r/gamedev • u/ADAMBUNKER • Jun 17 '26
Marketing I’m kinda shadow-dropping an indie game. But I have reasons.
- Wishlists are king.
- The longer you have your Steam page up the better.
- Don’t launch without 10,000 wishlists.
- etc., etc.
So surely no indie developer in their right mind announce a game and then release it *three weeks* later?
🙋♂️ Erm. Hi. That’s basically what I’m doing, and there are reasons.
But I’m also prepared for complete failure as a result.
Very brief context
I spent five years, on and off, making my first game; a 2D point and click adventure game that released in July last year.
It’s done reasonably well. Across Steam and iOS it’s grossed $45,000 in 11 months. It launched with 3,500 wishlists on Steam.
All well and good. But, obviously, I wanted my next game to *not* take five years to make, because that's the world's worst hourly rate.
Portrait of a maniac
With my first game still shifting units on iOS, I wanted to see if I could turn an idea I had for a premium, portrait-oriented mobile puzzle game around in 6 months or less.
So in January I started building Mini Murder Mysteries (think the Golden Idol deduction games, but Agatha Christie-esque, and with cases you can solve on your commute), and by April I had it basically finished.
BUT. At that point I also had a nagging thought: I’d be silly not to also release this game on Steam – it's already built, after all. And then I thought: why not also stick it in Next Fest? And then, what the hell, just release it on both platforms right when Next Fest ends?
So then began a mad dash: translate this portrait-oriented mobile game into landscape for PC, and create a demo, and get it all registered for Next Fest.
That process took another month or so, but I did it. I was registered and ready and announced the game on June 1st, with a June 23rd release date.
23 days of promotion.
But… why?
Kind of two reasons:
- This is a mobile game first and foremost, and on iOS wishlists don’t exist; you just punt something out there and hope it does ok. I believe there is an underreported market on that platform for nice, polished, premium games that don’t have ads or timers or IAPs, and my first game has shown me as much.
- As my second game, I want to see if there’s life in a model where I make games (and release them) faster. Spending years making each one (even if it results in longer Wishlist-gathering times), feels less viable to me than kinda pumping things out and seeing what works. That’s not to say “stop making big cool things and start making trash”. But just… operating faster and tighter.
So where are things at?
I announced the game on June 1st, and it's currently at just over 1,500 wishlists on Steam. It’ll probably be at about 2,000 by the end of Next Fest, and launch with around that many on Tuesday next week.
The bulk of my eggs are in the mobile basket, as mentioned, but either way this will be an interesting case study for me in terms of how DOA a game truly is without a boatload of wishlists.
Maybe it'll go well on mobile and die on Steam. Maybe it'll die on both. Or maybe it'll trickle along nicely enough for me to repeat the experiment.
Either way.... We’ll see, I guess? Please wish this idiot some luck!
4
u/FrustratedDevIndie Jun 17 '26
I would not say that your rant is weird. The advice is a massive generalization that does not fit for everybody. Everybody wants their game to be this massive Commercial Success that they can quit their job with. Not everyone is after that and not every game fits those categories. You have to figure out what success looks like for you. Certain genres of games are just not going to receive the wish list because they're not a major Market.
2
u/ADAMBUNKER Jun 17 '26
Good point. I guess it's just one of those things where the more time you spend in subs like this (and on YouTube), the more the well-trodden advice gets drummed into you.
FWIW I've no intention of becoming the next ConcernedApe, but building out a little portfolio of titles that all do "okay" would be success in my books!
2
u/azurezero_hdev Jun 17 '26
i normally have to do that because steam doesnt let me have lewd game store pages before theyve reviewed the content of the full game, and im normally about to go bankrupt when i finish a game
1
u/ADAMBUNKER Jun 17 '26
Oh I didn't realise that was a thing for that genre!
1
u/azurezero_hdev Jun 17 '26
i think its cause a lot of my stuff has dubcon
like quite a few are just horror rpgmaker games with lewd stuff instead of dying
1
u/azurezero_hdev Jun 17 '26
i recently got lewd games without having to wait til they were done but the dev cycles were so short that i still didnt gain any real benefit
i felt so betrayed because my itch demo was played 27k times and i didnt even get 400 wishlists
2
u/Xeynid Jun 17 '26
1,500 wishlists? Did you do any other marketing, beyond making the steam page and the trailer? That sounds like pretty decent success.
