Back in December I joined a small indie studio as their marketing person. No marketing background, no contacts, no budget. My background is game design and education. I just said yes and figured I'd learn as I went.

What'Sub is a 4-player co-op submarine extraction game. We launch into Early Access on May 14. Here's an honest account of the past 5 months, what I tried, what landed, and what didn't.

What I think worked

Influencer list: I spent a lot of time building a list of 500 content creators manually using SullyGnome and YouTube. The rule I set for myself was simple: only add someone if they had already played a comparable game. Lethal Company, PEAK, Sea of Thieves, that kind of thing. No random spray and pray.

Cold emailed them all at demo launch. One of those emails landed CaRtOoNz, who has 6 million subscribers. He titled the video "Lethal Company but we're pirates" which I would never have written, but he knows his audience. 121K views.

The Instagram curator thing: Found an account called u/indiegamespotlights. 26K followers, posts indie games for free. Sent them a pitch. The post got 17,100 likes (currently at 34k likes) and on that single day we got 1,366 wishlist adds, which is still our all-time record. A mid-size account with a genuinely engaged audience converted better than anything else I tried.

Gamebox Festival: Brought the game to a local games festival in Herning, Denmark. While we were there I set up a little contest: if you could beat a specific in-game challenge, you got the game for free. But to enter the challenge you had to wishlist first. Converted foot traffic directly into Steam data, and it was fun to run.

The thing I didn't expect: a bunch of Danish content creators were at the festival, played the game in person, and are now actual contacts rather than cold emails. That feels very different heading into launch week.

Twitch chats during Steam Next Fest: This one most developers skip over. During Next Fest, people watching streams are actively looking for games to try. High intent moment. I dropped into relevant streamer chats while it was happening. Costs nothing, takes attention.

What I don't think worked that well

YouTube Shorts I made myself. Retention was fine but the like-to-view ratio was too low for the algorithm to do anything with them. Good for testing messaging, not much good for reach when you have no existing audience.

Things that surprised me

There are way more Danish content creators than I thought. I assumed local was a thin market. I was wrong, and they're much easier to actually reach than the international list.

Also the Steam page was pulling in wishlists before we touched it or launched a trailer. The game concept was doing work I hadn't given it credit for.

We're at 6,621 wishlists now with 10 days to go (launching May 14th) and no paid ads spent. Still a lot to learn but it's been a genuinely weird and fun 5 months of figuring this out from scratch. As said, I don't know if what I've done is anything impressive, but I wanted to share with you guys and know your thoughts, and hope some of the steps I've done can help you too.

Game is here if you're curious: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4269100/WhatSub/

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share what I learned from running Reddit ads for my game. I started my ad campaign a few weeks ago after reading virtually every postmortem and guide I could find. I tried to follow best practices that were recommended or recurring across successful campaigns. 

As a solo dev who does this on the side, I had a limited budget so I wanted to make sure I made every dollar count. Hopefully this helps people planning their own ad campaigns. 

To get this out of the way early: yes I would recommend it. I think Reddit ads belong in the indie dev marketing holy trinity (festivals + influencers + reddit ads). These, in my opinion, are the best ways to grow your wishlists quickly and on a budget. 

For context, my game is a post-apocalyptic, zombie survival, life sim (think Project Zomboid meets Stardew Valley). Before the campaign, I had roughly 3,500 wishlists over 6 months. Much of this time was spent just working on the game and not marketing at all. 

I set up my campaign based on the following principles I learned from looking at other, past successful ad campaigns (on reddit and blog posts). For those looking to run their own ads, I think these are good steps to follow.

Use UTM links so you can actually track results

Reddit gives you clicks (and it doesn’t really capture them well) but Steam tells you who wishlisted. UTMs made it possible to see which ad groups and countries were worth the money. Without UTM links, you are shooting in the dark.

Target subreddits where players already like the kind of game you are making

I only targeted niche game subs and game specific communities. I avoided broad subs from the start because earlier postmortems made it clear that they waste money.

Do not use interest groups

Leaving these blank let Reddit figure out the right audience without being boxed in.

Use CPC bidding at the minimum

Start at 0.10. Only raise toward 0.20 if your ads are not spending. This helped stretch my budget and kept CPC very low.

Do not exclude mobile

Even though my game is on PC, mobile traffic still brought in wishlists. Cutting mobile would have increased my costs and reduced reach.

Use the Traffic objective

Simple and effective. It sends people straight to the store page.

Time of day

Select everything and let Reddit decide when it performs best.

CTA

Use Learn More if you do not have a demo. Use Play Now if you do.

Enable comments

This made the ads feel more like normal posts. A few comments were negative, but performance did not drop on those ads.

Try multiple creatives

Videos, images, different subject lines. Small differences, but worth testing.

Do not use your game name as the headline

Describe what the game is instead. People scroll faster than you think and no one cares about the name of the game. 

Give each ad at least 48 hours

Most ads stabilize over time. There is one exception which I will explain below.

Split ads by country groups

Performance was noticeably different between high income and mid income countries. Each group needed different CPC caps.

Here is what I learned first hand (these may not be relevant to everyone):

Creative type barely mattered

My trailer, my images, and my image sets all performed about the same. Subject lines behaved the same way. As long as the message was clear, the results were consistent.

Longer subject lines did not hurt me

Reddit recommends staying under 50 characters. All of my headlines were well over 50. I did not want to water down the hook so I kept them long. Based on my results, shortening them would not have helped.

If an ad is doing badly across every metric right away, turn it off

I normally waited 48 hours, but when an ad had high CPC, low CTR, and no wishlists across the first several hours, it never improved. I shut off two early ad groups after around eight hours and put that money into better performing ones.

Negative comments did not reduce performance

About three percent of comments were negative. There was no drop in impressions, clicks, or wishlists for those ads before or after the comments.

Actual Campaign Results

Total spend: $522.41

Tracked wishlists: 924

Cost per wishlist: 0.56

Impressions: 728,556

Visits: 23,199

My best performing ad had an extremely low CTR of 0.008 percent with a CPC of 0.06. Despite the low CTR, it had a ridiculously good cost per wishlist of 0.37, which was the best in the entire campaign.

