I’ve been using some of these games myself (and loving them) so after noticing more and more of them releasing recently I got inspired to dive into the data and see if we’re witnessing the birth of a new subgenre and what marketing lessons we may be able to learn.

I’m tried an experiment last week where I offered free consultation to anyone interested. It lead to some great meetings and the lovely email I received below so i’m offering the same again :). Sign up for a free 30 minute consultation on Thursdays between 18:00 - 20:00 CET. If there continues to be interest in this i’ll open up the amount of slots and times I do it! If you really want to meet but that time slot doesn’t fit your schedule feel free to reach out at indiegamejordan@gmail.com

Free 30 Min Consultation

Data Collection

I found as many games as I possibly could on Steam that fit the criteria of a productivity game. The primary purpose needed to be productivity and/or focus and they needed at least a few productivity or focus tools. I did not include purely “idle” & “bottom of your screen games”. These are games like Tiny Pasture or the ones included in this bottom of your screen bundle. These games are also meant to live in the background while you do other stuff on your PC but they aren’t focused primarily on productivity or come with tools to support it.

I found 34 games that confidently fit the criteria of a productively game and threw together this Google sheet with data on their wishlists numbers, sales, number of reviews, etc.

All data was collected on February 5th & 6th 2026 from Steam and Gamalytic. Gamalytic uses third party estimates so take the data with a grain of salt.

How are productivity games performing?

I’d argue that productivity games on Steam are a subgenre of idle games. Idle games is a decently matured genre and maybe i’ll dive into that genre on a different day but today we’re going to look at the niche genre of productivity games specifically.

9 out of the 34 games I identified have over 500 reviews, with 3 of them making over 1 million dollars! 500 reviews is generally speaking the minimum sign of a commercially successful game for most studios (depending on how much it cost to develop). 9 out of 34 doesn’t seem like very high odds but if you look at the games on the list there’s a pretty clear difference in quality of the games (and marketing) that did well and the ones that didn’t. Based off what i’m if you made a high quality polished game in this genre odds were you did pretty good! That may seem like common sense but to flip the script if you make a high quality polished game in a more saturated genre like roguelike deck builders, the competition is much more fierce.

You might be wondering if there’s still demand for gamified productivity tools like these when there’s already a few good quality ones on the market. I would argue there’s definitely still demand and room to innovate! One example of this is Virtual Cottage 2 which is sitting on 58,026 wishlists and will release sometime in 2026.

What did the winners have in common?

Speaking of room to innovate there’s definitely some very common trends amongst these games. The dominate vibe is cute and cozy. Nearly all of these games have charming art, cozy vibes, calming music, and productivity tools. The famous lofi girl from Youtube also seems to be a huge inspiration.

Multiplayer & working with your friends is an emerging trend that is quickly putting corporate attempts at virtual coworking to shame. Side note: I’ve been using On: Together Virtual Coworking a ton lately and its a great accountability tool to use with a friend to make you sit down and get some work useful work done, I highly recommend it! It’s also published by friends of the newsletter Future Friends, so that’s pretty cool.

I think this subgrene has so much room to innovate and I really hope more games like this come out. Someone please ditch the cozy and cute vibes and instead make a productivity app with viking music and a angry coach asking me “whos gonna carry the boats”.

How do you market a game that’s not a game on a game platform?

It’s honestly pretty much the same. A common mistake in games marketing is simply listing off features rather than selling the fantasy the game creates. For example The Witcher 3 isn’t marketed as “cool sword fighting” “nice environment”, & “great stories”, but rather sells the fantasy of embodying Geralt and embarking on a grand adventure full of satisfying combat and great storytelling. The productivity games that performed the best sold the fantasy of finally tackling those tasks you always say you’re gonna do in a satisfying and fun manner.

Positioning was important in persuading users why they should choose one productivity game over another. Here’s a few archetypes you can see in the games in this study:

• Solo focus companion (Virtual Cottage, Chill Corner): low distraction, commitment, minimal UI, F2P.

• Gamified habit tracking + Heavy Customization (Spirit City, Mini Cozy Room): you “earn” progress from real work, with a deep customization economy and DLC runway.

• Social body-doubling (On‑Together, Virtual Cottage 2): the core value is “I’m not alone” & using social accountability.

• Parasocial co-working (Chill with You): companionship as the productivity tool, with narrative progression.

Content creators & press played a big role as usual. For games like these streamers aren’t usually the best fit, but cozy content creators talking about how cute and useful the game is perfect. A surprising amount of press like Polygon & PCgamer also covered some of these games. I suspect this is due to how new & popular this subgenre is, but as productivity games become more common it will probably be harder to get big press to care.

DLCs, bundles, and cross promotion were expertly utilized by the top performing games. The top performer Spirit City Lofi Sessions has over 19 bundles & 5 DLCs. Bundles & cross promotion are always a good idea but if your making a game in a niche genre its an even more effective tool. They’re one of the most effective ways to quickly get your game in front of your relevant target audience. DLCs also make a lot of sense for these kind of games. If i’m using your game on a weekly basis to get work done and I can unlock a cool new environment, character, or music for $5 there’s a good chance ill grab it.

Believe it or not community was also a great tool to utilized by some productivity games. Sorry to keep using Spirit City Lofi Sessions as an example but honestly their marketing was fantastic and there’s a reason they’re the top selling game. Spirit City Lofi Session’s Discord has channels where you can share your success stories as well as your avatar and room. Having a place to share how their game has helped you accomplish your tasks and the cool rooms you’ve created is incredibly effective for this sort of game and word of mouth. It goes without saying but the multiplayer productivity games also make great use of community as well.

Finally a common thing you’ll see with the top games is that they’re constantly shipping updates and communicating what’s coming next with their players.

What can we learn from this emerging genre?

I think emerging niche genres like this are a gold mine. You have a handful of successful games that exist providing a roadmap of what players are looking for. So “all you have to do” is identify the expectations of players in the niche genre and what resonates with them, then look for areas where you can innovate. This is of course easier said than done :).

Alright i’m gonna stop my pomodoro timer and go buy a new hat in On Together: Virtual Coworking now.

In this article, I break down how Steam Next Fest actually works today, what has changed in recent years, which signals Steam cares about, and how to approach demos, wishlists, and timing so Next Fest becomes a multiplier for existing momentum rather than a roll of the dice.

