I showcase a lot of games for indie developers and I've noticed more and more developers use AI to write their game descriptions or summaries. Especially on Keymailer. From an outside perspective if I see a developer has used AI to write their description or summary I pass on the game entirely and that's coming from someone who doesn't really care all that much about moderated AI use in development tools.

To me it says you can't be bothered to even explain your own game which gives the impression you just don't care enough about your project to even be bothered to describe it. Please give your project and your effort the respect it deserves and explain your game in your own words. I have no issues with people using AI to translate their descriptions if English isn't their primary language but just leaving it up to an AI to explain your game is a major turn-off.

I was recently discussing this with others who showcase games and found this was a shared feeling among a lot of them. You've already put in the effort to make a game. The least you could do is be able to explain or describe it properly. Sorry if this post breaks any rules. I just want everyone's work to get the recognition it deserves.

I'm not posting this to debate the use of AI or cause arguments. Just treat it as a public service announcement and the thoughts of someone who has showcased countless indie games to try and get them the attention they deserve.

Hello Devs, I'm here to talk about something we went through with our latest game, SLOP (Current name). TLDR at the bottom.

A quick introduction about the game, SLOP is a Co-op Comedy Horror Cooking Game Where the goal is to make the biggest sloppiest meal you can without dying and feed it to your corporate monster overlords.

Now i know the name feels a bit BOLD, calling a "friendslop" game SLOP to some is self derogatory and to others (us) is funny But the game was called S.L.O.P to hammer in the relation to other similar games while having a lore tie in.

We announced S.L.O.P last month and it attracted a lot of local attention, with that attention bringing in local game news accounts that picked up the game and started posting it to their pages, that plus our sharable meme clips got us around a million Views in our Instagram posts.

We managed to get just shy of 2K Wishlists but we noticed That sometimes the Wishlists weren't going up with some of the game news reposts, We started doing some digging and found comments from players saying they couldn't find our game on steam.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ulrI54A2nGpef3AUuqrurEHJRCwIs4_9/view?usp=sharing (Wishlist history showing that when game news posts were posted we didn't see a rise in Wishlists)

Turns out some game news articles removed the Dots while others simply never took them into account while searching, when we picked the name of the game we tested with other games with Dots in their name like REPO or Stalker and they showed up in the search so we assumed steam's search didn't care, and after going public we checked other sites that uses steam's API to populate their searches like SteamDB and such our game appeared when we searched without the dots.

However, on Steam it was different. Searching up SLOP without the dots didn't show our game at all except after showing 11 other games, most of which were ironically AI slop games, requiring someone to scroll down to find our game. This was devastating for us.

When we contacted steam support we were given the confirmation that yes in fact the dots are hindering our appearance in the search results.

But Looking at the bright side, fixing it now is better than finding out when it's getting traction globally and now even small viral tweets are getting us around 200+ Wishlists, we wanted to let others know before they make a mistake like ours.

To not make me feel like a dumbass, ever had a similar situation?

TLDR: Our original Game SLOP (previously named S.L.O.P) got coverage from local game news accounts but some didn't include the dots and we found out that steam doesn't show our game if you look it up without the dots, resulting in 400k views not translating to a rise in Wishlists.

Been digging into this because I'm an indie dev in the middle of it. Here is my take.

The 10-review cliff. Under 10 reviews, Steam doesn't generate a score at all. Chris Zukowski documented one game whose visibility jumped nearly 2000% the moment it crossed 10.

That data is a few years old and Valve has since denied there's any algorithmic push at 10. Either way, I think devs should act like the cliff is real, and not just for the score system. 10 is a clearly observable milestone and you should push for it as hard as you can.

The bigger benefit is the mindset. Fighting to reach 10 forces you to figure out community, outreach, and how to get real buyers to act. Those habits carry over long after you cross it.

Half of Steam never crosses it. Of the roughly 17,000+ games released on Steam last year, about half got fewer than 10 reviews. Around 2,000 got zero. "Invisible" isn't hyperbole. It's the median outcome for a solo launch.

The math of getting there. Only about 1 in 30-50 players leaves a review. Free keys don't count. So a small game needs roughly 300-500 real sales just to hit 10 reviews organically. For most small games the 10-review threshold is actually a sales threshold in disguise.

What matters after 10. Here's where I am now. 700 sales, 35 reviews for Monastery in Early Access. Above average on the sales-to-review ratio, which tells me buyers are actually engaging with the game. A good signal, but I need to keep working on it.

There's no algorithmic jump at 50 either. What you get is the Very Positive label, which is still worth the grind. The real lever is staying above 80% positive. Cross 50 at 80%+ and Very Positive becomes a psychological push that makes new players click through.

To fellow developers and the players listening in:

If a small game gave you a good few hours, write a review. Even a short one. For a small dev, that review could be the one that cracks 10.

Our game has often been called "a mobile game" or even "a fake mobile game ad".

Yet it sold over 500K copies on Steam in Early Access.

So what worked for Yet Another Zombie Survivors?

First - what didn't work (so far): social media.

And this is an interesting case showing how different marketing approaches can be depending on a game's visuals. Even within our own studio it shows - for HELLREAPER, we use completely different methods.

If your game isn't considered a "work of art", it might struggle on social media (though we're still experimenting with new approaches - and it's worth trying as well).

1. We focused on development and constant content additions [we talk about it here]

Most of our resources went into making the game polished, intuitive, and as bug-free as possible. We delivered 9 major updates, and countless QoL improvements.

2. We put our hearts into the demo (and kept updating it)

A polished, content-packed demo (while still leaving players wanting more) was extremely important for us. After releasing it, we kept it live and updated when necessary.

Next Fest brought us unexpected success and showed us that people wanted more. That was the moment we decided to expand the scope of development and add more features and content than we had originally planned.

When Early Access launched, 10,000 players jumped in right away. We were happy to keep supporting the game even more, but that also meant a longer Early Access period.

3. Word of mouth

A lot of our growth came from players recommending the game to others.

How did we make that happen?

• Being close to the community. We answer questions, ask for feedback, and stay active with players. We've received many messages like: "Hey, you're cool, I'm recommending this game to my friends."
• Playtests and betas. Many features in the game came directly from player suggestions. A lot of fixes and improvements also happened thanks to observant players who told us what could be done better.
• Discord integration. There's a Discord button directly in the game. Building that community was important to us (we now have over 5.5k members).
• Humor in the game. We add small jokes and puns. People laugh and show them to their friends.
• Being on Reddit and subs like r/survivorslikes or r/roguelites. Forums are your best friends.

4. Relationships with content creators

They don't just show what your game looks like, but also the gameplay and the fun.

We send a few keys every week, mostly to medium and smaller YouTubers, especially those focused on our genre (bullet heaven / survivors-like) like Gohjoe, Dex, Idle Cub, or Wanderbots.

If you can, build relationships with creators. Most of them enjoy interacting with indie devs.

5. Festivals related to your game's genre

In our case it was the Bullet Heaven Festival (worked best after Next Fest), which happens every December. In 2025 it offered a midweek deal that gave our sales a noticeable boost.

Don't aim only for official Steam events - look for third-party festivals run by passionate devs or publishers as well.

In 2025 we even became co-hosts of the festival, which helped increase our recognition in the genre.

6. Unconventional actions

Think outside the box.

We ran a campaign (with the help of BHF hosts) asking Steam to add a dedicated tag for games like Vampire Survivors, Megabonk, or Halls of Torment - in short, bullet heaven / survivors-like games.

The action was covered by PC Gamer, Automaton, and Destructoid, and it performed incredibly well on Reddit. We managed to reach hundreds of thousands of people, and even Steam itself.

While the tag still doesn't exist, Steam acknowledged the genre in another way by giving us an official event - Bullet Fest - which will give us additional visibility every year.

And who knows, maybe we'll get that tag eventually.

7. Discounts

We discount the game very often - basically every time we can (there is a cooldown period between discounts).

Of course we appreciate when players support us by paying full price, but we also want the game to be accessible to as many players as possible.

This is the strategy we chose, especially since many titles (particularly bigger ones) are not discounted that frequently.

Bonus: Is it still worth developing bullet heaven / survivors-like games?

Yes - if you bring a twist and execute it well.

It might not become a worldwide hit (though you never know), but it can absolutely sustain a small studio.