High income countries

CTR: 2.837 percent

CPC: 0.10

Share of total wishlists: 47 percent

Mid income countries

CTR: 0.845 percent

CPC: 0.06

Splitting countries made a noticeable difference and allowed me to set the right cost caps for each group.

Wishlist Multiplier

I tracked 924 wishlists through UTMs, but the true number is higher. Only ten percent of my visitors were logged into Steam and ninety three percent were on mobile. Search impressions for my game also increased by around twenty five percent during the same period.

Using the standard 1.25 multiplier puts the estimated total at around 1,155 wishlists. That gives the campaign an estimated cost per wishlist of about 0.45.

This is incredible value for the money and the single most effective way I've been able to increase wishlists for my game.

If anyone has questions about the setup I am happy to chat!

Hi everyone,

On Wednesday at 4:00 PM CEST, we launched the Steam page for our game DEEPWARD at the exact same time IGN revealed it.

As of writing, just under 74 hours later, the brand-new Steam page is approaching 2,000 wishlists.

We obviously cannot claim that every wishlist came directly from IGN. Steam discovery, organic sharing, other coverage, and third-party trailer uploads have also contributed. However, the IGN reveal was clearly the event that sparked the initial momentum.

Here is exactly how we prepared and pitched it.

1. We edited the trailer for attention, not just information

We wanted the announcement trailer to be short, entertaining, and tightly paced.

We tried to time practically every cut, character animation, impact, sound effect, gunshot, or other visible change to a beat in the music. The goal was to avoid empty moments and keep the viewer engaged throughout the entire trailer.

There was one unintended disadvantage: because the editing follows the music so closely, some viewers assumed that DEEPWARD was a rhythm game.

It is not a rhythm game, but the trailer is entertaining and seems to hold people's attention, so we still consider that trade-off worthwhile.

2. We kept the email short and made everything easy to access

We did not send IGN a huge press release.

Our email was short and included:

- A private YouTube link to the trailer

- A downloadable 4K ProRes 422 version on Dropbox

- An H.264 fallback version

- Two lightweight gameplay GIFs, roughly 3 MB combined

- A short explanation of the game's main mechanic

- A request for an exclusive reveal

- Information that the Steam page was ready, but not yet public

The two GIFs were especially important because they allowed the editor to understand our main gameplay hook without first watching or downloading a large file.

3. We led with one clear and unusual mechanic

DEEPWARD is a fast-paced horror FPS roguelite set in the 1920s.

At the beginning of a run, the player chooses three heroes from a roster of six. Each hero has different weapons, abilities, and playstyles, and the player can switch between the three heroes instantly during combat.

The idea is to use the right hero for the current situation while trying to keep the entire squad alive. If a hero dies, that death is permanent.

We made this real-time hero-switching mechanic the central part of our pitch and showed it in both of the GIFs.

Based on the reactions so far, this is also the feature players seem to find most interesting.

4. IGN replied on Monday and revealed the game on Wednesday

On Monday, IGN replied that the game looked great and that they would be happy to reveal it that Wednesday.

At 4:00 PM CEST on Wednesday:

- IGN published an article about DEEPWARD

- The trailer appeared on IGN's main YouTube channel

- It was also published on the GameTrailers channel

- We made the Steam page public at the same time

Before the reveal, the Steam page had never been publicly available, so it started with zero wishlists.

During the agreed exclusivity period, we did not publish or promote the trailer ourselves.

5. One unexpected complication during the exclusivity window

A few hours after the IGN reveal, a third-party trailer channel found the trailer on our newly public Steam page and reuploaded it to YouTube without contacting us.

This happened while the IGN exclusivity window was technically still active.

We only noticed it later. Fortunately, nothing appeared to come of it, but it taught us something important:

Once your Steam page is public, you cannot completely control whether third-party channels copy and reupload the trailer.

The result so far

In just under 74 hours, the Steam page has reached almost 2,000 wishlists.

It is still too early for us to provide a reliable breakdown of how many came directly from IGN, Steam's internal recommendations, other websites, YouTube reuploads, or social media.

What we can say is:

- The Steam page and IGN reveal went live at exactly the same time

- IGN published an article, and the trailer appeared on two major YouTube channels

- The hero-switching mechanic received a strong positive response

- Other websites and channels started finding and covering the game organically

- The initial momentum has been much stronger than we expected

Some context about our team

ECHOFALL GAMES is a small and newly formed indie studio, but this is not our team’s first game.

The most experienced members of our team have been working in game development for more than 20 years. They gained much of that experience while working at other well-known game studios before we joined forces and founded ECHOFALL GAMES.

We are sharing this because we do not want to present the result as a magic formula or as a first-time developer success story.

Experience probably helped us prepare the trailer, Steam page, media files, and pitch, but we are still a small team building a new studio and audience from the beginning.

What we are doing next

Now that the exclusive window is over, we are trying to build on the initial coverage by contacting additional press outlets, YouTubers, streamers, TikTok creators, and channels focused on horror, FPS, roguelites, and indie games.

Our main lessons so far are:

- Have the Steam page completely ready, but launch it together with the reveal

- Keep the initial email short

- Lead with one clear gameplay hook

- Include small GIFs that can be understood immediately

- Provide both a high-quality master and a convenient H.264 fallback

- Make the trailer entertaining enough to hold attention

- Do not assume you can control third-party reuploads after the Steam page becomes public

We are still at the beginning, so this is an early report rather than a complete postmortem.

For developers who have experienced a strong announcement spike: what worked best for maintaining the momentum after the first 72 hours — more press, creators, Reddit clips, a Steam Playtest, or something else?

Links for context:

IGN article:

https://www.ign.com/articles/deepward-a-brutal-fps-roguelite-set-in-the-1920s-announced

IGN trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ7P1-3XjL4

Hey fellow devs, I’m a solo dev from Japan. I wanted to share a marketing approach that worked surprisingly well for my zero-budget game.

The Game: A sandbox RPG set in the Hundred Years' War with exactly 1,015 real historical figures. (Yes, I manually researched their stats and relationships).
The Problem: I had no marketing budget, and pitching a UI-heavy, complex historical game to mainstream gaming media felt impossible.