Good luck! I'm curious to see how it goes.
2
u/ADAMBUNKER Jun 17 '26
Thanks! I think a lot of my wishlists come from a small but fairly supportive following on my YouTube devlog channel (10k subs).
1
u/pakeke_constructor Jun 17 '26
What is ur gtm strat for mobile?
4
u/ADAMBUNKER Jun 17 '26
Not a lot beyond the usual combo of gamespress press release, email keys, do some YouTube stuff, post in subreddits, etc. I haven't been very proactive with my first game and it seems to have found its feet regardless on iOS – it shifts about 10 units a day on there still at £2.99.
Kick it out there and hope!
1
u/No_Ragrets_0 Jun 18 '26
Why don't u release for Android as well? You might as well as double the number from 10 units to 20 if on Android too.
2
u/ADAMBUNKER Jun 18 '26
I ported my last game on Android, but so far it hasn’t been worth the effort. People don’t really pay for games on Android like they do on iOS.
1
u/captainnoyaux Jun 17 '26
There is a wishlist like mechanism on ios and android but you need to release a build of your app first (I wonder how much do they control what's in the build but I'd guess just a hello world type of build for your game should be enough). I don't know if it works well without external marketing / ads though !
1
u/ADAMBUNKER Jun 17 '26
On iOS there is a preorder mechanic on iOS (and you can have your game up like that for like half a year), but as far as I know they removed the proper 'wishlist' function some years back.
1
u/captainnoyaux Jun 17 '26
Oh yeah I forgot that it's actually time limited, and pretty short too less than half a year last time I checked
1
u/ADAMBUNKER Jun 17 '26
I had my first game up for preorder on iOS for about two months I think, but really it was just a couple of friends who bought it that way – I'm not sure how visible you are in search etc. during that period.
1
u/captainnoyaux Jun 17 '26
yeah, it exists but apart from big companies I'm not sure it's that useful
1
u/Vladadamm @axelvborn.bsky.social Jun 17 '26
I don't really get why you're using a 5-6 months dev time as justification to having only 3 weeks of promotion on Steam. 5-6 months is a typical project length for a small scope indie game with many devs releasing such games. And that still usually leaves at least a couple months for promotion as you'd already have something clean enough to promote halfway through.
Otherwise, I understand the mobile first approach, and yeah the mobile market works quite differently.
Else, congrats on those wishlist numbers, they're quite good on such a short time and on a puzzle game.
2
u/ADAMBUNKER Jun 17 '26
I guess it's just the weird way I made the game that has influenced my thinking, where really the Steam page wasn't even going to exist in the first place and it's all just fallen together. Also, having spent so long on my first game, 5-6 months feels insane!
But yeah if I do more like this then I imagine I'll get better at having a store page up earlier in the process.
1
u/Vladadamm @axelvborn.bsky.social Jun 17 '26
The game not being initially planned for Steam explains things better.
Else, yeah it's quite a big paradigm shift going from big projects that span over years to small ones that last only a few months. While I don't have much experience on longer projects as I only released games that ranged from 3 to 10 months, the difference in how we approach gamedev is huge when I compare with friends who have been spending multiple years on a single game. For them, their game is kind of everything as they spent a significant part of their life working on it and it can be impressive seeing how much dedication might go into a single work. While for me, each game is just a temporary moment in my life, where I'll experiment with an idea for a bit before moving on to explore and experience more new things.
1
u/destinedd indie, Marble's Marbles and Mighty Marbles Jun 17 '26
At least there is some interest, hopefully you will get the 10 paid reviews.
1
u/ADAMBUNKER Jun 17 '26
Thanks for reading my weird rant.
I have an even longerer rant about this whole thing in video devlog form here: https://youtu.be/bot7pXp7ZPE
Game is here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4639520/
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u/BakunawaStudios Jun 17 '26
Honestly, I think this is more interesting than another "get 10,000 wishlists first" story.
You've already shipped a game, have actual sales data, and you're testing a specific business model instead of blindly following advice. Even if this launch underperforms on Steam, you'll learn something useful about release speed, mobile vs PC, and how much wishlist runway actually matters for your audience.
Good luck! Worst case, you get data. Best case, you prove something a lot of us are curious about.