I’m trying an experiment this week. I love indie devs and it breaks my heart seeing hard working devs flying blind when it comes to marketing. With that in mind i’m trying an experiment where I offer free 30 minute consultation for anyone interested on Thursdays between 18:00 - 20:00 CET. If there’s enough interest in this i’ll open up the amount of slots and times I do it.

Free 30 Min Consultation

What is Steam Next Fest?

Steam Next Fest is a one week week festival (next one is in February) that focuses on upcoming games with playable demos. For many games it’s a great chance to get a massive increase in visibility. This is largely because it’s featured on the front page of Steam and your only competing against other upcoming games with demos rather than the entire Steam store like normal.

It’s important to note that Next Fest is not the magic bullet it once was. When Steam first introduced Next Fest it featured less than 1000 games in 2023 and now regularly has between 2000 - 3000 games during the 3 Next Fests that happen each year.

How does Steam Next Fest Work?

To accommodate this they made some big changes to how Next Fest works. It’s a bit irrelevant to list all the changes that happened during the October 2024 Steam Next Fest (google Oct. 2024 steam next fest changes if you’re curious), since it hasn’t changed much since then. Instead i’ll just list the most important ones to make sure you’re not operating on any outdated information.

• Live streams are no longer as important as they once were, but they’re still nice to have.

• You can only join Next Fest once.

• All games are given equal visibility in the beginning, then users start seeing more personalized recommendations as the week goes on.

Live Streams used to have a really big role to play in Next Fest visibility but that’s been heavily deprioritized. There’s still a section showing games that have live streams active, so it’s still worth having. My advice would be to use a tool like Robostreamer to loop footage of gameplay or even better a well known influencer playing your game. Live streams are still a great community engagement tool to take advantage of but its no longer a crucial aspect to focus on for Next Fest.

The most important change to focus on that is very relevant to the upcoming Next Fest is how their discovery algorithm works. Here’s a direct quote from Steam’s most recent Next Fest Developer Q&A:

“So, historically, every single carousel that you've seen on NextFest is randomly sorted. The idea is that you know, everyone's coming in on the same page and that everyone gets you know, more or less equal visibility in that regard. As NextFest has evolved and progressed, we've sort of made a change there. The first 48 hours of NextFest are still totally randomly sorted. However, past that point, we're using machine learning smarts to better match people to games. So, the idea is past the 48 hour point, everyone coming on to the NextFest page while signed in is going to have a very different experience based on what they play, what their friends are playing, what kinds of games they've shown interest in in the past. And so that's kind of a new level of customization and personalization that we are trying out which does mean you know that first 48 hours of NexFest are important because that's the data that we're using to train the model. So make sure you're putting your best foot forward.”

TLDR the first 48 hours of Next Fest are very important. While valve makes it very clear the games past the first 2 days will be surfaced based on the personal preferences of the user, you’re overall performance on those two days definitely matters! If a user is showing a strong interest in a specific genre, art style, etc the better you perform through Next Fest the more likely you are to show up on that users personalized feed instead of other games. Next Fest also has trending charts that are shown to every user, so the better you perform the more likely you are to be included in the various top performing chart categories.

But what what do I mean by perform better? Let’s reference the developer Q&A again:

“What engagement signals during NextFest most strongly influence postfest visibility? Um, that one's a little difficult to answer one because there's a bit of secret sauce involved. But, um, there's a couple of things that I can tell you don't matter. Demo completion rate does not matter. How much time people spent in your demo does not matter. Play time doesn't matter. These are all things that are going to vary really widely between what kind of demo you've got and you know what kind of genre the base game is. And we think it would be unfair to try and judge a quality of a demo on something like Playtime when there are some rogueike demos that you could theoretically play forever versus, you know, some kind of narrative driven gameplay thing that would be done in 20 minutes. So we don't use any of that. What we do care about is the number of people who are interacting with your demo, who are interacting with your store page. That is something that is valuable to us.”

I still think focusing on things like playtime and competition rate is good, as these are strong signals of a fun demo. However, as Steam stated above they are more clearly valuing things like visiting your steam page, wishlisting, following, downloading your demo, opening your demo, etc. All of these activities would fall under “interacting with your demo & store page”.

When should I join Next Fest?

Using Next Fest as a Primer

• Demo launch = momentum creation

• Steam Next Fest = momentum amplification

A common line of thinking is to launch a demo during Next Fest and use it to get momentum and get the marketing ball rolling. This is often a mistake for two reasons.

1: You should launch your demo months ahead of Next Fest so that you have ample time to iron out any bugs and react to feedback. You want the best demo possible going into Next Fest (competition is fierce). Another reason is that you can have two marketing beats instead of one. If done correctly you should treat your demo launch similar to a game launch. Reach out to creators, press, and get your community excited about your demo launch. In an ideal world you should make a big marketing beat out of launching your demo then improve it over a few months then add a big exciting update to the demo for Next Fest.

2: The second reason is that games that go into Next Fest with substantial wishlists tend to gain way more wishlists during Next Fest then games going in with a little. This is pretty concrete evidence that using Next Fest as a primer is not a great idea. And guess what one of the best ways to increase your daily wishlist rate is before Next Fest? Having a demo!

Long story short: Launch your demo at least a few months before Next Fest > Make a big marketing beat out of it > Fix bugs and react to feedback > Go into Next Fest with a big demo update and polished demo.

For those of you in the back screaming “but what about X game that launched as part of Next Fest and did great”? If you go seeking for this you will absolutely find examples of this happening. However in most cases these were either very experienced teams that had already QA tested their demo a bunch before Next Fest or games that had their demo tested as part of playtests before officially launching the demo.

Use a separate demo page

Using a separate page for your demo allows you to get reviews on your demo. This is absolutely something you want. Best case scenario is you get lots of good reviews and it helps land you on “Trending Free” and worst scenario is you get a ton of bad reviews and you can simply take down the separate page and work on improvements. You can take down the separate page for the demo whenever you want but the reviews will not reset if you launch it again later. The reviews you get on your demo are a very strong signal of how ready your demo is for Next Fest.

If you want to begin getting feedback on your demo ASAP but feel its too early and don’t want to risk negative reviews on your demo page i’d recommend using the Steam playtesting tools to do a few rounds of playtesting on your demo until your confident enough to officially launch the demo.

How Effective is Steam Next Fest?

Thankfully, friend of the newsletter and marketing extraordinaire, Chris Zukowski, from How To Market A Game already collected some great data answering this question.

What Should I do before Steam Next Fest?

I’d recommend beginning to prepare for Next Fest no later than at least a month beforehand. During Next Fest you want to put your best foot forward, so your Steam Page & demo needs to be in the best state possible.