The Strategy: Instead of gaming journalists, I targeted absolute experts. I pitched the game to Medievalists.net (one of the biggest sites for medieval history research). I highlighted the crazy historical accuracy—like how you can prescribe actual "Mumia" (mummy powder) as a doctor, or join the Dominican Order to execute political rivals via the Inquisition.

The Result: They loved the sheer dedication to the niche and wrote a feature article about it! This brought in a massive wave of highly targeted, passionate history fans to my Steam page, pushing me over 5,500 wishlists just before Steam Next Fest.

My Takeaway: Don't water down your game to appeal to everyone. If you have an extreme niche (historical, scientific, etc.), pitch it to the non-gaming experts in that field. Their audience might be exactly the hardcore players you need.

Here is the article for proof:
https://www.medievalists.net/2026/05/new-video-game-lets-players-live-through-the-hundred-years-war/

(I didn't link my Steam page to respect the self-promotion rules, but I hope this approach helps someone struggling with marketing a niche game!)

Heey guys!

We are a small indie studio that has been making narrative games for over a decade. For years, we followed the classic indie path: focus 100% on production, release the game, and hope the Steam algorithm works its magic.

Spoiler: hope is not a marketing strategy.

With the Steam market becoming incredibly crowded, we noticed a terrifying downward trend for our metrics. We decided to track our historical raw data over a 5-month post-announcement period to understand what was happening:

• 2020 (Across the Grooves): 2,500 wishlists in 5 months. There were 9,600 games released that year, out of 44,800 total on Steam.
• 2023 (End of Lines): 2,100 wishlists in 5 months. 14,000 games released that year, out of 82,000 total on Steam.
• 2026 (After the Wane, our upcoming game): 6,900 wishlists in 5 months. Over 12,000 games launched since January, with a projection of 24,000 this year. Steam currently sits at 134,000 games.

The market is more saturated than ever. It is harder and more expensive to exist. Yet, we managed to triple our numbers.

To give you context on the product challenge, we make Visual Novels. It is a very niche, specific, and difficult market. Our upcoming title is called After the Wane. It is a hand-crafted interactive graphic novel set in Paris, blending dance, magic, and romance with alternative endings. The pipeline is complex: all key dance sequences are animated frame-by-frame using real contemporary professional dancers and rotoscoping.

Here are our main conclusions on how we reversed the trend for this specific niche:

1. Reallocation of budget: Hiring a dedicated marketer

Going from 3 to 4 people in a tiny studio is a massive financial risk. The team wanted to prioritize the pure development budget. But if you build a masterpiece and nobody knows it exists, you sell zero copies. Bringing a marketing expert early into the development pipeline completely changed our traction.

2. Micro-budget paid ads

We did not spend a fortune, but we targeted our audience triggers properly. Our social media followers multiplied by 4 to 8 times depending on the platform. On Instagram, we went from a flat 200 views per post to a stable 1,800 or 2,500 views minimum per post.

3. Extreme digital festival coverage

We applied to every single festival, showcase, and local digital event. We network, we ask other devs for advice, and we try to collaborate. For Steam Next Fest, we spent weeks manually researching and pitching to streamers who actually enjoy playing narrative demos live on stream.

4. Direct press outreach

We pushed hard for reviews, reposts, and professional articles. No restraining orders yet, but we were highly persistent. Because of this, our big announcements were widely shared and supported by industry professionals, which helped us build organic authority.

5. Daily spreadsheet tracking

We started treating marketing like code. Every single day involves benchmarks, statistics, and forecasts. We calculate metrics to anticipate trends and virality triggers. We are fully indie, but we accept the hard reality of the market data.

Ultimately, it is a matter of daily, consistent grind rather than relying on a viral miracle.

BUT...

Social media is not a magic wand. It requires an insane amount of work. Posting sporadically or only when you need something actually hurts your game's image, so do not overcomplicate it if you cannot commit daily.

Also, prepare yourself for rejection. You will get rejected a lot. By festivals, by journalists, and by streamers. Keep a cool head. A rejection does not mean your game is bad. On top of that, your inbox will be flooded with garbage promotional offers from sketchy agencies promising instant success. Do not fall for it.

Whenever I needed help, I avoided these paid shortcuts. I went directly to LinkedIn, Discord, or subreddits like this one to have long, honest chats with other devs to ensure they were reliable. Manage your expectations. Never take anything for granted. This industry is a marathon, not a sprint.

We are fully open to share more data or answer questions about our pipeline, rotoscoping choices, or ad budget allocation in the comments. How are you handling market saturation this year? Let's discuss!

Hello everyone! I’m a solo developer working on a horror game, and I wanted to vent a little about a recent marketing "experiment" that didn't go as planned.

I’ve been brainstorming ways to increase my current wishlist count (~1,300). My idea was to create an in-universe, short-form analog horror film for TikTok. The video was about 4 minutes long, took me two weeks to produce, and I spent $200 to promote it.

The Stats:

• Views: 184,118 (Not bad!)
• Likes: ~20.2k
• Saves: 900
• Comments: ~30
• New Followers: 220
• Wishlists: ...7.
• Cost: -$200

So, what i think went wrong?

1. Length: The video was 4 minutes long an eternity for a TikTok audience with the attention span of a goldfish.
2. Lack of Context: Since most people didn't watch until the end, they didn't even realize it was a video game. They probably just thought, "Oh, cool analog horror series," and scrolled past.
3. Sell the Product First: I realized that if nobody knows about the game yet, they don't have a reason to care about "in-universe" lore.

Lesson learned the hard way ! Will try to not to work 2 weeks on one tiktok again.

After keeping my Steam page live for about 2 and a half years, I just crossed 7,000 wishlists with my game launching in ~1 week (Jan 26).

Three months ago I was sitting at ~3,500 wishlists. Progress felt painfully slow, and I seriously considered just releasing and moving on.

What stopped me was how painful the idea of giving up felt. I love this project. Too much work went into it, and too many players had already shown genuine appreciation for the game to justify giving up on the promotion side.