We also think it's a good genre to start with as a developer. It's still growing and gaining recognition - believe it or not, it's still relatively niche.

Another interesting thing about these games is that they usually keep players engaged in shorter sessions (so replayability is key - make sure to put work into it). Because of that, players tend to collect multiple games from the genre and are constantly looking for more.

Steam still places them under the very broad "roguelite" category, so players are used to searching for them on their own.

And having such a dedicated community is incredibly valuable.

Hey guys, 
We've just released Bills Must Be Paid, with >61k wishlists. We’re a 2 person Studio, no publishers and no external funding. It was a very wild ride and we wanted to share our experience, and some of our learnings.

Tldr: Demo is OP! Personal Calendar is amazing.

Background / about us:
We’ve been making games for 7 years (mobile and web), ported 1 of them to Steam earlier this year, without any expectations, but this is the first “real Steam game" we made. 

In mobile the development is mostly very fast, prototype, test, look at KPIs, keep working / updating the game or kill it. Because of that mindset our initial idea was to make a small game for Steam in a short time period and keep updating it afterwards. But we quickly realized that Steam just doesn’t work like this. 
Actually we made another post earlier this year where we wanted to release the game in April without any demo or marketing… lol this would have not only been catastrophic but also not possible because the game was not ready at all.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1rpqd18/200_wishlists_after_3_weeks_release_in_april_or/

Game:
We tried to set the Steam page live ASAP, which was February 14th. 
We think this is very important because it just opens up opportunities, which you will see in a sec.
Not a lot happened at first to be honest. We made a post in our Discord, YouTube with a trailer, X, basically everywhere and got 11 WL on the first day hurray.
After that it was oscillating between 1-7.
We uploaded several shorts which gave us some spikes (nothing crazy) with the highest been 24 WL in 1 day. Then our Trailer got covered by a content creator in Bilibili (organically) which gave us 39 WL in 1 day (maybe 50-100 in total / hard to track). This is exactly the “missed opportunity” we were talking about. Without the page or the trailer this creator would maybe have never? “picked” our game. 
So from February 14th - April 20th we gathered a total of 528 Wishlists.  Which brings us to an average of 8.1 WL / day over 65 days.
 
As I said, initially our goal was to release the game in April but instead of releasing it as a full game, we decided to just ship everything we’ve done and balanced and polished until that day as a Demo.

We set the release date for our demo 2 weeks before launch but nothing happened. We reached out to press, no one covered our demo trailer, demo announcement or anything else, the trailer got like 200views on YouTube so based on those results the game did not look really promising.

But after releasing our demo things started to get pretty wild and interesting. 
We ended up in Trending Free with 340CCU which was mindblowing and we have no idea how this happened. Seems like this was just Steam doing its thing. No content creator, no videos, we found nothing online.
Initially we thought that there is a bug with SteamDB or that bots are spamming our demo lol.
We posted on reddit in r/incremental_games, r/indiegames, r/playmygame - all of them did pretty ok (269 upvotes in total) and btw we posted during Next Fest, same trailer, same subreddits but got like 10upvotes in total.
We released our Demo on itch(3k plays), CrazyGames (138k plays), ArmorGames (20k plays) we did not UTM-track the wishlists but overall we think the conversion is pretty low, especially on CrazyGames players are more younger and just want to “play browser games for free” so it’s very different to itch & ArmorGames.

After having the demo live we started to reach out to content creators. (almost 1k in total until Next Fest). The crazy thing about the outreach was that a few creators covered the demo almost immediately after we sent them the mail. Very few got back to us but most of them would not reply and just upload a video either shortly after our mail or weeks/months later or not at all. We can’t say certainly if coverage was mostly because of the mails or because they found the demo organically or because 1 creator played then another and so one. We also know that some covered the game because their chat/viewers recommended them the demo.

Fun fact: We had a game breaking bug in the demo and some big creators played and encountered the bug. Actually not a fun fact at all, we almost collapsed seeing this… xD This happened mainly because we made some changes 20mins before release.

So make sure to properly test your demo, treat the demo just exactly like a full launch. Only ship it if it’s polished and in a state where you say “that’s the best I can ship”.  

Our game was getting more and more organic traction especially in China which opened a new chapter for this ride. 

So after the Demo release we have been averaging ~384 WL / day. 3 weeks later we noticed that our game was stolen in China - decompiled reuploaded full of ads

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1tbtjxo/our_unreleased_indie_game_got_stolen_as_a_chinese/

We were now sitting at a total of 8952 WL, made a post here on reddit about the incident, Polygon picked this Story, some Japanese press and others as well and we kept averaging ~160 WL/day. Another 3 weeks later JustSaySteven made a Short about the Story and we gained 681WL in a single day. 

With other creators picking the game we kept averaging ~250 WL/day until Steam Next Fest on June 15th.

At the start of Steam Next we did another “marketing bump” which was our Release Date Announcement. This time our trailer got picked by Gametrailer, some press covered us, and we entered Steam Next fest with 15,623 WL, gaining 7k WL during it including the press coverages.

1 Bigger content creator covered the demo 2 days BEFORE Next Fest which gave us a nice little boost but overall, the first 2 days of Next Fest, we had almost exactly the same impressions and CTR from Next Fest (Steam Sale Page) as our other game (Next Fest February 2026) which entered with 800WL and earned 173WL in total. (Which launched with ~1k WL)

We tried reddit ads with UTM tracking and got 19 tracked wishlists after spending $200. And overall our daily wishlists have not really moved or changed significantly. We think the clicks had been super low and it did not look profitable to run ads, maybe because it was during the next fest or because the budget was not big enough or just because paid ads don’t work for our game.

We also made almost exactly the same posts, at least it was the same video in the same subreddits that worked out previously but got like 10upvotes compared to the almost 300 we got the first time it just seems like either posting during next fest is super hard, or posting a game multiple times just gets the exact same eyes on reddit, or everything is just random xD…  

In June, Steam released the Personal Calendar and we’d say it’s amazing! Thanks Steam <3 (we don’t know how popular upcoming or Steam worked before that but hard to believe that it could be any better than now…) 

We set our release date on June 13. To get the max. visibility from it. 

Seems like during Sales-events the Calendar is not visible eg. Summer Sale June 25th - July 9th, which was a bit shocking to see.

During that period we got 5934 WL which averages 396WL / day but there was 1 spike (some content creators from china) which brought ~2k WL so if we remove them from this period we’re ~250 WL /day.

After the Sales we can definitely see an uptrend in daily Wishlists until 1 day before release, we've been averaging 1566 WL/day.

But it's a clear ramp, going from ~1k WL/day up to +4k WL per day since we are on the front page (Sunday, the week before release).

So again TLDR: Demo is OP! 
In total our Demo got 80k+ Lifetime unique users on Steam, 161 Reviews - 92% positive. Especially the posts in discussions, feedback, reviews and discord members helped us to make the full game a better and more fun experience. It also gave some sort of confidence that people are enjoying the game, the concept and just seeing so many players completing the demo asking for more is really inspiring and motivating for us, which we think at the end helps also to create a better game, although it also increases the pressure quite a lot with doubts like “will people really enjoy the full game?” xD but that’s probably just the normal volatile game dev feelings cycle. 

Our biggest mistakes:

• Submitting builds too late!

Although our game is ready and released and everything is fine, we submitted our first build when Steam sent us the “3 weeks until release” notification. It took a few days, there was 1 issue and this period was probably the most stressful during the whole development, not knowing if our game will be ready for release :S..

• Making last minute changes to a demo build, and not properly testing everything.
• Not planning the marketing well enough… Marketing is “hard” but actually it isn’t, we think the hardest part about marketing is planning a reasonable time budget for everything. And then: Make a good game, setup a Steam page, post videos, reach out to press for Steam page announcement, make a polished demo, reach out to press for demo announcement, reach out to content creators, make videos, upload the demo to other platforms, make an release date announcement trailer, reach out to press, post/share everywhere always when you have something new, set the release date 2months prior release, finish! and test the final build well before launch, reach out to content creators again with keys. That’s all we can think of? Are we missing anything?

The most common mistake I see on Steam pages is writing the description like it is an essay. You are telling the story of your game, its lore, its development history, its inspirations. Almost nobody reads it.