Reach out to Press & Creators

Create a list of relevant Press & Creators you’d like to cover your game. Press & Creators often make a ton of Next Fest focused content highlighting their favorite or top performing demos throughout the week. Conversion rates for reaching out are typically very low (that is normal) so the more creators & press you reach out to the better. Try to create a combination of creators with small to medium audiences as well as the big creators in your specific genre. There’s probably no point in sending an email to PewDiePie, but its worth taking a shot at the big dogs in your specific niche.

After you have a list plan to send 2-3 emails before Next Fest begins.

1. Email 1: About a month before. Send Key to next fest demo build with an embargo date.

2. Email 2: 1 week or shortly before Next Fest. Reminder email with key to next fest demo build

3. Email 3 : Either on the first day of next fest or shortly before. Final reminder email.

This is not an exact science and the exact amount of emails and when to send them depends on a lot of factors, but this is a good base timeline. In the emails include access to the Next Fest demo build (if its ready) so that they can access it earlier.

I wouldn’t recommend sending more than 3 emails you’ll probably come off as annoying and do more harm than good at that point. Be human in your emails and make sure each email is different, don’t just send almost the same thing 3 times. Try different hooks in your email subject or gifs in your email to better convert.

Don’t forget to include and update your press kit!

Social Media

In an ideal world you have an engaged community and a mountain of wishlists going into Next Fest. If you’ve been slacking on social media, now’s a great time to get those accounts active again. You basically want to be making as much noise as you can about your game before and during Next Fest, social media is one great way to do that. In the month leading up to Next Fest i’d recommend trying to post around 3 times a week on your preferred social accounts.

Launch and Market Your Demo Early

Treat your demo launch like a game launch. Announce it on socials, reach out to creators & press, active your community.

Test, Improve, & Update your Demo

We already talked about this above so I won’t go too deep into this. If you’re not sitting on a well polished demo that had multiple rounds of feedback i’d reconsider if you should join this Next Fest.

I highly encourage planning a significant content update to your demo for Next Fest. This will get your existing community excited bringing back old players during Next Fest.

If you want to QA or get feedback on the updates you have planned for Next Fest i’d recommend giving a small portion of your existing audience access to the next fest demo updates early. This not only helps QA your updates, but also makes your most eager fans feel valued.

You can do this by creating a secret channel in Discord and inviting your most engaged members or having people apply through a link and give access to X amount of people.

Setup ways to automate feedback collection and bug reports

For many games Next Fest will be when their demo is played the most and thus a great chance to get feedback. You’d rather learn about what needs to be improved during Next Fest than when you launch.

Another reason for setting up automated feedback collection and bug reports is that if you don’t give players an easy way to send this to you they will be way more tempted to leave a negative review to make sure you see the issue they’re having.

A great example of this is the Tabletop Tavern Demo. The main menu, end of demo screen, and pause menu all have a places to report a bug. They even went a step further and automated it so that the bug reports automatically get sent to a discord channel where the dev can directly reply to the player who left it.

Optimize your Steam Store Page

Going into Next Fest your Steam Page should be updated with the most relevant visuals and information. Here’s a few things to revisit, update, or add to your Steam page before Next Fest:

• Revisit your Steam Tags and make sure they’re accurate

• Localize your steam page (and demo)

• Update Screenshots & Gifs

• Add any relevant reviews from press or creators

• Make sure you’re trailer is updated to reflect the quality the demo is at

• Revisit your short description and Steam Page

• Update capsule art if needed

Cross promote from your previous game

If you’ve released a previous game, you can cross promote from that game and let people know about your new game in Next Fest. You can do this on the Steam page with a post or in the game itself by having a subtle link in the main menu.

Optimize Demo Funnels

Make sure you demo is well optimized to encourage wishlists, funneling people to your discord or newsletter are nice bonus points as well. At a minimum you should have clear CTA’s to wishlist your game in your main menu & demo end screen. You can also take it up a notch and block content behind joining the discord or newsletter (if relevant for your game). Tabletop Tavern blocked 2 of its 4 playable heroes behind getting a code when joining the discord and Newsletter resulting in thousands of Discord joins and newsletter signups.

Add Steam Achievements

If you don’t have any Steam achievements in your demo yet now’s a great time to do it. Make sure to include at least one you can easily get in the first 15 minutes of playing (so players know there are achievements), one that requires finishing the demo (to motivate players to finish), and a combination of silly and difficult to get ones.

What should I do during Steam Next Fest?

Focus on making as much noise as possible during Next Fest. Be very active on social media & engaging with your community on both Steam & Discord. Reshare positive content about your game each day. If a streamer had a hilarious moment or a player posted a great comment, amplify it (retweet it, post it in Discord, make a tiktok video, etc). This not only markets your game to new people, but it also validates it’s a fun game (“Look, others are enjoying it too”)

Community Focused Retention

Do fun things that keep your community engaged and coming back to play your demo. Here’s a few cool ideas:

Daily Community Challenge: Tiny Glade did this during Next Fest by having different building themes ( “House on a Hill” or “Tiny Wizard Tower) every day of the festival. Checkmate Showdown kept its community interested with a daily scenario mode in the demo. Starting a week before and continuing through Next Fest, they delivered a different chess situation every day for players to solve or play through. Tears of Metal introduced special daily gameplay modifiers and encounters with “brutal difficulty laced with a touch of silliness”.

Exclusive Rewards: Beating the demo for Tactical Breach Wizards unlocked an exclusive cosmetic that carried over to the full game. Lynked: Banner of the Spark rewarded exclusive cosmetics for completing specific quests during Next Fest.

Leverage FOMO & Urgency: Remember how we talked about how the first 48 hours of Next Fest were very important? Once Human leveraged urgency and FOMO to retain players right at the start of Next Fest. The developers announced that if you played the demo for at least 3 hours within the first 24 hours of Next Fest, you’d earn an exclusive vehicle skin that carries over to the full game

Daily Devlogs: Half Sword’s developers came up with a brilliant retention approach: treat Next Fest like a week long hype campaign for upcoming features. At the start of Next Fest they announced “we didn’t want to rush out something that wasn’t ready” for the demo, acknowledging that no new build would drop immediately . However, to give players something to look forward to each day they promised that “Every single day of the Steam Next Fest, we’ll reveal a new sneak peek from upcoming maps, weapons, and new gameplay systems”

Surprise content update: A great way to bring back players who tried the demo earlier in the week and excite new ones is to drop a surprise content update in the second half of Next Fest. Bonus points if its something the players have been asking for!