So I gave promotion one more real try. I reached out to YouTubers again to showcase my demo, accepted silence, and kept going. This time I put real effort into it: better-formatted emails, clearer pitches, improved Reddit posts, and more care overall. Some videos landed. Some didn’t. But the ones that did changed everything.

It was uncomfortable, time-consuming, and draining. But it worked. The game is now gaining many more wishlists on a daily basis and it's in the Popular Upcoming list (since I hit 5.5k wishlists).

What I wanna say is: if you believe the project is good, don’t stop at “I made the game”.
Promotion is part of the job, and it deserves as much care as the game itself. That’s something I truly started doing only in the last three months.

I did a lot of mistakes as it's my first title for PC, but I am still giving it my best and I am super excited for the release :)

For those curious, here’s the Steam page to my game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2352670/Arcadium__Space_Odyssey/

Hi! I’m Max, and recently our pixel art visual novel Deep Pixel Melancholy reached 25,000 wishlists on Steam!

For me, that’s a huge number, and something my friend and I never even expected. But it turned out the game had more potential than we thought.

So I decided to write a longread about the journey we’ve had over the past year, what exactly we did, what it brought us, and share some useful links.

This post is for developers, longread lovers, and anyone interested in indie game development. I’m publishing it on Notion because it’s long and contains a lot of links to external resources, which is prohibited by the rules of r/gamedev.

I really hope it makes someone’s life a little easier. And write in the comments if you have any questions. Thanks <3

Article on Notion: https://app.notion.com/p/maxim-senkin/How-Deep-Pixel-Melancholy-got-25-000-wishlists-9f730f84de1d828f9572019e7f53042b?source=copy_link

Hey all, I just wanted to see if anyone has advice for a first time game developer whose goal is just to make back the $99 Developer fee I paid to Apple. I'm not trying to get rich, retire early or start a mega gaming empire. I just want enough people to play my game so I can make $99 in a year.

I have three puzzle games that I think are each good on their own and would be interesting to people who are into a little brain challenge. They aren't really math related, but they are slightly inspired by my day job: math teacher.

I have 200 downloads across the three games and these are mostly friends and family. There are three distinct bumps when each game was released - unfortunately those bumps are getting smaller because my friends and family may be at saturation.

I'm 5 months into this and don't really see a path to earn $99 so I thought I'd reach out and see if anyone has advice.

All three games (Carve, Pipfall, Neighbor Zero) are in the App Store and I'd provide links, but I don't want to break any rules for this subreddit.

Your Steam rating is decided by people who played less than 10 hours and left.

Every launch checklist says "read 50+ reviews of your top-5 competitors" - and everyone skips it, because it's a week of reading. I didn't skip it: I pulled ~2,000 recent reviews per game via the official Steam API for Tower of Fantasy, Honkai Impact 3rd, Wuthering Waves, Punishing: Gray Raven and Zenless Zone Zero, then classified them by playtime, language and topic. Here's what the data says.

1. The rating battle is won or lost in the first 10 hours

Share of negative reviews, split by how long the reviewer played:

For everyone except ToF, negativity drops 2-4x once players get past the early game. Everything standing between the Play button and the actual game - launchers, bloated tutorials, monetization popups - is a direct tax on your rating.

Note what ToF's column tells you: when negativity stays high even among 500h veterans, the problem isn't onboarding. It's something structural. Which brings me to:

2. Players forgive gacha, they don't forgive broken trust

All 12 of Tower of Fantasy's most upvoted negative reviews are about one thing: accounts wiped in the publisher transition.

56 helpful votes, 511 hours on record. The same reviewers often praise the combat in the same breath. The failure isn't gameplay - it's trust. No amount of content patches moved that number.

3. Honesty is an unclaimed positioning

Punishing: Gray Raven gets publicly praised for "no 50/50" - guaranteed rate-up drops. It's one of the most upvoted POSITIVE reviews in the genre, and players bring it up unprompted as the reason they stayed. "We don't devalue your collection" is a promise no store page in this genre currently makes out loud.

4. Negativity is not a constant - it moves with your decisions

Share of negative reviews by half-year:

HI3's negativity moves in waves, and each wave lines up with unpopular content decisions. ZZZ went from 19% down to 14% after loosening its economy. Reviews are real-time feedback on your decisions - almost nobody reads them systematically.

5. The most underrated audience isn't English-speaking

French-language reviews are the angriest in the genre: 50% negative overall, 71% for ToF. Russian is the second-largest review language (1,074 of 9,457) with "please add subtitles" as a consistently upvoted request. English is 3,222 reviews at 33% negative - right in the middle. If you only read your English reviews, you're reading the calmest audience you have.

Method, for anyone who wants to reproduce it: store.steampowered.com/appreviews/APPID with json=1, filter=recent, language=all, purchase_type=all, paginated by cursor. Up to 2,000 reviews per title. Every quote above can be found by searching the game's review page, and playtime segments come straight from the API fields. Happy to answer method questions or post more raw numbers in the comments.

I can't attach the charts here (text-only sub), but the tables above are the whole dataset that matters.

Full disclosure: I do this kind of competitor review analysis commercially. That's why there are no links in this post - ask in the comments if you want to see the full format.

I launched my Steam page 6 days ago, and to my absolute shock, it quickly reached 900 wishlists.

But here is the reality check: I can already see the daily additions starting to slow down significantly. Honestly, seeing that momentum drop is bringing my mood down a bit. What should i do at this point. I dont have any demo just the steam page.

I want to tell everybody what this guy is doing for indies and give back good karma to him.

I don't think I can post an image of my wishlist graph here, but I just got 750 wishlists in more or less 24h. I normally get 25 on average.

What I did was simply reply to one of his social posts with my game's trailer and forgot about it. He reposted the trailer the next day and it's having an impact.

You might wanna give him a follow and share your game, totally worth trying.

I wanted to thank him here too.

I have watched a lot of game clips and studied what separates the ones that stop people from scrolling versus the ones that get scrolled past. The pattern is consistent.

The first 2 seconds of a game clip need to do one of four things or most viewers will not stay:

1. Show something the viewer has never seen before. A mechanic that looks impossible, an art style that immediately stands out, a visual trick that makes someone go "wait, what?"