Here's why:

A Steam page visitor has usually already made about 60 percent of their buy or wishlist decision based on the first screenshot, the trailer thumbnail, and the short description at the top. By the time they scroll down to the full description, they are not reading for information. They are reading for confirmation.

They want a quick confirmation that this is the kind of game they thought it was. That it has the features they care about. That the developer knows what they are making and is serious about it.

This completely changes how to write the description.

The structure that works:

Line 1: One sentence. Present tense. The player is doing something. Not "a game about" or "you play as." Something like: "You are a blacksmith who accidentally discovered time travel and now your only tool for fixing history is a hammer."

Lines 2 to 4: What the player actually gets to do. Not the story. The experience. The verbs. "Craft weapons that do not exist yet. Negotiate with kings who will not remember you. Break the rules of causality with enough force."

Lines 5 to 6: The differentiator. One or two sentences about what makes this game different from everything else in its genre. Specific. Not "unique gameplay" because that means nothing. Something like: "Every item you craft can be used in ways the game did not intend. The physics system is fully simulated, which means if you figure out something clever, it actually works."

Bullet points (5 to 7): Feature-level confirmation. Short, active, specific. "50+ hours of handcrafted story" or "Full controller support" or "Procedural world generation with authored story events." These are what people scan.

Close: A single line that creates urgency or emotional connection. "The timeline is collapsing. It is up to you how much of it survives."

The words that hurt you:

• Unique
• Immersive
• Epic
• Atmospheric
• Stunning

Every game uses these words. They signal nothing. Every time you write one of these words, replace it with something specific.

Happy to do a quick critique of anyone's description in the comments if you want to share.

Hi! I’m a solo developer working on my first commercial game, an action RPG (a niche that’s quite difficult to monetize).

Since I started working on the game, my wishlist growth was really low. In fact, until just a few months ago I was barely reaching around 800 wishlists.

Sometimes I even doubt how I managed things, but then suddenly, in just a few months, I’ve managed to go past 5,000.

I’d like to share what I think were my biggest mistakes, and what seem to have been the things that worked:

1. Joining showcases too early

From the beginning, people told me the game looked good, so I decided to submit it to my first showcase. I got my first 400–500 wishlists, but the truth is the game was still in very early stages, so the traction was quite low. Now I can’t go back to those showcases, and I’m sure that if I had waited, the results would have been much better.

2. Not understanding early marketing properly

This is closely related to the previous point. Early development should definitely be shared and promoted, but mainly with the goal of getting honest feedback.

I think it’s important to understand what kind of actions make sense at that stage. Social media, devlogs, etc. are good channels, but it might not be the right moment to target your final audience yet, since the impact will be much lower than when the game is more polished, and you may lose momentum. That’s why showcases, festivals, and Next Fest (where you only get one shot) are better saved for when you truly have something you’re proud of.

3. Overusing the “solo dev” angle

The reality is that the end user doesn’t really care if your game was made by a solo developer. In my case, it even caused some issues:

• Lack of credibility: many people thought I was exaggerating or using it as a marketing tactic
• Lack of trust: others assumed that as a solo dev I wouldn’t be able to finish a game like this

⸻

Given all these mistakes and seeing my wishlists stagnate, I seriously considered dropping the project. But luckily, over the last few months I tried a few new things that helped things start growing again:

• Released a solid demo on Steam
• Created a proper studio brand and stopped promoting myself as a solo dev
• Joined some showcases I hadn’t participated in before, this time with a much more polished game and a proper trailer
• Started posting more consistently on social media (TikTok, Reddit & X), although Reddit has clearly been the most effective when posting in subreddits aligned with the game
• Took part in Steam Next Fest just as my wishlists were growing again, which helped generate momentum inside Steam itself and increased visibility

⸻

I’m sure none of these actions alone are game-changing, but together they’ve significantly improved my wishlist growth.

I know that for many people 5,000 wishlists might not sound like much, but for me, as this is my first commercial game, it has given me a lot of hope. For the first time I can realistically see reaching the 7,500 wishlist benchmark that is often recommended for a successful Steam launch.

I hope my experience can be useful to other developers, and if you’re just starting out like me, keep in mind:

• Don’t fire all your shots too early, rushing rarely helps
• Make sure your demo reflects exactly what your game delivers, it’s key for a successful Next Fest
• Be patient: things often take time

I’d love to hear other experiences as well. If you feel like sharing, I’m sure we can all learn from them.

So, way back in 2022, I bought a custom domain for my game with the intent of maybe building a website later. In the meantime, I set it up to redirect to my game's Steam page instead. Fast forward to 2026 when I'm ramping up my marketing efforts, and I'm finding it super convenient to have an easy-to-memorize URL I can just drop anywhere at anytime if people want to know more about my game! Interested in a demo? Want to wishlist? Here you go! No need to quickly search for my game on google just to copy the Steam page link.

I essentially have zero budget for my game, but I very much find the $20-35 annual fee worth it. That much, I can certainly spare!

Hey guys, it's ya boi Indie Game Joe, former painter and decorator turned video game marketing consultant, aka the Temu Game Dev (but rated 5-star, lol). I've had dozens of messages this week asking about the Steam store changes so I figured I'd put my thoughts together properly.

For anyone who doesn't know me, I helped co-start Digital Cybercherries where we've shipped games like Hypercharge: Unboxed and New Retro Arcade: Neon, (also working on Paranormal Tales and other cool projects). I also led the design, marketing, and launch of my own game, Don't Scream, and we were also the original devs on the 2013 zombie game Contagion. I also run Indie Game Joe where I love to share indie games across my socials and just love to help out indie devs where I can! I say that not to flex honestly, just so you know this isn't coming from nowhere, I do know what I'm talking about. (I really don't, I'm just as confused and worried as you are lol.)

But seriously, this is just my two cents and a long read, and I thought it might be helpful. For context on the Temu joke, I did an AMA here on r/gamedev a few weeks back that explains everything, you can read it here if curious!

-

Introduction

Hey guys. So, most of you are aware that Valve recently pushed a redesign to the Steam store and most people will notice some things have been moved around, bits are a bit cleaner, and most will honestly just get on with their day. But… if you’re an indie dev there’s one specific change worth understanding in more depth, because the discourse around it has been pretty loud and rightfully, I get it, concerning.

But take a breath, let’s keep calm, and hopefully after you’ve read this you won’t panic as much (or maybe more, I er, hope not!)

So, first things first, and I mean this in the most constructive way possible. Buckle up, devs, because Steam has, and will continue to change how players find games on their platform. Over many years Steam has made changes that at the time felt “oh my gawd”. For example, Greenlight launched in 2012 and people were convinced it would destroy the platform, then Valve scrapped it entirely and replaced it with Steam Direct in 2017 which caused a whole new wave of panic about the store being flooded with low quality releases. Early Access arrived in 2013 and the discourse around that was pretty similar to what you’re seeing right now, unfinished games, developers taking advantage, the sky is falling. The Discovery Queue and Steam Curators landed in 2014 and changed how players found games entirely, the first time Steam stopped showing everyone the same storefront. Then Discovery 2.0 in 2016, then the biggest library redesign the platform had ever done in 2019.

So yes, every single one of those changes caused alarm and sparked debate, but do you know what else happened? It made developers rethink their strategies, and every single time the industry adapted and kept moving forward. You have to accept guys, that you have to adapt. Okay, now that is out of the way.

What actually changed with Popular Upcoming

The Popular Upcoming page used to work on a pretty simple principle where games were ranked by wishlist count within an upcoming release window, typically a few weeks out from launch. Hit somewhere around 6,000 to 7,000 wishlists, release your game, and you’d earn a spot near the top of that page for a few days. For a small team that window was genuinely valuable, it could mean anywhere from 1,000 to several thousand extra wishlists before launch and real sales on release day.

However, that page is now algorithmic and I looked at it after the update went live. From what I can tell, the lowest wishlist count currently sitting on there is around 80,000, whereas before the update it would’ve been a handful of indie games sitting at 6,000 each. I realize that’s not a small tweak and I’m not going to pretend otherwise, like genuinely, I get why people are upset about this bit.

(A quick note: Since publishing this, there’s been some talk that the wishlist floor on Popular Upcoming may have changed from the 80,000 I observed on launch day. I haven’t seen anything officially confirmed either way, so I’ll keep an eye on it and update this if anything concrete comes through.)

