I don’t know how to make my game icon appealing. I just tried to put a random guy on an icon because a lot of other popular games put animals/avatars on their icon. But such a low CTR rate won’t work for when I’m trying to get this game known, especially since I don’t have a high budget in the first place.
Any advice, criticism, feedback would be greatly appreciated. I know this post seems rather dramatic but I poured a lot of effort into the game this past month and would hate to see it fade into obscurity just because I couldn’t make the right game icon.
Link to game (so you can see the other thumbnails):
Well firstly, having no text at all on a sponsor (whether it be in a logo format or just text on the image) is generally a bad thing, especially when your game doesn’t have an established playerbase yet. How are players supposed to know what the game is about or what to tell their friends if they don’t know the name of the game?
Games like Royale High are able to pull off a no-text icon because their playerbase has already been established and their players already know what they’re playing and what to tell their friends if they want to share what they’re playing.
If you’re just trying to build that playerbase up, you pretty much have two options:
Put as much information as you can into the game icon (of course without overwhelming the player such as with too much text, too much going on in the icon image, etc.)
Put very little information but have the icon be something intriguing; something that makes the player want to play the game to see what the icon means.
Right now, the icon you showed seems to be going for the 2nd option, but it doesn’t really make me want to play the game to find out. All it shows is a character with a sword, so I can just assume that the game is maybe some sort of PVP or RPG game within the fantasy genre.
My recommendation to you would be to add the name of the game somewhere in the icon and pick a concept/mechanic within your game that you want people to associate with your game. Is your game heavily based on combat? Does your game revolve around crafting better gear? Is the focus of your game finding better loot? Whatever the mechanic is that you want people to say “Let’s play the game about [mechanic here]”, try to make that the main object of the icon.
The icon looks good to me, but try adding a text so that new players know what the game could be about. Though you should gain players with a decent good icon, Thumbnail, rich description, and an engaging game play. It’s all about experiment first, and then you settle. Advertisements also have advantages
Sometimes we need to tend to the fact that kids like to earn things (or receive free gifts) and just from giving them a free sword (for your case) would get more plays because then they would want to start collecting all the swords.
What I would do is make him a bit lower, that way his legs are barley visible, also it’d be a great idea to add your logo on there to make it look like a fun game! I wish you best of luck on it.
Honestly, I’d just run an advertisement. If you look at the screenshots, you can see which one is clearly superior. I’ve gotten way more clicks for the same amount on ad spend, just using image ads. They’re pretty low effort as well.