Competitions: Engage your community with contests like capturing the best screenshot or climbing leaderboards.

There are endless ways you can engage your community in fun and clever ways. It’s up to you to be creative and figure out what makes the most sense for your game and community!

Be on standby for Bugs & Feedback

During the week of Nest Fest I would slow down development and instead be prepared to immediately firefight any negative bugs or feedback. The quicker you can react and fix issues the higher chance you can turn someone with a complaint to a passionate fan. Quickly reacting to issues is one of the most sure fire ways to garner good will with players. Not responding too and ignoring issues is the fastest way to lose that good will.

Follow up with creators & press if your game pops off

During Next Fest email creators and press that didn’t cover your game if you get any cool press. Something like: “Hey you should check out our demo that was listed as top 10 demos in next fest”.

What should I do after Steam Next Fest?

Share cool stuff with your players

Share how many wishlists you gained, people that played your demo, etc. If you’re tracking data in your game make a cool chart and share “how many goblins were killed”, “ how many houses were built”, “how many adventurers died”.

Continue the conversation

Let players know what’s coming next and what to expect in the next few months. Continue to provide updates and talk to your community on Steam & Discord at least (or wherever your community is) once a month.

Don’t forget to update those that joined your newsletter! In your closing Next Fest outreach make sure to include a survey where players can let you know where they want to see the game go from here.

Keep updating the demo

Your demo is one of the strongest marketing tools in your arsenal. Continue to add small updates to and improve you demo until launch.

Should I launch my game after Next Fest?

Chris wrote a great article on this. The TLDR is that many other devs have the same idea to launch after Next Fest and capitalize on momentum. So you will likely have more competition than normal if you launch in this window making it harder to get into and stay on things like New and Trending and Popular upcoming. My two cents is that you should avoid this strategy unless you already have at least 20k wishlists and feel confident you’ll be one of the big winners of Next Fest that knows they will stand above the competition. But fair warning there are bound to be some high quality games by experienced AA or AAA studios releasing in this window. Overall I agree with Chris that devs spend far to much time overthinking the release date.

Steam Next Fest Checklist

Conclusion

Next Fest is always something game devs get super stressed (and excited) about and unfortunately I come across SO many devs going about it completely the wrong way. I hope this article empowers you to get the most you possibly can out of Next Fest! Feel free to leave any specific questions in the comments or book a free consultation.

Recommended Readings

How Many Wishlists Can I Get From Steam Next Fest: A great article from Chris diving into how many wishlists you can can expect to get from Steam Next Fest, wish lots of other useful info!

Checking in with games in the Oct. 2025 Steam Next Fest: Another great article from Chris diving into specific case studies of games that did well in the Oct. 2025 Steam Next Fest

Steamworks Documentation on Steam Next Fest: Official documentation on Next Fest from Steam. A surprising amount of devs don’t bother to read this. You better read this.

Let me know in the comments if you want more of these or would rather just wait for the deep dives.

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Community Discussion

I want to discuss the challenges that you as a community face. While I can relate to and guess many of them it would be much better to hear directly from you! With that in mind i’ve set up a simple anonymous google form where you can submit questions you'd like me to tackle in the next newsletter!

Since this is a brand new initiative and I don’t have questions to reference yet, i’m going to use an interesting one I found in the HTMAG Discord.

Discussion Topic - Should you send keys to Press & Influencers before your launch window or only once during launch?

The answer is almost always before your launch. There may be specific scenarios where you want to wait until your launch window, but 90% of the time I would always advice activating press & influencers anytime it’s relevant (including your launch). It depends on the influencer but they generally don’t operate on a "ill only cover this once rule" but rather take each request in isolation. Even big influencers like Wanderbots cover the same game at different points in a games journey, the game Nimrods would be one example of this. In my experience creators are happy to cover (with interest in your game) EA release, Demo release, 1.0 release, and even significant updates to your demo or EA. As long as it feels significant and like something their audience may enjoy, they will cover it. This is the same for press.

Just remember when you reach out to an influencer you’re writing to a human, so don’t be an asshole or annoying. Only reach out when you have something significant and newsworthy. If you’re wondering how to reach out, i’d start with Wanderbots template on reaching out to creators.

TLDR: You won’t waste your “silver bullet” with influencers or press as long as your sending them newsworthy updates worth covering.

Don’t forget to submit your own question, concern, or discussion topic for me to cover next time!

Marketing Idea of The Week

The idea - Flex the nationality of your game dev team.

This might sound simple, but it’s honestly kind of a marketing hack if you live in an area that is low on game development but high in patriotism. I’ll use Norway as an example. 🫎

@breachvrgamesSupport some super cool Norwegian game devs and sign up to playtest Project Lost Island 🇳🇴 Click the link in our bio to join our Discord & get a playtest key! #pcvr #gaming #norway #horror #vr

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I’ve worked in the Norwegian game industry long enough to realize that when Norwegian gamers find out that a game is made in Norway they can’t help but engage with the content. In the video above I put some simple text over our trailer practically screaming “WE’RE NORWEGIAN”. The result? 73k views and hundreds of comments.

@breachvrgamesWe're a team of devs based in Trondheim, Norway that just released the demo for our PCVR horror game! Play the demo for FYR: The Lost Island on Steam 🎮 #pcvr #gaming #norway #horror #vr

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When we posted a new trailer later guess what I did? The same damn thing. This time resulting in 128K views.

This strategy works especially well on Tiktok where your content is always fed to a local audience first. Remember that this works best when game dev is relatively uncommon in your country. I don’t really think Americans are going to care your dev team is American due to how huge the game industry is in the US.

Cool Content of The Week

I thought it would be fun to share some cool content I come across that may inspire you. For better or worse marketing is an incestuous business. Everyone is constantly looking at others to see what’s working so they can copy it. While I don’t agree with ripping off someone’s game, I absolutely support copying marketing that you see is working. This is the whole reason you see trends go viral across social media.

@glowlightgameswishlist the magical mixture mill on steam now <3 link in bio #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev #cozygames #cozy #cozygaming #casualgames #steam #pcgaming

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I like this video for a few reasons

1. Speaking over gameplay with subtitles

2. Really strong hook in the beginning

3. It’s very indie

This video is well edited for Tiktok. One of the great things about Tiktok is that the bar for great editing is substantially lower than somewhere like Youtube. This video has all the standard things you want when making content about your game: clear gameplay, footage matching what he’s talking about, subtitles, and a strong hook.

