Short Answer: Yes

Longer Answer:

So around the second day of this year, I suddenly had an idea facing the extremely less play count on my game: How about let me submit this game to a lot of game jams? (I also extremely need feedback on my games)

I know this method had been used by plenty of developers out there, but still I gotta try it myself.

And here's the results of my game jam spamming experiment.

Also, before you come to my comment after reading this blog and say something like 

"The result of this isn't even impressive" but hey I tried. 

Take this blog as my view on this rather than an absolute guide ty

A bit background on my game. Fire Punch is a really simple 2D top-down endless game. 

You basically punch enemies outside the bounds and that's it!

My game doesn't have fancy art, thumbnail or even a proper animation for enemies, 

but I guess this would truly show how does my "promotion" method works.

Statistics

Embed

Not gonna lie, but this surprised me.

I never thought Embed would be the largest single traffic source.

If you never checked out my games, here's what I do normally at the end of every game description:

I did this mainly because it kinda works like the "last 20 seconds recommendation video chosen by creator" widget in YouTube.

If people likes the recommended video / game of yours, there's a great possibility they will continue this streak and keep watching / playing your other games.

Other than this, only 2 other traffic sources there are (Except for game jam that I'm going to talk about in a sec). It's

• Recommendation on home page
• Through your creator page

I'm not talking about featuring games here since I know basically nothing about it. 

First, Recommendation is just betting your other games show up on there.  Risky for starters.

Through your creator page is unlikely unless the player really liked your current game and thought you have more quality games to offer.

Embed is the best shot for you to let players continue playing your games

Here's the part where is probably this reason you clicked on this blog. 

22 Game Jams are submitted. 

79 clicks are gathered from all those.

It does indeed boost a lot(relative to the initial views) of views. 

You can try this game jam spamming method if you are a beginner to this platform and has less or no experience to marketing. 

But a few reasons of me kinda not liking this idea (sure, nice words from the guy that did this):

• Not Long Termed

Submitting to game jams only boost your views and plays for a short period of time. After that (You can kinda see it from my graph at the beginning of this blog), it starts to cool down.

• Critics

A lot of developers don't like this at all (I understand it so sorry to those host hosting the game jams that I submitted to). Worst case scenario: You get a bad reputation following your itch.io profile. (I might already have this)

• Wrong targeted Audience

Game Jams are targeted mainly towards developers. For large game jams, your game might not stand out. For smaller game jams, little players will play your game.

That's it. If you only wanted to see, there's nothing related behind of this.

Things that did NOT work out for me.

Posting trailers. It's just a joke lol. For me, a well made thumbnail is 100% more important than a well made trailer.

 
Without the good thumbnail, nobody will even hover above your game.
Also don't think you can get massive plays from YouTube.

However, as far as I see (I might be blind), posting memes on your game or a funny devlog does help boosting your game.

Posting your game on release-announcements thread.

For real, I got 0 clicks from 2 posts that I made. 

But after all, posting on there is effortless since you just need a screenshot and you're good to go. Why not then?

This would be it I guess. Don't take this post seriously lol