yeah.. Finding games related forums should be a nicest idea.. And make sure the forums have enough active members to receive your promotions/offers.. Just simply make sure the forum is worth to spend time on.. And you could target Forums which have games as sub forum inside the main forums.. That could help even better than just Games forums alone.. Hope it makes sense.
You should be engaged with the community members of each forum you join and advertise on the proper sections if they are available, just search on Google or any search engines for" Gaming Forum" and you will find many that you can join.
You have to blend forum links (not signature links) with your other link building strategies. All forums are great as long as they're targeted to your site's theme.
You need to clearly define what you want to use the forums for. Is it for link building or traffic? If it is for link building, then there is no point because most of the forum links are no follow but if it is for traffic back to your site, then it is a very good source of traffic. Search for your niche forums that receive high volume of daily users and allows links in their signatures. Familiarize yourself with the rules of the forum because they vary from one forum to another. Pick two forums so that you will be effective and also to prevent burn out. Post useful comments and offer useful advice, build a reputation and credibility in the forum. When you do these, people will naturally click the link in your signature and are siphoned to the target destination.
Year! It should be forums related to your product. At the same time, the main goal is to manage the feedbacks and recommendations, for instance your app, so that they work for your sales. Links should be placed in topical posts and give useful information to users. Most of the links could be nofollow and use non-commercial anchor text. These are the links which can not attract penalty.
Forums are a great way to build branding around your product/website, you need to do it consistently though and provide high quality posts with or without anchor texts / links better be dofollow .. Get yourself the paid version of https://ahrefs.com/ and watch your competition closely ... what type of backlinks they have etc. Youll notice that they have a wide variety of links including forum links that are basically built by others that are spreading the word..
Forums are basically the area of discussions on members queries or information they want to share with others and from this point of view .Forums is not only used for link building it is solved your queries.and high PR forums is used for link building.
Forums are not meant for getting backlinks. If someone does it only for this purpose, he/she might be banned from the respective group. Sometimes, it is seen that websites do not have enough documents related to the topic. If they get backlink from the forum, the visitors' bounce rate may be higher from the site. Visitors won't get the desired content.
Dont use forums for link building. Forums are not meant for that. Forums should only be used to generate referral traffic and sharing information. If you want to build links, generate quality content. You said that you want links related to games. If you have your own game that you're promoting, then you can submit your game to gaming directories. There are many of those out there. If you dont have a game, then you should consider spending time to generate content. And I am not talking about 400-500 word articles that you use for article directories. If you plan to create that type of content, you will not succeed. NEVER. You need to create high quality content and submit it to industry-relevant sites (blogs, news/media, social, forums etc).
IMO forum links has been beneficial for me but the negative side is most of the dofollow forums are turning into nofollow.
There are actually a lot of forum sites relevant to your niche that you can find on the web. If you want to find the most relevant one then I suggest that you use google advance operators when searching the web.
Forums are the great source of building link as well as traffic. There are numerous forums over the internet that are really good enough. Here are few high PR forums which I used mostly. DP Forum, WForum, SBB Forum, AE Forum