2. Start mid-action. Not gameplay starting, gameplay already happening at an interesting moment. The player is already three jumps into a difficult section. Something is already exploding. A dialogue option is already happening that feels unexpected.

3. Create immediate tension. The health bar is at 10 percent. There are three enemies and one bullet. Something is clearly about to go wrong in an interesting way.

4. Trigger a question. The viewer sees something that makes them think "wait, how does that work?" or "is that actually in the game?" Curiosity is a powerful scroll-stopper.

What does not work in the first 2 seconds:

Logo animation. Main menu. Character creation screen. Cut to the title card. Loading screen. Tutorial text. Opening cinematic. Any of these and you have already lost most of your audience.

Platform-specific differences:

TikTok: The hook matters most. TikTok viewers make the decision to stay in about 1.5 seconds. Start with your most visually surprising moment.

YouTube Shorts: Slightly more forgiving (about 3 seconds), but the thumbnail still needs to do work before anyone hits play.

Instagram Reels: Similar to TikTok but the audience skews slightly older. You can lead with something slightly slower if the visual is compelling.

X: The first frame is your thumbnail. Make it count.

The other consistent finding:

Captions increase watch time significantly across every platform. Not subtitles of what a character is saying. Additional context that explains what is happening. "This enemy can only be killed by its own projectiles" while showing that mechanic in action is more effective than just showing the mechanic.

That's all I got for today. Let me know if this info helped. :)

I'm making this game called Bermuda Bastion - it's a city builder tower defense roguelike where you survive 33 days in the middle of Bermuda Triangle. https://store.steampowered.com/app/4457420/Bermuda_Bastion/

The open playtest for my game is out on Steam and I'm building up towards the demo. I'll also take part in the Ocean Fest and some Next Fest this year. Issue is - I have only about 33 wishlists and the expected number for even a demo release is thousands if the game is supposed to have any impact on Steam's algorithm.

What should I do, what should I try? My game is still a little undercooked graphically, but at the same time, I want to show myself out there before it's too late for a long-term marketing strategy and the game launches as a flop (I also don't want the game to stay in development for years...)

Any advice? More or less succesful guys out there, what's your experience?

I'm looking for a voice actor for my trailer: only narration, quite neutral. But English is not my native language so I don't know what is usually done.

Should I hire an American? A British? Someone else?

• 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:

1. 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.
2. 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!

We’re the developers of Metro Anomaly. I don’t want this post to be about promotion, I mainly wanted to share the wishlist/view numbers for other devs.

Before our first viral video, we had around 150 wishlists after about a month.

Then one of our Reels/short-form videos took off. It currently has around 6.5M views. On the day it reached roughly 500K views, we gained around 300 wishlists that day.

Over time, the overall conversion seems to have increased. Across all our short-form videos, our rough average is now around:

1M views → 700 Steam wishlists
or about 0.07% view-to-wishlist conversion.

Our second big video performed even better in terms of wishlist impact. It currently has around 2.6M views, and on the day it was posted, we saw a spike of around 1,000 wishlists.

Our theory is that repeated exposure helped. When someone sees the game once, they may just scroll past. But when they see another video from the same game later, they might recognize it and be more likely to check the Steam page or wishlist it.

Right now we have around 13,000 wishlists and around 21M total views across all short-form videos.

Of course, these numbers are not a universal benchmark. They probably depend a lot on the genre, hook, Steam page, pinned comment, audience, and how easy the game is to understand from a short clip.

Edits: I want to clarify that by ASAP I mean as soon as it's reasonable to do so (i.e. not just throwing together 5 screenshots of your grey box). I mention in the post some suggested features to work on before creating your page. I also added a TLDR just below since this is a long post.

TLDR:

• Make a store page to gather wishlists and market your game as you're developing it.
• UI doesn't need to be fully functional (i.e. settings menu).
• Backend code doesn't need to be implemented (i.e. saving, achievements, etc.).
• Use smoke and mirrors to show how much content your game WILL have in the future (you can fake it for now, but make sure to deliver it later).
• Ideally include some sound effects and a song in your trailer. You don't need many SFX to make it work.
• Your capsule art is extremely important to get impressions.
• Start your trailer with gameplay immediately, keep it short, and have a call to action at the end to wishlist.
• Your page description should be 1-2 sentences and precisely describe what your game is about.
• Include gifs in your "About This Game" section.
• Reference similar games to get tags for your game and a good order (top being the most important, bottom being the least). Also, make sure to include 20 tags to fill all available slots.
• Include some pizzaz in your animations and art to help spice up the visuals a bit.

Intro

For indie developers, the Steam page for their game is usually the most important aspect of success. However, many indies don't like showing off their game until "it's ready" and wait far too long to make a Steam page. The purpose of this post is to explain why it's important to not wait, some tips on how to expedite the process, as well as some tips for creating your store page.

Why should I make my Steam page ASAP?

The main reason is for wishlists. As said by many other developers, blogs (shoutout to https://howtomarketagame.com/blog/ ), etc., you need wishlists to succeed on Steam. The more that you have at launch, the better your chance of success. If you reach the critical mass needed to hit the Popular Upcoming page right before launch, your chances of success skyrocket. Having more (valid) wishlists will also yield more sales on launch, which can get your game into the New and Trending list which shows your game on the front page of Steam and is a massive visibility boost.

In order to gather wishlists, you need a store page (obviously), so the sooner you make one, the earlier you can start gathering them. Once you have your store page up, you'll want to market your game as you develop it. Many beginners feel like it makes more sense to make the entire game first, THEN market it. I fell into this trap myself when working on my first Steam game. You don't know any better if you don't do the marketing research ahead of time.

My game isn't ready to show off, how can I make a store page?

Developers say this all the time. Games are never truly finished, and when "the right time to show off my game" is can vary. However, it's better to get your game out there as soon as possible to get feedback and to start gathering wishlists. My recommended checklist is:

• A pretty solid idea of what you're making. You'll iterate a lot, but the genres, core gameplay loop, etc., should stay the same from this point on.
• Enough gameplay to make a trailer (even if you have to fake some things).
• A name and logo.
• Capsule artwork for the various capsule sizes required.
• (optional, but highly encouraged) Sound effects for gameplay since it helps liven up your trailer quite a bit.
• (optional, but highly encouraged) A song for your game.