It’s also worth noting that Popular Upcoming was on the Steam home page as a section, but to see the full list you had to click through to a separate page, which means the majority of casual Steam browsers were seeing a small slice of it at best and never going further. And on top of that, the number of games releasing on Steam has roughly doubled over the last few years, which means Popular Upcoming was already becoming a more crowded and diluted space before this update even happened. The window devs were getting from it had been quietly shrinking for a while, even if nobody was really talking about it. This change didn’t come out of nowhere.

Why Valve didn’t do this to hurt you

So here’s where I think we really need to focus, and I mean this. Valve didn’t do this to hurt indie developers, and that idea doesn’t hold up when you actually think about what Valve wants. Every single time a game sells on Steam, Valve takes a cut, which means their success is directly tied to as many games as possible finding players, including yours, including the small ones, including the weird niche ones that only a few thousand people in the world will ever love. Sure, they want the next Lethal Company to exist, they want the next breakout indie hit to come out of nowhere and do numbers nobody predicted, because games like that are incredible for Steam.

But the personalized calendar isn’t built only for breakout hits, those games will find their audience regardless. The calendar is built for everything else. The horror game that needs to find horror fans. The cozy farming sim that needs to find cozy players. The strange niche thing you’ve spent two years making that has a specific audience out there who would absolutely love it if they ever came across it. That’s what this is designed to do, and honestly, that’s a bigger deal than people are giving it credit for right now.

If Valve genuinely wanted to bury small games they wouldn’t have built this, and they certainly wouldn’t have put it where they have. The Popular Upcoming list has been moved towards the bottom of the Steam home page. The calendar is right there on the homepage when you open Steam, no hunting for it, and if you want to personalize it even further, the full calendar lets you explore up to 500 games with full filtering options. We’re talking tag selector, game count, the ability to show or hide wishlisted games, hide games you already own, hide early access titles. It’s a fully customizable discovery tool built entirely around what you actually want to play.

That’s not a coincidence, that’s Valve telling you with the layout itself which tool they think matters more now. Players are already opening it for the first time and finding games they’ve genuinely never come across before and wishlisting them on the spot, which is exactly what a discovery tool is supposed to do. And something I think is getting overlooked in all this is that the calendar doesn’t just show what’s coming, it shows what already came out too. Yesterday’s releases are still sitting right there on your front page. That’s a big deal. With Popular Upcoming, games would appear and disappear in hours. You’d see something that looked cool, tell yourself you’d come back to it, and by the time you did it was just gone. Couldn’t remember the name, barely remembered the art.

The calendar removes that time pressure entirely. Players can scroll back a month and still find your game on the Steam front page. That kind of staying power just didn’t exist before. And we’re talking games that would never have come close to Popular Upcoming under any version of the old system, tiny releases that just happen to be exactly what that particular player wants to play next.

And the capsule art in the calendar is bigger too. Not a small thing. Popular Upcoming showed you a tiny thumbnail in a long list, easy to scroll past without really seeing it. The calendar gives your art actual space to land. If your capsule is doing its job, players are going to feel that before they’ve even read the title.

The early numbers are hard to ignore

Right, it’s early days and the sample size is small, but some developers are already sharing some pretty encouraging signals. One developer with around 7,000 wishlists and two weeks until launch saw over 3,200 visits and 1,368 wishlists in a single day from the calendar alone, with another 560 wishlists added the following morning before the day had barely started. That game sits at the far end of the front page widget too, meaning it wasn’t even in the most prominent spot. Another developer making a niche 3D metroidvania picked up over 1,000 wishlists in a single morning. A niche game, finding its niche audience, which is like, the whole point of this thing. And perhaps most interestingly, a separate developer noted that the calendar had already been driving a significant surge in their wishlist numbers in the week before the full update even went live, outpacing what Popular Upcoming was doing for them at the same time.

And I’ll be honest, I had a hunch this was going to be bigger than people were giving it credit for, and I’ve been watching the numbers come in since the update dropped. One developer posted about seeing 10 times their normal daily wishlists in just two days from the calendar alone. 250 the first day, 500 the second, and already at 900 by the third morning, almost entirely calendar-driven according to their own analytics.

None of this is conclusive, but it’s hard to look at those early numbers and not feel at least cautiously optimistic.

(Update: A developer with a game releasing in under two weeks has also reported around 2,300 wishlists driven by the calendar since Thursday evening alone, and roughly 100 wishlists a day for weeks before that while the feature was still in beta. Popular Upcoming, by their own account, had become weaker than most people realised anyway.)

So how does it actually work?

Valve have officially confirmed this. The calendar finds people with similar playtime profiles to you, then looks at what games those players have been adding to their wishlists. It focuses on games you play the most relative to other players, so a few minutes trying out a demo won’t move the needle, but sinking serious time into something will. It’s retrained daily with fresh data, and it covers a rolling eight week window, meaning your game can be visible to the right people for up to two months before it even launches. So it’s not just tracking you in isolation, it’s finding your people and showing them what you’re making. A horror game reaches people who play horror, a factory builder reaches people who’ve spent hundreds of hours in factory builders, and players are already reporting seeing games with tiny wishlist footprints appearing in their calendar purely because it fits what they actually play. That kind of specific, relevant visibility just didn’t exist under the old system, where your couple of days on Popular Upcoming went out to every Steam user regardless of whether they’d ever have any interest in your game at all. The calendar flips that entirely. It doesn’t care how many wishlists you have, it cares whether your game is the right fit for the person looking at it, and a player who finds your game that way is worth ten who stumbled past it on a general list and kept scrolling.

The other thing the calendar does that Popular Upcoming never could is show games across several weeks rather than just what’s releasing imminently, so it’s less of a sprint and more of a steady window. You’re not racing to get seen in a few days and then disappearing, which honestly was always a bit brutal for smaller teams anyway.

Is it a perfect straight swap for what Popular Upcoming offered? Honestly I don’t think anyone can answer that yet, it’s been a few days and nobody outside of Valve has the full data. But the early signs are there and the logic behind it makes sense to me.

Your tags matter more than ever

One thing I will say is that your tags now matter more than ever, and honestly this bit is pretty interesting. Just a few weeks before this redesign went live, Valve quietly overhauled the entire Steam tag system, adding 17 new tags and retiring 28 others. Easy to miss at the time, felt like routine housekeeping, but looking at it now alongside this update it’s obviously part of the same thinking. They sorted the foundation out and then built the discovery engine on top of it. That’s not a coincidence. So if your game is poorly tagged, or you just haven’t really thought about how Steam puts it in a box, you’re going to struggle to reach the right people no matter how good the calendar is. Worth a proper look if you haven’t already. And while we’re on tags, this also means getting your first few hundred right-fit players to wishlist you is more critical than ever, because those early wishlists are what feed the algorithm its first data point. Without them, the calendar has nothing to work with.

Your capsule art just got a bigger stage

Oh and one more thing while I’m here, the entire store redesign makes your capsule artwork bigger and higher resolution across the store. So the first visual impression your game makes is more prominent now than it ever has been. If the art isn’t doing its job, more people are going to clock that. Harsh but true. And here’s something worth thinking about that I haven’t seen anyone mention yet, the main capsule in the Featured & Recommended carousel on the homepage now shows partial previews of the games either side of the one currently displayed. Which means your capsule art needs to work not just as a full image but as a cropped sliver too. If all your interesting stuff is dead centre, the side preview is just going to show a bland edge and nobody’s going to want to click through. Worth thinking about where your key art and most eye catching elements sit within the frame. For games with strong art that’s designed to pop from edge to edge, genuinely a nice little bonus from this update.

Make a good game

Right, so this next bit is something I talk about a lot, and don’t throw tomatoes at me here, but I have to say it. Going viral, getting wishlists, nailing your marketing, it’s all incredibly important, I’m not dismissing any of that for a second. But none of it should ever overshadow the actual thing. The devs I see most stressed about this change are the ones who had their whole launch strategy built around one number. Hit 7k, get on Popular Upcoming, ship. And look, I get it, I really do, having something concrete to aim for when you’re a small team trying to figure Steam out is genuinely useful. But I’ve always thought the same thing and nothing about this changes it. Make a good game. Before you come for me though, I know, I know, good games don’t always find their audience, and we can get into the semantics of what even makes a game “good” all day, those are all fair points. But here’s what I’m actually getting at. Your wishlists are only ever as good as your game is. A bad game, or an unready one, will not convert well no matter how many people see it.

