So I recently started making my own game, so I reached out to a few of the game devs who post here to get some tips. I'll post them here, so if any one else wants some quick tips they can reference this.

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u/Asterazureus dev of Heartsworn Abyss

1. You NEED to get the word out. If you want to grow. If you want decent growth, you need to spam like it’s the Super Bowl, even big companies know this and that’s why annoying commercials exist.

2. Costs. Pay careful attention to cost/benefit. AI art has a staggeringly good cost/benefit ratio because it’s essentially free (if you have a computer). When you pump hundreds of good-looking images in a day, very few readers are going to wait a month or more for a few quality, hand-drawn illustrations. Lots of top-earning adult games use a combination of AI + hand-editing now, and that brings in insane profit-margin. Out of principle, I do not use AI art. Lots of people cannot tell AI art from real art sadly, and the ratio is only going to skew further to AI in the future. That being said, I will always appreciate hand-drawn art, and have massive respect for devs who continue to include it in their games.

3. Ignore haters/complainers Sometimes these are other devs (competition) putting you down. Other times, these are tourists who don't really care about your game but want to satisfy their own fetishes. Do not stretch yourself thin pandering to too many requests (especially from people who weren't even going to support you) For example, netorase is a common request, but it would require a LOT of reworking the scenes in my game. This means less content for netorare lovers, who might leave in droves, while you gain a handful of netorase fans in exchange. Focus on your core audience first, there is nothing you can do about tourists who want you to change your game's vision to suit them. You can always add more fetishes later when you've grown a stable audience and want to branch out.

4. Avoid extraneous features, focus on the essential ones. One good example being voice acting. It rarely pays off. Almost none of the top adult games have full voice acting. You'll hear grunts for the H-scenes and that’s usually it. But what they DO have is lots of interesting sex scenes, great-looking models (AI or not), and ANIMATION. The unfortunate truth is that solid writing and realistic scenarios isn’t enough to grab clicks. If your page doesn’t make them download the game, then they’ll never be able to enjoy the good writing etc.

5. Cross-promote with other like-minded devs Conversion rates are very high since you share a common audience. Do it in moderation though, or you’ll annoy your audience who might not want to see advertisements.

For what it’s worth, I don’t actually follow many of these rules, but I don’t consider myself particularly successful. These are just trends I’ve noticed from looking at major adult devs.

I will say that games with animation gets crazy views (from what I can see on Steam and itchio). Just still images is a hard sell, since lots of people can do that now. But with a novel idea (NTR phone), still images can work.

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u/ObliviousNTR dev of Life After Victory

I just learnt based on what other successful devs were doing. What I learnt, promotion wise, is to post on all relevant sub-reddits and post on twitter & pixiv.

You should probably also make a Subscribestar & Itch.io account if you haven't already and even Boosty if you can since it'll open up the door to more people and also it gives people an impression that the game could take "darker" paths since Patreon is much more strict (Also, Boosty, Itch & Subscribestar allow you to post adult content publicly on your page where as Patreon does not).

Some more common but important things to remember is to always be active, even if you have to delay etc, still take the time to post, even if you to just give a progress report. If you feel like it's becoming too much then take a break before you decide to quit altogether, especially if you're not some huge creator, I don't have experience with it myself, but logically, if you're game is good enough and you come back to make it even better, it should not take long to get your supporters back (Again, this probably won't apply as much if you get bigger).

And don't let in-game errors frustrate you because if the end product is good, people will be patient. But, above everything, you must actually enjoy, or at least understand to a high degree, the genre you're targeting. I've seen people with VERY minimal artistic ability use their own drawings for their game and still blow up, simply because their game knows and gives what the audience wants, to the point that the bad art is fine.

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More to come?

I thought it would be good to have a repository of sorts where good NTR games are listed, so I'm going to do that for the 3k milestone on /r/NetorareGames, but instead of just posting the ones I think are good, I thought it would be better to get a community consensus.

So... What games are top tier? Hidden gems? Under rated? Etc.