The hook is the secret sauce. There’s actually 2 strong hooks. The first is “We made a huge mistake and now the future of our indie game is on thin ice” and the second is pointing out their game director is one of the original creators of Subway Surfers. Both of these get you to stop scrolling and think "what did they do to risk their game?” & “oh cool what’s that subways surfers guy working on now”.

It’s an engaging video that keeps you watching to the end, at which point the indie flavor I mentioned comes into play. At the end you learn the “thin ice” is simply that they were so busy making the best game possible that they now have no money for marketing. This is so indie. You’re not gonna see Activision or Blizzard begging for wishlists because they need your help to get noticed. As indies you get to play this card. Players are usually happy to support if it’s framed in the right way and they have a genuine interest in the game.

I came across this amazing meme and wanted to share it. It perfectly sums up my advice when i’m asked for 1000th time when you should start marketing your game.

Recommended Readings

Push to Talk

YouTubers Can't Save All the Indie Games

Hi to all the new readers: I’m Ryan Rigney and this is Push to Talk, a weekly newsletter about the art and business of video games. Today we’re taking a look at the impossible challenge facing YouTubers who want to help great indie games get discovered…

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9 months ago · 51 likes · 12 comments · Ryan K. Rigney

How much should we freak out about Silksong: Chris from HTMAG tackles the sheer panic that occurs for any game devs releasing near a giant like Silksong.

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How to use Deep Research for GTM

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Game Developer Legal Foundations: Copyright, Trademark, and Contract Essentials with indie Lawyer Jacob Vela - If you haven’t checked out Freaking Cool Indies yet, you’re missing out. It’s packed with insightful interviews with industry pros covering a wide range of game dev topics.

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I pulled data on every game released with the Pixel Graphics tag between August 1, 2023 – August 1, 2025 that earned 500+ reviews. That leaves us with a clear snapshot of recent pixel art games that broke through the noise. Using this dataset, I went on a quest to see what we could uncover.

Data Context

The data in this article is sourced from Gamalytic. You can check out the full dataset yourself in this Google Sheet. There are way more insights in there than I could possibly fit in this article. Keep in mind 3rd party tools like Gamalytic are based off estimates and thus should be taken with a grain of salt. This data only includes information from Steam and does not include how pixel art games performed on console or any other platforms.

I choose to look at the last 2 years of pixel art games for a few reasons:

1. Some of Gamalytic’s most useful data, like wishlist history, starts from August 2023.

2. Outside factors like Covid and the rise of AI can have a big impact. By keeping the timing recent it makes it more relevant to the current landscape you’d be releasing your game into.

3. It takes a long time to gather and analyze this data 🫠

Between August 2023 and August 2025, 6,422 pixel art games released on Steam.

But how many of them were actually successful? That depends on what you count as “success”. Success can mean different things depending on your goals. Revenue, player count, playtime, etc can all be signs of a successful game. For this article, I used 500 reviews as the bar. If you’ve hit that, you’ve got meaningful engagement and are probably doing well in other areas too.

After filtering out any games that haven’t reached at least 500 reviews, we are left with 343 out of 6,422 games. In other words only 5% of pixel art games released on steam over the past 2 years were successful.

A 5% chance of success my sound scary, but I promise it’s not as bad as it sounds. If you got worried by that number i’d encourage you to head over to the Gamalytic Games List and filter by the Pixel Graphics tag with the lowest review count. What you’ll find is thousands of games that obviously don’t pass the quality bar to be a serious contender. They also probably aren’t subscribed to this newsletter and thus didn’t know how to market their game :). But your game is good and you’re subscribed to OP Game Marketing right? RIGHT?

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Best Pixel Art Steam Tags

If you simply want to know the top performers head over to the Google Sheet with the full data and filter by your preferred metric. Fair warning simply looking at the top of the list will give you outliers and not very useful data points. You probably won’t learn much from seeing that “Silent Protagonist” has the highest median revenue on the list but was only used in one title that did extremely well.

I don’t just want to know which tags are most popular or which ones had the highest median revenue. I wanted a metric that captured both: tags that are frequently used and consistently tied to higher revenues. So I built a “Success Index.”

Here’s how the Success Index is calculated:

1. Step 1: Used the median revenue of all pixel art games as the baseline (~$349k).

2. Step 2: For each tag, I divide its median revenue by that baseline.

   • Example: “Turn-Based” games has median a revenue of $1.1M, that’s 3.2× higher than the baseline.

3. Step 3: Weight by commonness. A tag on only 2–3 games could just be a fluke. To account for this, I multiply by log10(1 + number of games with the tag). This boosts tags that show up often, but only gently (logarithmic scaling prevents giant tags from steamrolling everything).

4. Step 4: Exclude generic tags. “Pixel Graphics” and “2D” are in every game here, so I removed them.

5. Step 5: Exclude rare tags. If a tag wasn’t used in at least 5 games I removed them.

Genre Tags

Turn-Based Strategy/ Turn-Based Combat / Turn-Based Tactics / Tactical / Combat.

• Turn Based Strategy - 29 titles, 2.69 success index, $636,289 median revenue.

• Combat - 66 titles, 2.39 success index, $456,764 median revenue.

• Turn Based Combat - 36 titles, 2.23 success index, $497,302 median revenue.

• Turn Based Tactics - 20 titles, 2.07 success index, $546,926 median revenue.

• Tactical - 21 titles, 2.0 success index, $520,187 median revenue.

Turn-based and strategy are the beating heart of successful pixel art games. No surprise here, many of the most beloved pixel titles live in this space.

RPG / JRPG / Strategy

• RPG - 130 titles, 2.56 success index, $422,750 median revenue.

• JRPG - 36 titles, 2.17 success index, $483,584 median revenue.

• Strategy - 90 titles, 2.65 success index, $471,836 median revenue.

Naturally RPG & JRPG’s are among the top contenders as they pair extremely well with turn based strategy mechanics.

While turn based strategy and rpg pixel art games have been popular for decades it was interesting to see the following genres growing in popularity as well. This reflects a larger trend on Steam of the below genres picking up steam in the last few years.

Card Game / Deckbuilding

• Card Game - 25 titles, 2.03 success index, $502,082 median revenue.

• Deckbuilding - 32 titles, 2.11 success index, $485,766 median revenue.

Roguelike / Roguelite

• Roguelite - 75 titles, 2.53 success index, $469,465 median revenue.

• Roguelike - 82 titles, 2.31 success index, $420,721 median revenue.