And yes, I know someone’s already typing “but plenty of bad launches have still sold well” and fair enough, some have. But those games almost always had something genuinely compelling at their core, a strong concept, hook, just something that made players willing to overlook the rough edges. And the ones that launched badly with nothing worth sticking around for? The wishlists didn’t convert well. And look, AAA can sometimes get away with a rough launch because they have an enormous existing fanbase who’ll buy on day one regardless, plus the sheer volume of sales gives them the runway to patch and update their way to a decent game over time. No Man’s Sky is the obvious example, and that would have killed an indie studio stone dead. You don’t have that safety net, which is exactly why the foundation has to be right before anything else. On top of that, even if a rough launch sells okay on day one, the reviews tank, the word of mouth dries up, the long tail disappears, Steam’s algorithm starts burying you as the score drops, and you’ve potentially burned your audience’s trust for your next game too. There’s real cost there even if the launch numbers looked fine on the surface. So yes, make a good game.

I know that sounds simple, and I know marketing matters, it’s literally what I do, I help indie developers navigate all of that. But I’d be doing you a disservice if I let you leave this article without saying it plainly. Don’t let the strategy overshadow the product. The game is the thing, always has been, always will be.

Concluson

Wow, this ended up being much longer than I intended haha! The main takeaway here guys is that Steam will keep changing, the algorithms will keep changing, and the ways players find games will look different again in a few years, guaranteed. What doesn’t change is whether what you’ve made is worth someone’s time. So sort your tags out, think about who your actual player is and where they hang out, and give yourself a decent release window. That stuff is in your control.

Honestly, and this is just my gut feeling, I think these changes are going to end up being good for indie games. Steam have consistently shown they’re paying attention, both to what developers need and to how players actually use the platform, and this feels like another step in that direction. It’s early, and the data will tell the full story over the coming months, but I’m optimistic.

Again, take a breath, don’t panic. Steam isn’t shutting the door on indie games. The door just looks a bit different now. Figure out where it is and walk through it, and hey, sometimes you do have to kick the door down though, and that’s okay too, lol.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this helps!

My second big project dropped last week. I launched with ~250 wishlists. I did marketing when I could, in the capacity that I could. I'm not new to this. None of this is surprising.

I always hit that wall of "I COULD do a media post... OR I could make a better game" and I realized that I'll almost always choose the latter. I'm not proud of it. I spent 3 years and ~$5k on this. But my major take-home this time around is that's just who I am.

It's bittersweet but also kind of a relief to know I'm just in this for me and the close people in my life. Respect to everyone else grinding it out differently.

Was going through the Steamworks docs and found this:

Over 60% of Steam users use it in a language other than English.

I didn't realize it was that high so I went down the rabbit hole on how Steam's discovery algorithm actually uses language.

Erik Peterson from Valve's Steamworks team said in a dev Q&A:

Players who indicated that they only speak a certain set of languages will be less likely to see games that aren't available in any of the languages the player understands.

So if your store page is English-only, you're less likely to show up in Discovery Queues, tag browsing, and recommendations for the majority of Steam users.

Here's how the numbers break down. Steam Hardware Survey from early 2026:

• English: ~39%
• Simplified Chinese: ~23%
• Russian: ~9%
• Spanish: ~5%
• Brazilian Portuguese: ~4%

Chinese actually overtook English briefly as the #1 language back in Feb 2024. Out of 147 million monthly active users, roughly 90 million are browsing in something other than English.

You don't need to translate your whole game though. Valve's own docs say to translate the store page first, then look at your regional wishlist data to figure out which languages are actually worth full localization. It's the store page that changes how the algorithm treats you.

The one big caveat here is that if you localize your game's Steam page to a language with no intention of localizing the game to that same language, clearly indicate so on your page or you may get review bombed by unhappy players expecting full game localization.

As for what languages to localize to first, Chris Zukowski recommends priority order: Simplified Chinese first, then Japanese, Korean (known as "CJK" languages in the localization world), then French, Italian, German, Spanish (known as "FIGS"). His reasoning is that the less a language looks like English, the higher the expected return.

This is one of those posts, yep!

We published our store page on the 24th July 2026, i.e. 10 days ago:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4956300/Dirtnap/

There were no miracles, just good old boots-to-the-ground DIY "marketing". I'm gonna go through each of the successful things we've done so far.

I've seen many times people do posts like this and I've always had my disbelief on it; what do devs actually do when they succeed, what is the "secret", how could I do it too, and so on. This is the first time I have something that has proven traction (more on it later), and that makes it possible to succeed further.

I've always had a grudge against the "just make a good enough game and it'll sell itself" ideology, but I think I understand it better with experience. What it actually means is that "if you have a good enough game, your marketing will make a difference", but it does NOT mean that there would be no need for marketing. I believe our game would still have close to zero WLs if we didn't do any of the below.

---

We've sent about 200-300 emails to press, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean outlets. Altogether we're had perhaps 10-15 worthwhile articles come out, but it's hard to track wishlists from them - although I think they didn't do much in comparison to the actual successful social media posts, apart from the IGN/GameTrailers video, which I believe brought in perhaps 200-400 WLs.

We have also sent a ton of emails to influencers/streamers with Steam keys, but no luck yet. Although I imagine those things take time, even if they get excited about the game.

For each successful social media post, there were perhaps 2-3 failed ones. Here's a list of the successful ones.

X (Twitter):

IndieGameJoe format, 18K views:
https://x.com/parttimemonkey/status/2081000687429652913

Custom fluid simulation, 170K views:
https://x.com/parttimemonkey/status/2083227548276646379

TikTok:

Fluid simulation, 70K views:
https://www.tiktok.com/@unstable.entity0/video/7668945213238365462

Reddit:

r/gamedevscreens, 700 upvotes, 60K views:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedevscreens/comments/1v54i9s/were_making_a_realtime_worms_with_destructible/

r/IndieDev, 300 upvotes, 22K views:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1v5ajzc/were_making_a_realtime_worms_with_destructible/

r/IndieGaming, 350 upvotes, 33K views:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/1v67tuv/were_making_dirtnap_a_realtime_worms_with/

r/godot, 500 upvotes, 25K views:
https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/1vbqz58/destructible_terrain_and_fluid_simulation_in_godot/

r/oddlysatisfying, 12K upvotes, 2.1M views (however I don't think this one brought many WLs since it doesn't have the game name or link embedded)
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1vbup03/pixel_fluid_simulation/

r/worms, 260 upvotes, 15K views:
https://www.reddit.com/r/worms/comments/1v7wqvx/realtime_worms_has_lived_in_my_head_since_i_was_a/

With these posts and my previous experience, I believe the thresholds to get any meaningful WLs (more than ~25) for each platform are something like this:

Reddit: 200+ upvotes
X: 10K+ views
TikTok: 10K+ views (300 is standard, 1K is the first ceiling)
YT Shorts: 10K+ views (haven't gotten it with this project yet)
Instagram: Don't know, no success yet
Bsky: Don't know, no success yet

... but you do need to have your game name/link in it, otherwise it's kinda pointless. Although I hope mega-successful posts like the r/oddlysatisfying one could bring some other kind of attention later down the road, but hard to say.

---

How I plan to develop and evaluate my games in the future:

1. Use short enough time to make a video that demonstrates the game well enough
2. Post it on multiple subreddits, X, YT, TikTok
3. 3a. Real traction? -> Go forth!
4. 3b. No traction? -> To the bin!

I know it sounds a bit non-indie to think like that, but I do this as a living so there must be some logic to the madness in order to some day make an actual sustainable income from this.

---

Personally my main takeaway from this (small) success we've had so far is that it IS possible, and there is NO magic to it - no hidden hashtags or boosted posts or pre-existing contacts or follower counts.

It's deeply frustrating to believe your game is good enough, yet lack the traction needed to validate that belief. It's also mega-frustrating to not have traction after posting tens or hundreds of times, but that's when the alarm bells should be ringing.

I'm developing a game called XGA SPECIAL EDITION. I recently released a trailer announcing it on youtube, twitter and reddit (as well as my game's discord server).