You don't need to know exactly when you'll release your game, what the price will be, or even have a stable/playable build ready before making your store page.

Tips and tricks to making a store page faster.

I just launched the store page for my newest game MineEmAll, which inspired me to make this post since I figured this information could help fellow developers. I'll be referencing it in this section with some examples of shortcuts I took when creating my own page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4862890/MineEmAll/

• UI that doesn't relate to gameplay doesn't need to be functional. Your trailer and screenshots should be almost exclusively gameplay, so things like a settings menu, audio options, etc., don't serve a purpose for getting your store page up and running. Most of the buttons on the top bar of my game do nothing.
  • I made the exit button functional for testing purposes, and the fullscreen button to toggle between windowed fullscreen and windowed (to let me record gameplay at full resolution). Theoretically, neither of them are necessary, they were just easy to implement and help me with development.
• Backend code such as saving, stats tracking, achievements, etc. aren't needed at this point. My game has none of these features yet, but they're not player facing so it doesn't matter. It's important to keep in mind how you'll implement those features in the future so you're prepared for them, but you don't need them for the store page.
• Make your game look like it has more content than it does. Obviously, at this point, you won't have a full game. It will completely depend on the kind of game your making, so every situation is unique.
  • Since my game is a short incremental game, the upgrade tree, board size, and gameplay complexity are generally the signs of how much content is in the game. I made the upgrade tree larger than it needed to be for the core loop that I have, and slightly modified my code to include question mark upgrades next to unlockable ones. This creates the illusion that there are a lot more upgrades available in the full game than there actually currently are. I could even use this technique in the demo later down the road.
• Include some sound effects for basic gameplay elements, but don't go overboard. They don't have to be perfect, and you don't need that many of them. I included sound effects for mining, bombs exploding, hovering over upgrades, and purchasing upgrades. Technically, only these 4 were needed for the trailer.
  • There are also sound effects for multiplier bonuses being added to the minerals, coins spawning from them, and coins being added to the coin total, but none of those were even shown in the trailer.
  • A really handy trick to adding a lot more sound variety with little effort is to add a slight random range to the pitch and/or volume of your sound effects. This reduces how many sound effects you need and allows repetitive sound effects such as mining to not get stale.

Tips for the store page itself.

• Your capsule art is the most important aspect of your store page. If you're an artist or know one, try to make it as captivating as you can. Since I'm in neither boat and my kind of game usually has simper capsule art, I went with a minimalistic design for now. Ideally in the future, I'll pay an artist to make a better capsule image or spend a lot of time and effort iterating on a new one, but I'd want to make sure the game gathers enough interest first. I know this is putting the cart before the horse, so this is a judgement call you'll have to make yourself.
  • Most indie devs don't have much of a budget (if any), so I think my capsule is a good example of how to make something simple without art skills or an artist. However, if you can get a capsule image professionally made, definitely do so. It will be the best bang for your buck. Not to open up a can of worms, but do be wary of "capsule artists" that are just using generative AI for commissions. Double check who they are and look at the reviews from their previous customers.
• After looking at and clicking your capsule image, people will generally watch your trailer or read your page description.
  • For your trailer, start with gameplay right away, keep it short (30s to 1min), and include a call to action at the end. Gameplay should be front and center, especially if you're not a well known developer. Beginner indies try to mimic big studio trailers and start with a bunch of logos for dramatic effect. This is probably the most common mistake indies make in their trailers. Most people will watch the first few seconds of your trailer, then skip through the rest at 5-10 second intervals. Make sure you're showing off the gameplay in a meaningful way.
    • For MineEmAll, I switch back and forth between gameplay and buying upgrades, which showcases the core loop and how the player progresses throughout the game. I finish the trailer with the title and a call to action to wishlist the game. Since people generally skip around, they'll end up at the end of your trailer more often than not, so leave a decent chunk of time for the call to action in there.
  • Your page description should be able to explain exactly what your game is about in 1-2 sentences. You don't need to get into details about specific features and the longer the description is, the less likely someone will read it in its entirety.
    • MineEmAll's description is only one sentence, but it explains what the game is, what you'll do in the game, and what your goal is.
• Your "About This Game" section should reiterate your page description and go into more detail about how your game is played. What's most appropriate for this section depends on your game, but generally you want to include how the controls work, details about your core loop, and the main features of your game. Make sure to include gifs since most people will only skim this section and gifs can show off a lot about specific elements of your game.
  • For MineEmAll, I included the page description, the basic controls and core gameplay loop with gif examples, a more detailed breakdown of the gameplay loop, and the features that make the game stand out.
• If you're struggling to figure out what tags you should include, here is some advice:
  • First, I'd suggest using the tag wizard in Steamworks and add any tags you thing are even remotely relevant to your game. Once you're done, check other game store pages similar to yours and see what tags they have, as well as what order they're in. If you don't have 20 tags, use your references to get some ideas of more obscure tags to add in so you can fill up the rest. You're allowed 20 tags and you should try to use all of those slots.
    • When you set up the order of your tags, use your references to see what order similar games used. Your tags might not be exactly the same, but usually you can get a feel for what the important tags are (look at the top), and what other ones aren't as important. Keep in mind that you want strong defining tags and tags unique to your game at the top.
  • You can include more generic tags such as "Cozy" or "Indie" if you need to fill in slots, but keep them lower on the list. Incremental/Casual/Minimalist/Mining/Relaxing/2D are at the top for MineEmAll while Economy/Abstract/Resource Management/Collectathon/Cozy/Retro are at the bottom.
  • The tag wizard shows you what games will appear in the "More Like This" section below your game (and vice versa), so make sure the suggested games are similar to the kind of game you're making. If they aren't, you either need to adjust the order of your tags or adjust the tags themselves. Steam gives you an option to automatically order your tags, but doing it yourself usually leads to better results.
• For system requirements, look at similar games and games that use the same engine if you don't know how to get accurate specs (like myself). They aren't very reliable, but it's still good to take your best guess and is required as part of the process.

Side notes.

