To any moderators of small games, what has been your experience with new people discovering your game and starting to speedrun it? Has anyone ever mentioned how they discovered your game?
For console games specifically, I feel like most people “discover” a game by owning it already, and then they just decide to speedrun it.
Most of the games I run are very obscure, so I very rarely see new runners. The only exceptions to this are games like grey-box testing or 60 seconds burger run, which are popular and have a lot of people searching for them. However, I'm pretty much alone in a lot of other games. Even though I've been running the game for a year, I'm still the only runner for https://speedrun.com/tim_
I don't know for the most part*, but every game that I've moderated for at least a few months has gotten at least one other runner on the site. (Remains to be seen if Peral will attract others, but that's early still.) Kinda wish I knew what brings them to the games myself, because each game I moderate has few runners.
*In a couple of cases, I encouraged people off the site to submit something for specific games and they did, and at least one of the other runners for Pigments came via the advertisement thread. That's all that I know.
Ok thanks all, I'm glad to hear that people do sometimes discover new games on the site without me having to advertise them!
I completely get the idea of people searching up a cool game to see if it has a speedrun page, and in fact that is one of the main reasons why I want to submit a new game to the site!
If and when I've done a run, had the game accepted and set up the leaderboard, I'll definitely give it a cheeky plug on that adverts thread ;)
( @Pear The game is called Odd Bot Out, it's a physics based puzzle game on mobile)
Oh, one piece of advice related to how I discover games through here—be sure to add all applicable platforms. As a webgame runner, I like to go to the list of recently added web games to see if anything is of interest. But twice in the past couple months, I've randomly stumbled across webgames I was familiar with that hadn't included "web" on the list of platforms, so I'd missed them when they were first added.