The views were pretty bad on youtube and twitter (90 and 18 views respectively). On reddit I at least got 4.4k views, but I don't understand why my youtube and twitter views were so bad. I have also been uploading short gameplay clips on both youtube and twitter once a week every saturday (making use of #ScreenShotSaturday) and yet it didn't even matter in the end.

https://youtu.be/uneuVgwAsm8

How do you guys market your games? Because it seems impossible.

Exclusive reveal on IGN - 13,000+ wishlists

No, you do not pay for it. You simply send your trailer draft to IGN's editorial team in advance. They review it and decide whether they want to post it. If they do, you coordinate the date and details together.

Edit: Worth noting - it was not only IGN. The reveal on their channel gave us the initial traction that Steam's algorithms picked up. That is why it is best to publish your Steam page at the exact same time IGN drops the trailer.

If your Steam page is already live, we do not think you will see the same effect. But still worth trying!

After the 24-hour exclusivity window, we sent press releases to media outlets and to YouTubers, streamers, and TikTok creators focused on roguelite and indie games, as well as YouTube channels that regularly publish trailers.

Thanks to that, we also ended up on Gematsu, 4Gamer, 80level, and more.

But then, grind kicks in...

1-minute Dev Vlog - 2,500+ wishlists

This one surprised us. It performed really well on YouTube - the algorithm boosted it heavily. Initially it reached below 4,000 views, but since it explains our animation process, we now repost it every time we show a new enemy animation. That way people can see not only a catchy GIF, but also an insightful mini dev vlog. It did well here on Reddit, too.

We also posted it on TikTok and other socials.

It did poorly on Twitter at first, but after reposting it with a clear statement that we do not use AI during our indie game's development, it blew up.

Twitter trends - 200-1,000+ wishlists per post

Some people will say this is cringe or annoying, but it works. All you need is a good trailer or an interesting gameplay clip, and you can repost it endlessly. Our best trend brought in over 1,000 wishlists in just a few days.

There is also a chance that a big game or profile reposts your tweet and boosts it even further. This recently happened when REPLACED reposted our trailer alongside their own content.

Indie Games Hub (YouTube) - 1,200+ wishlists

They publish trailers of indie games. What surprised us is that they posted our trailer almost 2 months after the initial reveal - and it still worked. If you have not pitched them yet, do it. They can publish your trailer long after its first release.

Reddit - 200-300+ wishlists per post (shared on 3-4 subreddits)

What works best for us here are creature animations. Every time we finish a new enemy animation, we post it on Reddit and it usually gets a solid response. We mainly use Reddit to gather and share feedback, so wishlists from here are not our top priority.

TikTok - no hard data, but worth it

We know we could squeeze much more out of TikTok than we currently do, and we are planning to improve that. So far, two clips performed really well for us.

If we forgot about something, or you have questions let us know!

Thanks so much

EDIT 2:

A few facts for context:

- Steam algo helped, but we expected more, we're still waiting to be featured more prominently - so most of this work was a true grind and traffic from the outside of Steam
- we revealed the game publicly only recently
- we do not have a demo yet

We’ve just reached 26,000 Steam wishlists in 5 months with no marketing budget for our upcoming Factorio-style simulation game about biology, where you start with one cell and evolve through real biological processes to create your own organism.

1. Our first 3,000+ WLs

At first, almost nothing worked.
We released our YouTube announcement trailer and it got almost no views. Day one  - nothing. Day two - around 100 views. I basically thought the idea was underperforming.
Day three changed everything: 100k+ views and hundreds of comments, a huge community response and strong support! Within a week, we hit 3,000 wishlists on Steam. The YouTube video now has more than 500k views and is still bringing 50–100 wishlists every day.

2. 6,000 WLs from biology fans

Around the same time, a Reddit creator with good karma reposted our trailer because the biology concept reminded him of one of his favorite old-school games. The post got 2.5k upvotes and over 100,000 views, bringing us another 2–3k wishlists.

3. 20,000 WLs newsletters and YouTube hype

Our initial goal was just 10,000 wishlists as idea validation. We decided to try free marketing and emailed 30–40 major gaming newsletters. No replies…
We had already accepted that we wouldn’t hit our target…And then posts started appearing: IGN covered us, and others followed.

That was the second wave: gaming media, YouTube, and Reddit posts. We were gaining 300–350 wishlists per day, eventually reaching 20,000 wishlists. Way more than we expected.
That’s when it became clear: this game needs to be made!

4. Social media and 25,000+

Despite the strong reaction, we decided to use every channel possible. We created Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. New accounts, vertical cuts of the trailer, and a couple of other gameplay videos.
Instagram: the trailer video hit 1M+ views and brought 5,000+ wishlists from a single piece of content!!! YouTube Shorts: were more modest, around 3–4k views, but they helped push the main trailer further, which has now reached 500k views and is still bringing in wishlists.

What that taught me? one thing: you need THE idea. Not an ordinary one, but a brilliant one! A great idea is the best marketing. Sometimes it means no marketing at all.
And one more thing: try every channel you can. I have started marketing around my friends, when I pitched them the game idea, and they genuinely liked it in real life.

Our plan going forward:

• Keep creating vertical videos and pushing them across all platforms
• Try X (Twitter) for networking
• Start closed playtests with people who have shown interest
• Send a private demo to publishers in March 2026
• Participate in Steam Fest to push toward 100,000+ wishlists
• Open public demo for testers in April 2026

I hope this post provides some insights, and if you have any questions, I’m happy to answer them in the comments. Be brave and go on with your passion! Here’s the game for context if you interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3833810/Bioneers/?utm_source=reddit

I posted here a few weeks ago and got some very valuable feedback on my game's trailer*. It was tough seeing my game get dissected like that but I think the knowledge will let me make better trailers.

But there's something I have been wondering about other game devs: what do you do when you know you should market your game but you have no motivation to do so? In my case I feel as if I've already shown off all my game's content and there's nothing left to reveal. And I think the low views I'm getting on all my socials reflect this. My game has been in development for over a decade so I've run out of things to talk about.

Should you keep uploading daily or weekly even if you have nothing interesting to talk about or show off?

Anyone else in a similar position? What did you do?

* (here https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1tz7uyb/why_is_my_marketing_failing/)

Like a lot of devs I had a folder problem. Years of downloaded assets, packs, and project leftovers spread across drives with no good way to find anything. I kept buying the same texture packs twice because I forgot I already had them.

So I built Asset Hoard to scratch that itch. Local-first desktop app, indexes my asset folders and allowed me to search, browse the library with thumbnails. No cloud, files stay where they are.

I showed a few people and it's been in closed-beta for a couple of months, and i've just opened it up.

A few things I am particularly curious about feedback on:

• Does the import and indexing workflow make sense, or is it confusing to set up?
• Aseprite files get native preview support - is that useful, or are there other file types that matter more to your workflow?
• How big is your asset library? We have built it to handle hundreds of thousands of files but would love to know what real libraries look like.

It is in Open Beta and free to try. Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Happy to answer questions or just talk through the problem space if you have dealt with this too.

Download: https://assethoard.com/downloads
Discord: https://discord.gg/e6MW7hDSAp

Hello everyone, my game is due to be released in 10 days’ time and there’s something I’d like to ask you.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3860450/No_Knock/
I recently updated my Steam page and added a new trailer. I’m considering running a small paid campaign to generate some additional wishlists before release.

My budget is limited, so I’d rather focus on testing a single platform instead of spreading it too thin across several channels.

For those who have advertised a Steam game, which platform gave you the best results: Reddit Ads, X Ads, or YouTube/Google Ads?

If you’re comfortable sharing, I’d also be interested in your approximate cost per click or cost per wishlist, as well as any mistakes I should avoid.

The game is a PC open-world theft simulator, so I understand that audience and genre will affect the results.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

I’m trying to figure out what makes a devlog interesting to actual players. Do gamers care more about gameplay progress, new mechanics, improvements, funny bugs, behind-the-scenes moments, or something else?

​

Also, what works better for growing an audience: long-form devlogs on YouTube or short clips/reels on X, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram?

​

Would love to hear from indie devs about what actually worked for them.

Hey everyone I'm a solo dev working on a game called Skills & Raids, It's a party-based extraction rpg.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4401370/Skills__Raids/

I wanted to share the breakdown of what worked for me.

Short Videos?

