With its top-down perspective and outlandish violence, it certainly has shades of the former with a very snappy pace. Geneshift began life nine years ago, inspired by the biggest names of the time: GTA2 and Counter-Strike, as well as a small indie game called Soldat.
Still, not bad for a solo developer who began creating the game simply as a way to learn C++. “It’s damn cool to be the 10th most ‘played’ game of all time,” Johnson tells us, though this is predominantly due to an issue with Steam Trading Cards that caused bots to descend on the game. But the result didn’t quite stem from the reasons Johnson was anticipating. It’s a remarkable achievement for a small indie game against such competition. Little did he know, it would soon rise to have the 10th highest ever player count on Steam alongside the likes of PUBG, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. That’s exactly what developer Ben Johnson found with his game Geneshift. So it only makes sense that using Reddit to market your game is going to get some huge results. It has an avid fanbase of over 330M monthly unique visitors and over 18 billion views each month (according to this Reddit blog), with the gaming subreddit being amongst the site’s most popular. Reddit is, of course, the front page of the Internet. Today though, it’s simple: share it on Reddit. How do you market it? Even 10 years ago, this would have been a drawn-out, costly affair, nevermind whether or not it was possible considering your independent position within the industry.
So, you’ve spent nine years creating your dream game and you’re after the biggest possible audience to play it.