Simulation & Building

• Building - 28 titles, 2.51 success index, $600,343 median revenue.

• Simulation - 90 titles, 2.30 success index, $409,235 median revenue.

Thematic Tags

These shape positioning, tone, and marketability more than mechanics or genre.

• Difficult - 29 titles, 4.17 success index, $985,441 median revenue.

• Story Rich - 102 titles, 2.18 success index, $378,787 median revenue.

• Atmospheric- 81 titles, 2.16 success index, $395,027 median revenue.

• Cute - 101 titles, 2.16 success index, $375,839 median revenue.

• Magic - 27 titles, 2.16 success index, $520,187 median revenue.

• Fantasy - 87 titles, 2.13 success index, $381,866 median revenue.

• Exploration - 83 titles, 2.12 success index, $385,709 median revenue.

• Choices Matter - 41 titles, 2.12 success index, $455,662 median revenue.

Worst Pixel Art Steam Tags

I won’t go into details on these but in case your curious and don’t want to check the full data set, here are the tags with the lowest success index after filtering out tags used in less than 20 games.

Practical Takeaways

Turn-Based + RPG is still king.
Strong revenues, long-standing audience. If you’re making a turn-based RPG, pixel art is a great fit.

The “Difficult” tag could be a smart tag to use if it applies to your game.
It’s no secret that tags are very important in informing who Steam shows you’re game to. Marketers regularly experiment with different tags to see what games it compares theirs too and how it effects metrics. The Difficult tag shows up as a clear multiplier. Median revenue is almost 3x higher than thematic tags like Cute or Magic. If your game can genuinely deliver challenge, lean into this tag on Steam.

Deckbuilding Card Games with rougelite elements are the new kids on the block
While turned based RPGs have been the image of the classic pixel game for a while, deckbuilding games are gaining traction. Combine them with rougelite/rougelike elements and you’ve got a winning combo.

Pixel art fans skew fantasy over sci-fi
Fantasy, Cute, and Magic were some of the best performing tags while Sci-fi, Medieval, and Horror were on the lower end.

Pixel Art fans don’t have friends
The singleplayer tag was the 7th highest tag by success index having a median revenue of $358,633 in 248 titles. Yet another reason why pixel art is such a indie friendly art style.

Playtime correlates with perceived value.
Tags associated with long playtimes consistently align with higher prices and higher revenues.

Great Case Studies

This article is full of data that suggests what kind of games perform well, but marketing them is another story. I’ve covered the basics before, but if you want some pixel art specific marketing inspiration i’d recommend checking out the marketing of the following games:

Self Published

• Sea of Stars

• Mini Cozy Room

• Nimrods

• Cast n Chill

• Spilled

Externally Published

• Nice Day for Fishing

• Moonstone Island

• 9 Kings

• Tiny Pasture

• Metal Slug Tactics

All of the games included in the data set were successful by some metric so if you’re still looking for marketing inspiration, pick a game in your genre and look at what’s working for them. Play their game, check out their reviews to see what players are and aren’t enjoying, look at their marketing strategies, etc. Also ask yourself: What festivals did they join? What creators covered their game (contact the same ones)? What were their major marketing beats between announcement and launch? How did they execute on these beats? What kind of content performed well?

Self published vs Published Titles

Every time I gather data on a large amount of games i’m always curious to learn how published versus self published titles faired.

• Self-published: 153 games

• Externally published: 187 games

Externally published games have much stronger medians. On average, external publishers bring in ~1.6× higher median revenue.

• Median revenue = $426.6k (vs $260.7k self published)

• 75th percentile = $1.20M (vs $694k self published)

• 90th percentile = $2.93M (vs $2.37M self published)

Followers

• Externally published: 8,014

• Self-published: 5,176.

Pricing

• Self-published: median price = $8

• Externally published: median price = $15

Overall this data is pretty expected, I would seriously question the usefulness of publishers if the median revenue was higher for self published games across hundreds of games. It was interesting to see that the number of self published versus externally published games on the list weren’t that far off from each other. While it’s true that externally published games did better on average, every game in this data set was a success so this clearly shows that you can absolutely win as a self published game as well.

AAA, AA, Indie

There is no 100% agreed upon definition of what separates AAA, AA, and Indie game studios. Since I used Gamalytic’s filtering to collect this data, we’ll be using their definition for these groups:

• Indie: Publishers who made more than $10k and less than $50m lifetime on Steam.

• AA: Publishers who published at least 2 games, made more than $50m and less than $500m lifetime on Steam.

• AAA: Publishers who published at least 2 games, made more than $500m lifetime on Steam and have at least $10m average revenue per game

By their definition AAA, AA, & Indie has less to do with studio size and more to do with experience. They also based their definition on the publisher rather than the developer, an irrelevant point if the studio self published.

As you can see from the data, pixel art is most definitely an indie dominated art style. This is likely due to pixel art being more straightforward to learn and easier to implement than 3D art styles. Pixel art has a strong indie identity as well so it helps if you’re leaning into the indie underdog narrative.

There’s also a trend of successful pixel art games moving to 3D art for their sequel. Great examples include Moonlighter switching to 3D for Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault and Hyper Light Drifter switching to 3D for Hyper Light Breaker. Besides gameplay changes I suspect one reason they do this is to appeal to a much larger audience. While pixel art is a popular art style it’s still dwarfed in player demand & median revenue by 3D games. After the success of their first games they can afford the risk that comes with the much larger reward of winning with a 3D game.

Random Thoughts on Pixel Art Success

One common denominator you’ll see among the top pixel art games is fantastic art. This is not reflected in the hard data and while I do believe pixel art is an indie friendly art style that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do well.

Use Steam tags that make intuitive sense and accurately describe your game. Steam tags are weighted by the order you put them in. I’d recommend first and foremost choosing tags that make intuitive sense and accurately describe your game. After that use the data in this list to inform what order you should put them in (thus changing the weight).

Pixel art is certainly popular, but 3D art still has way more addressable market.

Data Versus Vibes

This data resulted in a healthy mix of confirming things I assumed to be true and surprising discoveries. Data like this is always useful from a market research perspective but be careful not to be blinded by data and lose the magic of game development. In an ideal world you should determine what game to make based off what genuinely interest and inspires your team as well as researched product market fit. Making a game that on paper should succeed is not the same thing as making a fun polished game.