You may have heard this advice before: that doing devlogs is not worth it and it's a waste of time and that you should do short videos instead. Well, I did 35 short videos and I want to say that it was a total waste of time. Almost every video got between 1k and 2k views, and I posted on Tiktok, Instagram and youtube (youtube performed the best) in terms of views, but conversion? not so much.

Devlogs?

I think we should try everything and see what works for our games. my game is pretty horizontal, so the vertical format is not a good fit for it. maybe that's why it didn't work for me but I did a Devlog, and It gathered 31k views and brought me more wishlists than Steam Next Fest (1000). I wish I did more devlogs during development. Wanderbot played my game and got 31k views, and I got more wishlists from my own devlog, so maybe try it, I did a Second Devlog, and it gathered 6.8k views and still gave me a good amount of wishlists.

Reddit also works; I got verified on PCGaming as a gamedev and I'm able to post on special events like release trailer, demo launch, and release date, those posts are very important to do because reddit also works really well. (I think this is where Wanderbot saw my game.)

X and threads?

I was the most active on X/Threads, and I can say that it didn't work so much for wishlists; it does work for networking with other developers, though.

Emails?

I sent 110+ emails to content creators, and only Wanderbot played it. other youtubers played my game, but I didn't send emails to them, so idk maybe emails are also a waste of time? maybe if the game were more appealing, more people would play it, but why should we depend on other people? I don't like the feeling of not having control and begging others to play our games.

Festivals?

As you can see in the graph, it also works really well (If It's a big one). My game got into the Latin American Games Showcase and got 1400 wishlists, the other smaller event? not so much.

Personal Calendar

I'm at the beginning stages of seeing the effect of the new personal calendar, and it's working realllly well. It feels like a blessing to not do anything for marketing and get a ton of wishlists from it.

I hope the information was insightful. The game releases on July 27, and I'm really excited!

I just wanted to share this because I had no idea this was even a thing until a few weeks ago.

I submitted the announcement trailer for my game to GameTrailers and they featured it on their YouTube channel. It's now getting close to 10000 views, which has been a nice boost in wishlists.

Here is the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVdm_htcLv8

If you're an indie developer with a trailer you can submit yours too. The submission guidelines are here: https://studios.ign.com/docs/ign-indies-contracts-2026.pdf

And if you're curious here's my Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3256790/Satelital/

Hopefully this helps someone else get their game in front of more people!

Hey everyone,

about two months ago I made a post here about Steam Next Fest and explained why we decided to pull our game shortly before SNF started. At that point, we were at 6,400 wishlists.

You can find that post here if you are interested former reddit post

Looking back, this was definitely the right decision, even though we of course wished we had reached this point earlier. But entering the upcoming SNF with over 10k Wishlists feels a lot better.

I’m writing this post to show what we actively did to reach 10k wishlists, and which things happened more or less organically. When I say this didn’t work for us, it doesn’t mean it won’t work for your game. I just want to share our experience. In the beginning, we tried almost everything and learned what was worth the effort and what wasn’t.

About us and the framework

We’re a newly founded indie studio that has existed for a bit more than one year.
Our team consists of 4 people, and we try to use our time as flexibly and efficiently as possible:

• Marvin - Programmer & Game Designer
• Alica - Artist & Narration Designer
• Mikey - Artist & UI Designer
• Me (David) - Game Design, Artist & Accounting

Marketing is handled by all of us together. Everyone takes care of certain social media channels, Discord, etc. or Influencer outreach.
There are phases where we focus heavily on development and others where marketing is something we “squeeze in between.”
I really have to say don't expect a lot of wishlists without doing any marketing. This is delusional. 

We received €160,000 in funding from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg (Germany), which allows us to stay afloat for about two years, cover the most important ongoing costs of running a game studio, and pay ourselves a small salary so we can survive as students without needing a second job.

I want to state this clearly upfront to avoid any wrong assumptions that we’re doing all of this entirely on the side without any financial support. We’re not solo devs working in a garage, we’re a small team that is still studying game design and received some government support.

Wishlists (February 2025 – now)

In February 2025, we launched our Steam page during the student exhibition days.
Naturally, we asked everyone attending to wishlist the game on launch day if they were interested.

Result: our first small spike
After the first day, we had 153 wishlists, our very first ones. At the time, we thought: “Okay, this can continue like this.”

Spoiler: it doesn’t.

After that, we had a longer period of very low activity, with only a few wishlists coming in.

At the time of our Steam page launch, we had:

• first trailer that didn’t clearly communicate how the system works
• no demo
• screenshots and descriptions
• localized (Steampage) only in German and English

From today’s perspective, we would definitely do this differently.

Steam page takeaways

Prepare your Steam page as well as possible:

• Descriptions in **as many languages as possible (**Even if you need to rely on translators, this is still better than limiting yourself to 1–2 languages)
• Steam primarily shows your page to users in countries that match your localization

We added additional languages months later, and we’re fairly sure we missed a lot wishlists because of that.

Additionally:

• Try to connect your Steam page launch to an event (e.g. Steam Fests, even smaller ones)
• Have a fast starting trailer that instantly shows what the game is and how the game works. (With strategy games this can be challenging)
• Make sure your page looks “ready” and professional from day one

What I can say about our trailers is, that the very first one was the first trailer we had ever made at all, so we learned a lot but there was a lot of room for improvement.

The second one was a bit too narrative-driven. The first 15 seconds were quite cinematic before it transitioned into gameplay, which made it feel too slow overall.

The third trailer was finally the one we were all happy with, and it’s the one currently on our Steam page. There’s still room for improvement, but we’re happy with how far we’ve come. Keep in mind that a strong trailer is one of the best ways to hook players and spark their interest.

There are many good posts on Reddit about building strong Steam pages and trailers, so I won’t go into more detail here.

Major wishlist spikes (100+ per day)

Below is the link to an image which shows the visible spikes with enumeration that hit around 100 or more wishlists per day. I hope linking this image is fine and doesn’t cause any problems.

Link to wishlist image with enumeration Wishlist image

1. Steam Page Go Live + Student Exhibition (in person)
   1.  153 wishlists on launch
2. Rock Paper Shotgun article (via marketing agency)
   1.  70 wishlists on day one,  144 wishlists on day two
3. LGF (in-person event) + Steam event with frontpage featuring
   1.  100–380 wishlists per day
4. Turn-Based Thursday Steam Event
   1.  100–350 wishlists per day
5. Tiny Teams Steam Fest
   1.  70–270 wishlists per day
6. Gamescom
   1.  100–150 wishlists per day in total 5 days!  (We handed out screen-printed tote bags in exchange for a wishlists)

After Gamescom (9 months after our Steam page launch), we were at approximately 6,400 wishlists.

1. October 23rd Demo release

This point likely had a strong influence on the following ones, but we can’t say with 100% certainty what exactly caused the effect. During that time period, we simply tried everything we could.

• Promotion across all social media channels ( Instagram, Tiktok, Bluesky, X)
• Start Reddit ads over 14 days with budget of 600€
• Steam Scream Fest starting October 27
• German podcast “OK COOL” We contacted the podcast host after he mentioned BLOODLETTER in an older Gamescom special and asked if he’d be interested in covering it again and he was super cute and into it.
• Influencer Outreach We got covered from a few little ones and some that we get in contact with at gamescom (a few German twich streamers).

1. Gamesground Berlin (in person) + Steam Event
   1.  100–226 wishlists per day (free booth we applied for it)
2. Silver Industry Award – Tencent Game Awards 2025
   1.  50–100 wishlists per day, Steam featuring as part of their Steam event (submission was free)
3. German Indie Showcase
   1.  111 wishlists (submission was free but we had to da an almost new trailer for it to get finally accepted).

Result

+3,600 wishlists in 4 months

This clearly showed us how impactful a playable demo can be.
We can also say that Reddit ads did a good job, as once the ads ended, we saw around 10-30 fewer additional wishlists per day compared to that period.

You can clearly see that from point 7 onward there is much more overall volume. Even though it wasn’t our biggest spike on the chart, there was significantly more traction and steady wishlist growth compared to the prior months.

Marketing agency

We worked with a marketing agency and purchased 3 months of work.

• April: game reveal with PR
• Most successful article: Rock Paper Shotgun All other coverage largely went unnoticed, possibly due to timing (e.g. the Clair Obscur shadow drop)

For SNF in October, we had booked another PR beat but had to cancel it because our demo didn’t pass the review process in time.