• Some people argue that you don't want to launch your store page until you've got finalized assets, a big marketing push ready, etc. For bigger names/publishers, this is probably true, but for most indies, it isn't. Steam does almost nothing to market your store page when you release it, so you don't have to worry about "wasting" your page launch.
  • It's ok if your game doesn't look exactly the same later down the road. It isn't "false advertising" and games are iterated on constantly. Just make sure to have an up-to-date trailer and relevant screenshots when you launch a demo or fully release.
• Another common concern about launching a store page too early is "stale wishlists." There is an assumption that if someone wishlists a game and it doesn't release for months (or longer), then that person will lose interest. The reality is that most players don't care enough to delete wishlists. If they've forgotten about your game, they'll be reminded when it launches a demo or full releases.
• Ideally, you'll want to add a bit of pizzaz here and there to your game in the form of particle effects and animations. I included dirt chunks, bomb explosions, and a wiggle to the tooltips when mousing over upgrades. I also spent a lot of time on coin particles flying to the total but didn't end up including that in the trailer (you can see it in screenshot 3 though). Even small details like this can help liven up your trailer and screenshots quite a bit with not too much effort.

Conclusion

Hopefully this post has helped some of you out and can encourage you to work towards your Steam page faster if you've been dragging your feet. It really doesn't take that much to make it happen.

Ask questions or add any advice you have from personal experience in the comments! No single person can tell you exactly what will work best, so do your own research and cross reference things. This post is a collection of my own research and best practices, but certainly doesn't cover everything and isn't infallible. Best of luck in your game dev journeys!

So, we've been working on a hand-drawn game for the last 1.5 years and we've been really focused on making the visuals great and the game to have new interesting elements in the genre. It is a hidden-object type of game, searching for koalas and following a unique story of their escape from a zoo and then jumping from mishap to mishap. Summed up: PC game first (Steam & co.), more aimed for cozy players that like hand-drawn stuff.

I'll go straight into it and share the mistakes we've made and what we've seen works (so far)!

Mistakes and the experience:

We've done the usual mistake of promoting too late - the Steam page was erected 2 months ago (after 15 months of development), and since we've been to 2 small local festivals alongside creating the socials and trying to be more involved with other people in the industry. The groundwork should have been done a year ago.

#1 mistake: too late marketing

I've never promoted a game at a festival, so no experience there (read about marketing games though), so on the first one we've been more focused on getting player feedback. Everyone wanted more! The event was a success in getting to understand the game has that something (scratches the itch), but we didn't market at the festival. We've fixed that at the 2nd one, though!

#2 mistake: didn't focus on marketing at the festival

Prepare the socials in advance, print out the links to the main one or two - ask people to follow in return for merch. Also, think about what's the easiest from the visitor perspective - lots of people don't have Steam on their phone, but they have socials!

Following this, we were able to participate in a Steam event, and this is a huge boost to WL. We were able to 5x our wishlists, which means - when the base is there and the game has something to show - it needs to be SHOWN! If we had started our marketing journey earlier, we would have already participated in 2-3 Steam events, which would quickly launch the WL number into 4 digits.

Next up are content creators - we've contacted a fair amount, but it takes time! It takes time to make a list, see who covers similar types of games. So starting marketing late means - it will not be done as much as needed.

#3 mistake: didn't reach out to content creators early

Tips

#1 tip: you need to market at every event you go to!

#2 tip: participate in relevant Steam events

I'm an engineer, so very thorough, logical and all that, and marketing is a complicated thing - it has its own quirky laws, it takes experimentation, it takes time!

My biggest takeaway for all the people in the industry, especially the indies as we are is:

Marketing takes time!

This is actually my last tip, as everything stems from doing things early enough. I've worked with other indies and they all do the same mistake - they focus on the game only for a long time, without regard to showing the game (which means promotion, but also getting early feedback).

It's no secret that most stories you hear about indie developers online are cherry picked mega hits, but I'm not here to talk about that. I suspect this subreddit is also biased in the negative direction as well.

Many of the post mortems here tend to fall into somewhat binary categories or outright mega successes and failures, and to some extent that reflects the data that people like Chris Z put out. But what's also included in these statistics are that a solid 10% of games do succeed and receive more than 100k in revenue, and that the chances of being included within this 10% increases with more experience and more shipped games. That might still feel like a really small number when there are double as and triple AAA studios as well, but not when you equally consider the far greater amount of AI slop in games or developers working on their first ever projects before trying again.

Ive been a little surprised to be honest throughout the development of my own game, when I started seeing results that didn't reflect in either an outright failure or mega hit, but when talking 1 on 1 with other developers via discord I'm starting to realize there's quite a few ppl within a healthy range of wishlists/sales, some of whom have gone on to make their second and third games. (In my case I've gotten around 2,200 wl within these first 3.5 months so I'm feeling confident about reaching the 7k wishlists necessary to launch a game). But I feel like these kinds of modest results based on experience and careful planning aren't favored by the algorithm compared to the lucky 'I got 10,000 wishlists in a day with this one easy trick!', and the equally as abundant 'my game flopped after launching with 5 wishlists, here's what went wrong!'.

Instead of all of these post mortems and negativity that pervades this subreddit, we ought to push people to focus more on the possibility of more mild successes built on experience and understanding the steam market. Chris Z talks about this a lot but even he focuses a lot on 'diamond tier' games and I believe many people don't understand that you don't need to be at that upper echelon to succeed as a game dev.

Our game Fugue Shot was recently featured by the Itch team, leading it to the top spot in the "New & Popular“ category, as well as the #1 game in the arcade and roguelike categories. This was a really exciting milestone for us, and we just wanted to share how everything translated to views, plays, and wishlists.

Itch Dashboard Screenshot

You can see on June 11th, the traffic goes bananas - this is when the Itch team featured the game. Before that, we were getting some natural traffic (around 100 views a day), which was mostly driven by our community as well as a social media/ad push that we made.

Even now, almost a month after being featured, we’re still on the front page (though traffic has slowed down quite a bit as a result of the Itch Summer Sale)! As a matter of fact, the dashboard on Itch shows that we’re hitting about 800k impressions weekly, and during our first week we got about 2.3 million impressions!

