I've released multiple free and open source games (of course made in FreePascal) myself and also participated in several commercial game projects (also made in FreePascal
). However, the first is not a commercial release experience and in the second I was a humble programmer, so also not aware of the commercial side. So, the notes below are rather from generic gamedev experience, I can't advice you on how to earn money or what price tag to put there.
So, from generic point of view:
1. Your page doesn't tell me almost a thing about your game. I suggest it's a hexagonal turn-based multiplayer strategy. This doesn't answer the question "why should I buy it?". You need to define your target audience and clearly communicate to them what you are selling and how it fits their demands. The game is described as "chess" though I rather see Battle for Wesnoth. Maybe there is some chess variant that I'm not aware of? Don't tell me, tell it on the landing page.
2. How does one play this game? I see a bunch of static screenshots that don't help me a bit. Make a trailer / gameplay trailer or at least a gif that will show the game flow; and most importantly - why the gameplay is exciting and worth spending my money on.
3. As it seems like some rare game variant or some unique take on chess - a free demo may give players by far better understanding of what the game is. Though demo is a double-edged sword, first it allows players to try the game for free and get hooked enough to buy it (if there is a good hook in the game), but on the other hand it may also give "free players" enough gameplay not to buy the full game. Hooking players with a demo is complicated.
4. You offer only Linux platform. My current hobby project has approximately 3% of the downloads for Linux platforms, 42% for Android and 55% for Windows. Free Pascal allows you to easily support Windows target and not so easily but still possible Android, it's more than worth a try.
5. Stonechess name is almost totally un-SEO-able. Google has >27 millions search results for this. You still can get to the first page, but until you do, you simply don't exist.
6. Most critical, IMHO. You are offering an online multiplayer game with no singleplayer option. How many concurrent players do you have now? How many can you easily obtain? Let's imagine: player buys your game but has no one to play with. Why did he buy the game? You need a stable online presence of a significant number of players for at least some matchmaking. I can understand that two friends can buy the game to play together and sync by-phone. But this is extremely small amount of game copies sold, given all of the above, may be literally zero.
7. When entering commercial gamedev you will eventually need to learn to do marketing and promotion of your game. If nobody knows about your game, it equals that it doesn't exist. Itch offers you some visibility buff at release, but in the last 24 hours there were 384 games released at Itch. You all compete for player's attention, how do you stand out among others?
8. Last but not least, Steam has 10x audience than Itch. If you want to go serious commercial unfortunately you don't have much of an option. Also consider other stores like Epic and maybe smaller ones like GameJolt, but you need to estimate result/effort ratio for those, which requires experience.
And finally, do not put too much hopes on your first release. You may get "lucky" and it will be a hit, but usually it's a miss. That's normal. Analyze, research, learn. See what worked, what didn't.
P.S. One very hard question. Why did you make specifically this game? Why did you pick this specific genre and visual aesthetics? Why multiplayer? I don't ask for answers, what I mean you must do market research. If you plan to go commercial, especially in hopes of self-sustaining your development, you must understand for whom you make games (target audience), what they like and what hooks them, how likely they are to spend money (should you use one-time payment, ads, INAPs or DLC monetization strategy?), how filled is this specific niche, etc. This should be done
before writing the first line of code.
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