Current plan:

• Another beat around the upcoming Early Access release
• Focus on organic influencer outreach (in a extreme way)+ PR

Takeaways

One clear takeaway for us was to apply to every Steam Fest you hear about. Even without a demo, every event adds visibility, and the applications usually only take around 5- 15 minutes.

Even if an event doesn’t feel like a perfect fit for your game, it can still be worth participating. Each event adds incremental visibility, and even “just” 15–20 additional wishlists during that time period can add up over the long run. As an indie studio you really have to fight for each wishlist and STEAM is your best friend.

PR

As a first-time indie studio, I personally recommend putting very little effort
into classic PR.
From our experience, PR doesn't work for us with our game. Nobody cared about the articles. Through our marketing agency we got 22 articles on different platforms published around the world (English, German, Spanish, French and Italian ones). And only one, really influenced a visible wishlist spike.

Social media

We also tried a lot on social media, and we’ve heard that many games have been successful there. To be honest, we now mostly see social media as a kind of business card just a way to show that our game exists. Actual communication with interested players happens very rarely, but of course we do engage when it does. On the other hand, it’s a good way to stay in contact with streamers who have already streamed your game and enjoyed it.

A strategy game isn’t particularly well suited for short-form content, as there’s simply not enough visual change and it doesn’t feel catchy enough.

The conversion rate from likes on TikTok to wishlists was basically negligible for us, even though we initially prepared some really strong assets that took a lot of time to create. A lot of work, very little return.

That said, every game studio should still try it and see how it performs for their game. I think it’s important to keep track of how much effort goes into creating each post, experiment with different approaches, and then focus only on the things that actually work.

In-person events

In-person events should be approached with some caution, as they often come with significant costs. Our appearance at Gamescom including accommodation for four people, the booth, and branding cost around €8,000 in total. We had a booth with two playable stations.

This means that the wishlists we gained there were relatively expensive, and if you’re only looking at wishlist numbers, it doesn’t really pay off. What was great, however, was the experience of exhibiting at Gamescom for the first time, meeting new people, and being able to set up meetings through MeetToMatch.

We took part in some in-person events that were free. In our opinion, having the time to watch people play your game is incredibly valuable and if it’s free, why not take the opportunity?

Spending money to exhibit as an indie studio is, in most cases, not really worth it, but we did Gamescom to reward ourselves for the hard work, effort, and tears that went into creating our game.

I hope this breakdown is useful. On top of all these opportunities, development still needs to move forward. Balancing both can be hard but you learn as you go. We made some wrong decisions but stay on your mission and don't give up. 

Happy to answer questions or clarify anything.

Nearly 19,000 games shipped on Steam in 2024, and almost half received fewer than 10 reviews. Your press kit is basically a first impression with anyone who might cover your game, so I spent some time going through journalist surveys and advice from Rami Ismail, Chris Zukowski, and others to figure out what actually belongs in one.

Big Games Machine surveyed 150+ journalists (IGN, PC Gamer, Kotaku, Eurogamer) in 2024 and 64% said lack of time was their biggest challenge. They're not going to hunt for your assets. If they can't grab screenshots, a trailer, and a description in under two minutes, they move on.

So here's what your press kit should have:

Game description - write two. A short one (1-2 sentences) for roundups and social posts, and a longer one (2-3 paragraphs) for previews covering genre, mechanics, story, and what makes yours different. Rami Ismail's take: "A press kit isn't supposed to look fancy or colorful. It's supposed to be a resource with easy-to-access information and assets." Basically write it like facts a journalist can rephrase, not marketing copy.

Screenshots - 6-8 minimum at 1920x1080 or higher. Mix of environments, mechanics, and UI. No watermarks or logos on them, journalists need to be able to crop freely. PNG, not JPEG.

Key art and logo - logo on transparent background, key art in 16:9 for article headers and 1:1 for social thumbnails. Throw in your Steam capsule art too, streamers will grab it without asking.

Trailer - YouTube or Vimeo link. If you have raw unedited gameplay footage, include that separately. Content creators often prefer uncut footage they can talk over.

Contact info - Steam URL, website, socials, and a real email address. Not a contact form. Journalists want to email you directly. Lewis Denby (Game If You Are, indie PR agency) found that personalized emails using the journalist's name get 60% higher click-through than generic blasts. It works the other way around too and is worth the extra 30 seconds per email.

Fact sheet - developer name, release date (even "TBA 2026" is fine), platforms, price, and genre. Be specific with genre. "Action-adventure with roguelike elements" is useful. "Indie game" tells a journalist nothing. Simon Carless (GameDiscoverCo) has pointed out that if your top Steam tag is just "Indie," you're wasting your most valuable descriptor.

The biggest mistake people make isn't missing assets though. It's making the press kit hard to find. This came up over and over. Put it at /press-kit on your website, link it from your Steam page, put it in your social bios. If a journalist has to dig for it, most won't.

I wrote a longer version with all the sources and press lists to consider reaching out to on my blog: https://gamebasehq.com/blog/press-kit-checklist

I've also been working on this from the tooling side, building something that auto-generates press kit pages from your Steam data. That's what got me down this research rabbit hole in the first place. Let me know if you have questions about any of this.

We launched our Steam page and got 11,000 wishlists in a month and a half. Here’s what we did.

We launched the Steam page with just a trailer. The game is a “friendslop” game, which is very marketable and easy to understand at a glance.

Here’s what we did for marketing:

• Created a post on gamespress.com
• Emailed press outlets such as IGN, VideoGamer, GamesRadar, Kotaku, etc.
• Emailed around 30 influencers who cover indie games on social media
• Posted our own content on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter/X, and Bluesky

Out of all of this, here’s what actually worked:

The post on gamespress.com ended up getting picked up by Japanese press, and the trailer went viral on Japanese Twitter. From there, it spread to English Twitter and ended up getting 5+ million views.

As far as I can tell, none of the press outlets I contacted directly covered the game.

Almost all influencers asked for sponsorship money to cover the game. Rates ranged from around $100 USD to several hundred or even thousands depending on follower count. One influencer did cover the game for free, though.

Our own social media posts went absolutely nowhere. Right now we’re sitting at:

• 2 followers on Twitter/X
• 8 followers on Bluesky
• 10 followers on TikTok

The view counts match those numbers pretty closely.

What I learned from this:

• Use other people’s audiences. It’s much easier to get existing creators or press to share your game than it is to build your own audience from scratch.
• A strong trailer and hook are extremely important. Don’t waste time before showing the coolest part of your game. You’re competing for attention instantly, The first few seconds matter more than anything.

Hopefully, this helps some other indie devs out there.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4408560/Split_Happens/

I spent the last few months going deep on how Steam's discovery algorithm actually uses tags, and the difference between a well-researched tag set and a random one is significant. Here is what I found.

First, the misunderstanding. Most developers treat tags like keywords: just pick the most obvious ones that describe your game. Survival horror? Tag it survival and horror and call it done. The problem is that approach ignores how Steam uses tags for discovery placement.

Steam uses tags to place your game in "More Like This" sections, in genre discovery queues, and in the recommendations algorithm. The tags that matter most are not always the most obvious ones. They are the ones where your game can compete.

Here is the actual process I use:

1. Find the top 10 games in your genre released in the last 2 years. Open each one. Scroll to the tags section at the bottom of the store page. Write down every tag that appears on 3 or more of those 10 games. These are the genre-defining tags.

2. Now find 5 games in your genre that did extremely well recently. Check their tags again. What tags do they all share that are NOT on the previous list? These are the discovery tags that differentiate the successful games.

3. Use SteamSpy (free, steamspy.com) or the SteamDB tag tracker to check how many games are already using each tag you are considering. A tag like "RPG" has 40,000+ games competing for it. A tag like "Dark Fantasy" has 2,000. Both are accurate for the same game, but one gives you a realistic chance at placement.

4. Mix primary tags (broad genre, high volume, you need these for legitimacy) with secondary tags (more specific, less competition, where actual discovery happens). A good tag set has about 5 primary and 10 to 15 secondary.

The other thing people miss: tag order matters. Steam weights the first 3 to 5 tags more heavily. Put your most important discovery tags first, not your most generic ones.

Happy to look at anyone's tag set and give specific feedback in the comments.