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Broken Spear and Nvizzio decided to join forces and build their own Montreal based publishing label Parallel 45 games. Tower Dominion started from scratch in early December 2024. No social following. No existing audience. No prior marketing. Yet, by the time they released just 5 months later in May 2025 they had over 40,000 wishlists.1 In this article we dig into how they did it.

Ongoing Playtesting

Barely a week after launching their steam page they immediately kicked off a playtest allowing players to request access via the steam page. The all time peak was 25 players so it wasn’t very popular, but it allowed them to get something playable into the hands of players ASAP and begin collecting feedback. They left the playtest open and continued to give patch notes in Discord until closing it in Feb 2025 and teasing the demo launch.

Demo & Next Fest

I’ve looked at a lot of different games and perhaps the most common initial spike in average daily wishlists I see is launching a demo. I’m convinced having a demo is a cheat code for marketing on Steam. Which makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Not only is something playable great for players but having a demo suddenly makes utilize content creators possible.

Shortly after launching the demo they joined the Feb 2025 Steam Next Fest. Their demo did very well at one point earning a spot in the top 50 demos!

Leveraging Content Creators

Interestingly, Tower Dominion’s social media never really gained any traction. Their marketing success was almost entirely carried on the back of content creators combined with a great demo.

Great Demo + Steam Festivals + Content Creators = Wishlist 📈.

Tower Dominion was covered by TONs of content creators across Twitch, Youtube, and other socials. Many of these were smaller creators who picked it up themselves but some bigger creators, like Wanderbots, were officially sponsored by Parallel 45.

When you consider that the goal of marketing in simple terms is to get your product in front of the target audience interested in buying it, it’s easy to see why content creators are so effective. Instead of praying to the algorithm that your organic social media posts are seen by relevant people & starting at 0 followers, you can hijack a content creator’s audience for instant access to a large group of your target audience.

Launch

On launch day Press Releases went out and they once again used content creators to generate hype. At the time of writing they have 1,413 reviews only 2 weeks after launch. It’s safe to say they had a fantastic launch.

One thing they did in their Press Release that I love is brag on their achievement right at the top. Sharing how well your demo is doing, how many wishlists you have, or any other impressive metrics is a great way of providing validation of why they should care.

Great Steam Page

Tower Dominion has all the hallmarks of a great steam page: gifs showing off core features, headers that match the in game font and art style, accurate tags, etc.

I want to highlight a nice little marketing hack they did that may not be common knowledge. You’ll often seen devs using tools like RoboStreamer to loop a pre recorded stream at the top of their Steam page. It’s usually just gameplay or the devs themselves playing and discussing the game. That’s great but if your lucky enough to have a famous creator cover your game, reach out to them and see if they’d be okay with you using their footage. That’s exactly what Tower Dominion did with Wanderbots & other creators. This makes users who arrive on your page go “oh shit, (insert creator here) played this game, it must be good!”

Great Use Of Discord

Parallel 45 made great use of their Discord throughout their marketing blitz regularly providing updates, posting patch notes, and interacting with players. I especially love the fun way they welcome new members to the discord server with the photo shown above.

Localization & The Chinese Market

Localizing their game and their efforts in reaching the Chinese market are a huge part of their success.

If you search for Tower Dominion on Bilibili (a popular Chinese social media) you’ll find page after page of creators who made videos. To be honest i’m not too sure how they successfully reached this audience. Maybe the demo got picked up by a few Chinese content creators and it snowballed from their or perhaps they did more direct efforts. Either way, posting Chinese versions of updates on Steams and localizing in Chinese certainly helped!

5 Month Blitz Before Release Vs. Marketing Early

So what’s the final verdict? Should you wait until a few months before release and do a marketing blitz or start marketing while your still in the prototyping stage?

If your game is polished and you’re near having a demo you’re proud of, then you can maybe pull of a 5 month blitz using some of the same strategies as Tower Dominion. This is an ideal choice for studios that don’t have an in house marketing person and want to focus all their efforts on finishing the game. I also see this happen when a publisher or marketing agency joins later in development.

If your game is still in it’s very early stages, then there’s still lots of benefit in starting marketing as early as possible. You can get feedback early, see any positioning issues, and potentially go viral and wrack up thousands of wishlists. Check out the article I wrote on Tiny Glade to see how they started marketing while still in the prototyping stage and ended up with over 1 million wishlists at launch.

My official recommendation: Why not both? I still think in most cases you should start marketing as soon as you can. Start sharing on social media early and wracking up wishlists. Once you’re closer to a polished demo and approx 6 months away from release then join as many steam festivals as you can and utilize content creators.

That’s it for me this week. I’m gonna go play some more Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and improve my French cursing.

P.S Long term readers may have wondered why their inbox hasn’t been graced by OPGM in a while. I’m still alive. I took a brief hiatus followed by accidently deleting my notion 🥲, but i’m back and excited to cover more over powered game marketing. Keep an eye on your inbox 📨

I want to give a quick shoutout to a super talented friend of mine who kicked off his own studio, Noise Visuals, creating some seriously awesome 3D visuals. I’ve worked with him on various projects and couldn’t recommend someone more for trailer work, ads, and other visuals!

I implore you to read The Balatro Timeline. It’s filled with powerful lessons and offers an incredibly human perspective on the realities faced by solo developers, including the often underestimated stress that accompanies sudden success.

With only 43 wishlists at its initial Steam launch, Balatro’s eventual popularity raises a critical question: Was it simply the game's excellence that led to its success, or did strategic publisher support ultimately ignite its momentum? Let's explore.

Balatro Steam Page Launch

So what happened when Balatro, now a widely acclaimed indie sensation, first launched their Steam page in May 2023? Absolutely nothing. By the end of May, Balatro had 43 wishlists to it’s name.

Besides a handful of social media posts, the dev behind Balatro hadn’t really done anything to market the game. He released his Steam page with a demo and planned on releasing the game just a few weeks later in June 2023. His expectations were low and he had his own reasons for launching the game and moving on, but if you’ve read my Indie Survival Guide To Game Marketing then you’d know he barely gave the game a chance marketing wise. No reaching out to content creators or press, no active social media, no joining festivals, no use of his demo launch as a marketing beat, zilch.

A quiet Steam page launch with minimal activity isn't necessarily a verdict on your game's market appeal. Without proper marketing efforts, it’s impossible to gauge genuine market interest.

The Power of Content Creators

Now to completely contradict myself. Having a great game absolutely does give you cheat codes in marketing, it’s a down right superpower. Even though he did little marketing, Balatro was picked up by a handful of smaller content creators that boosted his wishlists to 183 by June 10th.

