Same game on Gamejolt and Itch.IO (not monetized) bad move?

Hey guys!

So, recently I released another game of mine, not gonna talk much about it here but it's an online multiplayer game for Android (I always promise to port it to iOS, but not this time, let's see how things go), and as a... maybe... "frustrated" attempt to market the game a little more I published the game on Gamejolt and Itch.IO, my monetization sources are ad banners, video ads and in-app purchases so I won't get any of these in the standalone so if the game make any success on itch.io and gamejolt I will need money to pay a higher tier on Photon — so I'll be making no money from there but I will be spending depending on how things go there, btw, the only restriction on the standalone version is that the player can't unlock any customization item, (only aestethetic items) so I was also wondering if that would be a good excuse for the players to download the game on Android.
I also put a Google Play badge in the right bottom of the menu screen that points to the app page.

I was wondering if I would be generating any install on the actual Android version from there, does someone has any experience with it? Did someone here tried this before? Bad idea?

This is the first game I'm willing to work hard to get a fan base, the first game I make that I think it's worth.

edit: removed the marketing

 

Please correct if I'm wrong.
You are deploying on itch.io and gamejolt solely to drive people to the Android version where you can generate revenue with ads.
The only revenue generator in the non-mobile builds are cosmetic items?

Are the cosmetic items "special" enough that people will pay for them, or are they insignificant like different hats, weapons, colors?

Would be interesting experiment to incentivize players to download and play the mobile version - within the non-mobile version, but I have no clue what that would look like of if it can even be tracked - probably can with some type of confirmation code generator when mobile platform is installed and booted up.

 

Yes!

And no, there's nothing special in the items, they are only cosmetic, it's an online game so it didn't feel right to give any special treatment for those who pay, I always criticized p2w so I would never do that, I'm planning on making a story version and more multiplayer game modes, including co-op, so maybe in these new modes those same items could make something different there.

Ah, that's a great idea, I could give the player some kind of unique item (again, cosmetic) for those who are coming from the gamejolt/itch.io version, I think I could achieve that using Playfab, generate the code and store on playfab and the player would type the code in some kind of form in the mobile version.

 

Yeah that is a cool idea. Would be even better if you could allow players to achieve custom items (cosmetic) in stand alone - when reaching goals in the mobile version.
Would like to see it when you get it set up for both versions.

 

Ah true, the bad part about this is that I would be paying for players in standalone to stay online in the multiplayer (I'm using photon) but wouldn't be making any money with it, that's why I'm focusing more on driving people to play the mobile version, if the game didn't had any expenses (right now it doesn't, I didn't surpassed the free 20 CCU limit) I wouldn't care of delivering the same game on both versions and being indifferent by which version the user plays. Btw, these are the unlockable items I'm talking about:

Spoiler

Wands

Spells

Hats

and Robes

 

i wonder hows that goes at the end?

 

Hey @SweatyChair, at the time I wanted to publish the game in webgl so the players could play from the browser but I was having lots of problems trying to build the game for webgl mainly because of the long times to build and load, etc. So I decided to only release the game on Android. Maybe nowadays I'd have a better luck in this subject.

 

Sounds fair... probably not worth it switching WebGL where the structure is totally different...

 

Yes... I miss the old webplayer, it was a breezy to port stuff from other platforms.