DYLUCK'S PROFILE

Good read, and I gotta say so far I'm impressed with your willingness to quickly do away with some of the old tedious traditions of the past in favor of newer more enjoyable mechanics for modern players.

author=Dragol
It's hard in Best Antogonist to choose between Umbral Soul and Christmas Card 2017.
Because in CC2017 he is obviously better, and it's not a game )
But seriously, wtf with Misaos?

That category is inaccurately labeled as "Antagonist means Villain.", so there's your freebie, Umbral Soul! *hands over the award* =D

author=Tuomo_L
my game has literally literature too with the lore books

But is it literally literature with a lot of alliteration? =)

Sleeper Hit of the Year
The most underrated game of the year. The game everybody hears is good but nobody has bothered to play.

The description for Sleeper Hit isn't really right. If everybody hears it's good, then it's already not underrated or a sleeper. It should be a game that turns out to be better than what people thought initially, or one that you think deserves more credit or attention than it has gotten. Games that have been sticking on the main page for a long time definitely don't fit that category.

Nice article. Lots of good advice for people looking to promote their games.

RMN is bigger than you might think, but in ways you don't realize
RMN still gets about 7,000 to 9,000 unique visitors a day. A fly-by audience is here, but it is going to be a largely silent one. You will see this reflected in some of the other statistics, such as pageviews, downloads and "buzz score". Some games, for example, despite not getting any comments or reviews with any real frequency, constantly find themselves "buzzing" on the frontpage due to this large audience. You veteran members of RMN will have immediately thought of the viral hit game Pom Gets Wi-Fi. (That game made huge waves at RMN in the summer of 2013 after it was played by Pewdiepie on his Youtube channel.)

I've always wondered, where do those other frontpage mainstays like Lisa, Pocket Mirror, Heartache 101, Oneshot, Dreaming Mary get their endless supply of large audiences from?

Maybe RMN isn't the right place for your project
The R is for RPG. And RPG maker network does sound a lot like that game engine RPG Maker. People navigating to this site are going to come here with certain expectations in their mind, and if your game does not fit that mold - and, let's be honest here, that mold being a 2D top-down retro RPG - you are going to find it all the more difficult to garner an audience.

Isn't it kind of weird though that so many of the games that stay on the main page or get featured / spotlighted tend to not be RPGs? I mean sure I guess every type of game deserves a chance too. But if most people really do come here looking for RPGs, then it kind of feels like the main page tends to get stuck in the middle of no man's land where neither the audience nor developers are getting what they came for.

Also, can the buzzing section just contain more slots? Most of the slots are usually taken by the same games that are always up there, leaving so few spots for other games to have a chance to rotate into. If space is an issue, the New and Notable section can go, because it's so redundant with New Downloads most of the time anyways.