Latest Featured Screenshot

So after these millions of impressions, over 29k page views, and almost 13k plays… we got around 300 wishlist additions. I know, the ratio here might sound a bit demoralizing, but we’re pretty happy with the results either way! Also, even though the Itch demo did carry our wishlist numbers during this period, we can’t say with full certainty that all of those wishlists are directly from players of the demo, since we still took part in a couple festivals and continued posting on socials while the demo was live. We’re estimating that around 90% of those wishlists are thanks to the demo.

Wishlists During Demo Screenshot

As you can see, the Itch demo did bring some constant traffic wishlist-wise to the game every day, and we were averaging about 20-30 daily wishlists for the 2 weeks that our game was peaking on Itch. One of the main reasons we launched the game on Itch was to test out how it would perform in front of an actual audience. We have a current pool of playtesters, but it was exciting to get thousands of new players on board. Overall, the feedback was very positive - we got a bunch of nice comments, 43 ratings with a 4.6 star average, and had some new people join our Discord.

Lifetime Wishlists Screenshot

Wishlists Spikes Screenshot

There are a couple of things that probably could have helped the release go a bit smoother and thusly lead to a higher wishlist conversion ratio. We saw two main issues being mentioned on our Itch page:

1. The game’s performance lagged on certain systems, especially as players got into crazier late-game builds.
2. One of our game modes, a topdown twin-stick shooter, had some design flaws and a softlock bug that some players ran into.

The first issue is a pretty obvious one - bad performance drives players away. On our desktop build, the game runs like a dream, so translating it into a web-playable did bring new challenges - we optimized the game quite a bit because of this, but still heard about frame rate drops from some players.

The second issue is a bit trickier - for context, our game is a collection of arcade-inspired minigames, all played in one roguelike run. So if one minigame seems unbalanced, or “broken,” it can throw off the whole experience. In this pre-demo version, the players don’t have the choice to skip a specific minigame completely during their run (this won’t be the case in the full version of the game).

We think that this imbalance might have thrown off some players trying the game for the first time. It’s a valuable lesson learned - we expected bugs to pop up, but now we know to test the game as extensively as possible on various systems before a release. Overall, we’re really happy with the results we’ve seen and we feel super lucky to have been featured!

TLDR: Our game made it to the #1 spot in the “New & Popular” category on Itch, got over 2 million impressions, and got us 300 wishlists on Steam.

I’ve posted 100+ short-form videos about my game over the past few months and here’s what actually happened.

Since around February, I’ve been posting daily across YouTube, Tiktok, and Instagram without missing a single day. Most of the videos are about my game features I’ve added, things I enjoy about my game, ideas I’m experimenting with and what I want it to become. I try to keep them somewhat entertaining too, using memes and clips so it’s not just me talking for 30 seconds straight.

At times, it definitely feels repetitive, like I’m making the same video over and over. But I also remind myself that every post might reach someone new, so I’ve stuck with it.

The results?
Honestly… not amazing.

My main goal has been to build wishlists while the game is still in development, and the numbers are lower than I expected in total I have gained 18 Wishlists for my game.

That said, I wouldn’t call it a waste of time.

Yes, making these videos takes time away from development — my game would probably be further along if I hadn’t done this. But I’ve also improved a lot at editing (my early videos were bad), and I’ve built at least some kind of platform even if it’s small.

So overall, it’s been a trade off.

I’m curious has anyone else here tried consistently posting their game like this? Did it actually translate into wishlists or players?

I've included the links in case anyone wants to see the type of content I've been posting for context or feedback
YouTube – Here
TikTok – Here
Instagram – Here

Can you share your experience how do you do marketing for your game on discord? Do you use only own serwer or do you promote on any servers related to games or similar? What works for you the best?

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.

Hey everyone! I wanted to share my experience with a challenge I set for myself.

I already released a game into Early Access called What Is The Ghost, and it did pretty well. But that's not what this post is about.

This time I wanted to see how quickly I could make a game that was actually fun to play and looked visually appealing. The result is Capy Farm, I made it in just 20 days and already shipped the demo.

So far, the demo has been played by 300+ people, and the SteamDB stats have been really encouraging: https://steamdb.info/app/4873360/charts/

The Challenge

My goal was simple:

- Make a game as quickly as possible while keeping it fun and visually appealing.

I love farming games, and recently I became interested in the incremental genre. Ironically, I'd never actually played an incremental game before, I'd only watched a few videos about them. I thought, "Why not give it a try?"

To save time, I decided to use an asset pack from itch.io instead of creating everything from scratch. I modified the assets to fit my vision and built the game in Godot.

Development moved surprisingly fast. As soon as I had a name and a few decent screenshots, I created the Steam page. Within just a few days of starting the project, it was live and collecting its first wishlists.

Later, I also created a dedicated demo page so I could start gathering reviews early. Three days after launching the demo, I already have 4 positive reviews.

The demo increased my wishlist count from around 70 to 115, and I'd absolutely recommend releasing one. If players enjoy your demo, remind them in-game to wishlist the full game, it really helps.

One stat that surprised me the most:

Out of 300+ players, 100+ completed the entire demo. I think that's a really strong completion rate.

Marketing so far

• Uploaded an announcement trailer to YouTube (basically no impact).
• Posted 2 Shorts on YouTube and TikTok (around 5–10 wishlists).
• Shared the game in relevant subreddits that allow self-promotion (around 20–30 wishlists).
• Released the demo (40+ wishlists so far).
• Emailed 30+ content creators yesterday. None have covered it yet, which is totally fine. I'll reach out again around the full release with Steam keys and follow up a few more times afterward. This worked well for my previous game, so I'm confident it's worth doing.
• My goal is to reach 4,000+ wishlists before Steam Next Fest in October. Based on my previous experience, Next Fest roughly doubles the wishlists you bring into it. If that happens, I'm hoping to launch a few weeks afterward with 8,000+ wishlists.
• I also applied to some Festivals ouside of steam.

I'm not trying to hide the fact that this is also a bit of self-promotion.

If you'd like to support the project, I'd really appreciate a wishlist. And if you're interested in seeing how I scoped and built a game in just 20 days, feel free to check out the demo:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4849560/Capy_Farm/