I had a tough time finding analytics representing the initial release period of game on itch.io The benefit of that is knowing how well you’re doing during a launch or if something is awry.

I did find posts by people like Senshisun and LadyIcepaw, so I’m going to follow suit. This way we have some representation and reflection for a Twine and in particular an erotic twine game.

Above you’ll see the numbers for my first 7 days after launch.

From what I understand, I had a pretty successful launch of the game. Although no one donated any money to the project I did get a high number of page views.

The 102 downloads, although I don’t offer the game for downloading, should be representative of people who played it in the itch.io app (if I understand it correctly)

It’s a browser game, so that many plays is really great. With the best day being the third day, and it dropping off after that to about 100 or so browser plays on the 7th day.

I received 4 ratings, one with 5 stars and 2 with 4 stars. And the comments are so high due to me replying to a handful of people asking questions.

I’ll explain “Impressions” and “CTR” as I understand them. Impressions means that, on this very site, itch.io is placing your game in front of relevant users through suggestions, search results, etc. I had a lot of impressions (the site even recommended I play my own game at one point - and that counts). CTR is the “Click Through Rate”. This measures how often someone clicks on the link provided when it does come up as an impression. With popular games getting 1-0.6% regularly. For the first couple of days my CTR was over 3% and has come down quite a bit.

Why is that?

Because, again, from what I know, when a game is first launched or has a major update then itch.io’s system will work to promote it just a little bit more and give new games a fighting chance. I think, beyond marketing, that accounts for why my first 3 days were so good.

This next image has to do with that marketing.

I posted on social media, on my gallery sites, I bought an ad on Y!gallery (a long time dream of mine), and I worked with 2 gay erotic fiction sites to help promote the project. The first day the bulk of my views came from gayspiral with itch.io matching it pretty well. After that itch.io took the lead as the shoutout on gayspiral was gone by the third day.

Having a shoutout on a popular site was a major boost, and the ad yielded much less than me promoting it to the people who already follow me. Friends also retweeted my little advert image which helped on Twitter.

By the 4th day I had visitors from places I never contacted. I never made a post on facebook, duckduckgo, baidu, etc. but I guess they picked up on the game’s presence - and somehow people started coming from google (?!)

So people were either googling the game or something else. Not sure which.

I never posted on a reddit, but I’d image that would have increased the number of visitors.

All in all, as I said earlier, it seems like a very good launch to me. I hope this information is helpful to other game creators and that you’re encouraged to share your first week analytics for others as well.