does a dot sometimes show up where the score should be? For the first few hours after a submission is created, the score is not displayed. This is intended to mitigate the bandwagon effect.
From my experience, your age and karma also affects this topic. Reddit internal algorithm can be really complex so, no one really knows.
I’m making a game called Neurodeck! Check out the steampage!
