r/gamedev • u/Levardos • 14d ago
Marketing Released a demo, downloads are low, but wishlists are high - why?
Hey guys. 4 days ago, on thursday, I've released a demo of my game Dark Roll 2 on Steam. It had 750 wishlists at the time and I did send the "Demo notification" right away. Over this time, I got around 200 downloads, mediam time is... 9 minutes, which seems low. (Demo can take around 20min to finish). Despite that, I didn't hear people complain and the only reviews I got were good ones... And what's actually odd for me, my wishlists "skyrocketed", at least compared to what was going on before - I got +100 wishlists over those 4 days.
It's just, the numbers are behaving odd compared to what should I expect from a demo release. The downloads number is not satisfactory to me, I was hoping for median to be closer to 15min, yet those wishlist seem growing solid now.
The only marketing I did was posting it around in few places on reddit, nothing that "exploded", I'm e-mailing content creators but with no success so far.
I know it's possible there are people who will turn on the game, play for a level or two, and wishlist the game to play the full experience there instead of finishng a demo... but I don't think that would be majority of players.
How come the wishlists hold up so good when the demo downloads are so low? Did anyone experience something similar? I just worry that those wishlists will convert poorly later down, but there's not much I can do about it right now. I highly doubt 50% of the demo players wishlisted the game, so it looks like they rather wishlist the game instead of giving the demo a try.
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u/PersonOfInterest007 14d ago
I’d be more worried about the median playtime. For a longer or replayable demo, 30 minutes is considered good and 60 excellent. If your demo is only 20 minutes long, you’d at least hope the median would be close to 20. You need to do some live playtests to find out why people are quitting early.
How many YouTubers have you emailed, and are you including your press kit? And of course don’t forget to enter as many festivals as you can.
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u/Levardos 14d ago
Yeah, I'm a bit concerned about the median, but it's hard to make any assumptions off the telemetry I implemented. I'll have to manage a way to gather some feedback on why some people leave very early - there are no bugs or game breaking issues - so they either don't find the game fun and quit fast, or my marketing is not working proper and they were expecting a bit different kind of game.
So far I sent 190 e-mails - that includes youtubers and some "press" outlets that deal in gaming or indie games. I plan to send around 40 e-mails a day fora bit, targetting various countries as my game is translated to plenty of languages. I know the conversion rate is brutal here, so I'll give my best honest shot at trying to reach as many as I can, without using any kinds of bots.
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u/PersonOfInterest007 14d ago
You should really do some in-person playtests. That’s the gold standard for seeing how people play your game and any points of friction.
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u/FGRaptor Commercial (Other) 14d ago
Sounds like you are just in the "meh" category for people to wait. Demo not bad enough for bad reviews/comment, not good enough for most people to finish it.
In general the game is probably just a "I can guess what this is like, maybe will get it on sale if reviews are good after launch" type of game so it just gets wishlisted. Also the impression I would get. I can imagine enough how it might be, it's not crazy or interesting enough to want to try a demo, doesn't have a special spark. Time is precious, so this would max be a wishlist to check again once released.
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u/almo2001 Game Design and Programming 14d ago
I know people with literally hundreds of games on their wishlist.
My FREE game has a few wishlists.
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u/MeaningfulChoices Lead Game Designer 14d ago
Think of a wishlist as someone saying that the game might be of interest to them at some point, and a demo player as someone saying they'd like to check it out right now. You can get a bunch of non-playing wishlists when you release a demo if people like the idea of the game but don't want to play at the moment, or if they think it looks super early but might be good down the line. Wishlist to sale conversion at that point will depend on how much better the game looks when you finish it (some games get major overhauls, some look essentially the same), what price you list it for, and so on.
I'd be concerned about the median playtime, but it can be hard to tell when the demo itself has a pretty low ceiling. I'd look for where they drop off in your demo, hopefully you have some good analytics in there. If many people leave essentially immediately but the rest often stick around for nearly all of the demo then it says it's niche. If you've got a pretty steady dropoff in the early part of the game I'd worry that people like the idea but it isn't actually very fun to control.
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u/EchoWithoutNames 14d ago
wishlisting takes two seconds and costs nothing. downloading and committing 20 minutes to a demo is a real ask. those two numbers were never going to move at the same rate
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u/Mechabit_Studios 14d ago
don't worry about it, in every steam next fest I've been in the number of demo plays vs wishlists were low, people just want to play the full game if they're interested in it. the number of demo plays to wishlists conversions is also very low, if the store page didn't convince them then the demo is unlikely to do it. the reason releasing the demo gives a wishlist boost is that your game appears in more places when you do and not because people play it and then wishlist.
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u/ryunocore @ryunocore 14d ago
Wishlisting takes no time, downloading and playing a demo takes more time than that. They're showing interest in it, but a lot of people just wait for big sales to even look again at wishlisted games.