As we all know, it is very difficult to promote and do marketing for this type of content. Me personally have been having a hard time trying to run add campaigns or manual posting of my content in places where you would expect to get a lot of impressions, I have been banned from several Reddit subreddits, from Facebook groups and from several Gaming forums, even if I tag my posts as NSFW it is not very well accepted.
So the point of this thread is to share our knowledge on how to advertise our content, maybe somebody has the secret and we would all benefit from it.
I’m part of a development team for a pretty successful adult game right now and I’ve been assisting with the marketing part myself. I feel like spreading the word to social media isn’t incredibly effective unless you have something to show for it.
There is some general advice to give: get a demo out (our demo alone grew our patron amount by over 50% in a few days), get known people in the community you’re trying to attract to signal boost, and try to get quality artists to work on your game (either through commissioning their work or recruiting them as collaborators). Having a skilled artist on your team won’t just add quality content to you game, it will attract their entire community of followers to your project.
This is a large part of the reason our game is doing so well right now.
We were content creators in the community we’re in before we became game developers to it, and we know the community and where to appeal to it.
Without knowing the specifics of your game it’s hard to give you really effective advice on where to go to advertise it though, each type of nsfw community basically has its own community, even sub-communities that are pretty insular - they really only want to see content that caters specifically to them.
That goes down to a creator level too, communities tend to form around individuals or groups rather than broader categories of content. They like things people do, not just all nsfw content. I would figure out how to incorporate that into your project if you’re still having trouble after your demo is out.
I’m not much of a developer but I do a mix of NSFW artist, and I’ve got a few peers who’ve had experience with this. One big place for advertising this stuff would actually be twitter and tumblr. They’re a lot more lax on content standards as long as you’re marking your stuff as NSFW appropriately.
Tumblr gets a bad rap for a chunk of its userbase but it’s honestly one of the best NSFW platforms in my opinion. Gifs in particular fair REALLY well on that site. (Unless your game glorifies extreme ideas that are controversial by even NSFW standards, but a lot of those are banned on Patreon as well.) (With respect to Tumblr you have to know how their tagging system works to use it efficiently as well)
Newgrounds is also a solid place to host your games still and to gain more of a following. It’s kinda a niche location overall but it has a lot of overlap with other NSFW communities.
As Watsup said, it’s also important to have stuff to show. Animation demonstrations, game demos especially, dev logs, concept art, etc.
Figuring out how to present your NSFW content in a SFW way that toes the line is pretty handy, too.
Also, if there’s a place you know you’d have interest, try to concentrate there. I know there’s multiple gaming forums and sub-reddits specifically about adult and NSFW gaming, it’s mainly a matter of knowing where those are and what they’ll allow. @Watsup’s advice around this was really good, having a core community to work with is a great start, and they may do a lot of your work for you.
I’ve contemplated making a list of forums/sites for NSFW game content, but a lot of them would also rather fly under the radar due to fear of getting invaded/shut down/etc for various reasons, so it’s kind of hard to do.