This lead to Dan Gheesling streaming Balatro and later recommending it to Northern Lion. Naturally this snowballed into even more content creators covering his game. Remember how I mentioned he had 183 wishlists on June 10th? By the end of June Balatro had 2440 wishlists. After Northern Lion played the next month, he ended July with 28,661 wishlists.

None of this would have happened without Balatro having a live demo! Make a demo folks. This is also a great reminder to reach out to and utilize smaller content creators. They are way more likely to cover your game for free and if enough of them do it, it can snowball and get the attention of larger content creators.

If your game starts going viral on social media or covered by lots of content creators you can expect publishers to come knocking on your door, and knock they did.

Publishers

Balatro at this point in time was every publishers wet dream. A great looking game with a highly rated demo, strong market validation, and a solo dev who doesn’t have time to learn or do proper marketing. I’ll take two please. This is often a great deal for the developer too. The notion of getting funding to develop your game and let the experts take care of marketing is an enticing one.

LocalThunk talked with various publishers but in the end he signed with Playtack in July 2023.

Playstack Marketing Strategies

What did Playstack do for Balatro? Well for starters they replaced his IT salary, created a go to market plan, localized the game, and ported Balatro to consoles and mobile.

So what was in the go to market plan? Here’s a few mentioned by Localthunk in the blog post.

Ongoing Playtesting & Community Management

This was actually something Localthunk was great at from day 1. It’s certainly not a coincidence that he playtested frequently and ended up with such a highly rated game.

Here’s a few great quotes from Localthunk that provide some nice insights into playtesting

I really like he’s idea to make a private server for exceptionally qualified testers. This is a fantastic way to create evangelists and get some highly effective feedback. At the risk of stating the obvious, actually listen to your players! Sometimes devs can get a bit of an ego and think they know what’s best for their game and largely dismiss player feedback. I’m not saying you should aim to make everyone happy or make changes willy nilly, but look for patterns in feedback and generally be openminded.

Balatro is without a doubt an exceptionally designed game. My general takeaway after reading the full blog post from Localthunk is that the community behind the game was instrumental in creating the final design.

An Updated Demo

After watching Norhernlion quickly finish the demo and rushing to send him a key to the full beta version, LocalThunk & Playstack realized they needed to update the demo.

Steam Next Fest Fall 2023

While Balatro wasn’t in the Fall 2023 Next Fest, Playstack decided to launch the demo during it and see if it would get extra attention since it was happening in parallel with a festival focused on playing new demos.

This strategy worked out for Balatro but it’s hard to say if this is because Balatro was already gaining significant traction or because launching the demo next to Next Fest was highly effective. On one hand I would assume that players who are looking forward to playing new demos due to Next Fest would find them through the Next Fest interface (where Balatro would not be), on the other hand players and press in general are in a mood of trying and highlighting new demos during Next Fest. Regardless it worked for them and I totally get the line of thinking.

Influencer Tournament

In January Playstack hosts a Balatro Tournament with 6 streamers. This was a beautifully executed strategy. It’s a far more engaging use of content creators then simply sponsoring their streams and timing it right before the the Feb 2024 Next Fest built up some great momentum. The streamers were given access to an early build of the new demo that would go live during Next Fest giving players an early look at what they’d be able to play soon.

Steam Next Fest February 2024

Balatro took down the demo in December 2023 then prepared an updated version for the February 2024 Next Fest. Unless your launching your demo during Next Fest itself, it’s always a good idea to make Next Fest special and launch an updated demo.

Balatro Launch Day

Shortly after the Influencer tournament in January, Balatro announces it’s release date: Feb 20th. On Feb 19th the embargo is lifted and major press outlets release their reviews of Balatro.

Following the awesome reviews Balatro launches with 208,401 wishlists. By the end of it’s launch day, Balatro sold 119,000 units on Steam alone.

Mental Health

Behind Balatro's incredible success story lies an important conversation about the mental and physical toll of game development. As the game's popularity exploded, its developer found himself grappling with significant health issues, including severe anxiety, sleep disruption, and worrying heart symptoms.

Localthunk’s transparent reflection on these challenges shines a much-needed spotlight on the importance of mental health within the game dev community. His honest insight serve as a crucial reminder for developers everywhere: prioritize self-care, seek support when struggling, and openly discussing these challenges with those around you. 💖

Conclusion

Balatro's success story reveals that while a great game is certainly a significant advantage, it requires strategic marketing and community engagement to truly thrive.

See you next time, i’m gonna go do a jokerless run of Balatro now.

What initially drew me to Escape from Duckov was how incredibly fun and marketable the game looked, combined with the fact that it was made by a small 4 man team. The unique premise, humor, and absurdity of a Tarkov-inspired shooter featuring gun-wielding ducks made it stand out instantly. This blog explores Escape from Duckov’s marketing playbook, analyzing what worked, what stood out, and what game developers can learn from its success.

Data Source

The data used in this analysis is sourced from third-party platforms GameDiscoverCo and Gamalytic.

What is Escape from Duckov?

At its core, Escape from Duckov is a humorous extraction shooter that parodies Escape from Tarkov. Instead of the gritty realism that Tarkov is known for, Duckov injects absurdity into the formula, placing players in a beautiful world of gun-wielding ducks. The game’s combination of familiar gameplay mechanics with a completely unorthodox theme made it highly marketable from the outset. The meme potential alone was enormous, giving it an immediate advantage in capturing player curiosity. With only a few seconds of gameplay and the name alone, players know exactly what to expect from the game.

Escape from Duckov is published by Bilibili, a massive Chinese video-sharing and gaming platform that caters to anime, comic, and gaming fans. In recent years Bilibili has expanded into game publishing, helping local and international developers reach Chinese audiences. Due to my lack of Chinese fluency it was difficult for me to determine specific areas they helped Escape from Duckov’s marketing, but their instant access to a huge amount of gamers certainly helped with exposure. Bilibili also partners with Western studios to bring their games to China, such as with Core Keeper.

Escape from Duckov was developed by Team Soda, a small four person indie studio based in China. Team Soda has also released successful titles, Soda Crisis (2022) and Snake Force (2021). It’s clear they’ve leaned into their strengths with all three games having similar art styles and mechanics. It’s worth noting that Snake Force was the product of a game jam and released on Steam for free. Given the success of Snake Force i’m willing to bet it helped snowball a following for their future games. It’s also impressive they’re on track to release 3 polished and well received games in a 4 year time span with only 4 devs! Team Soda is exactly the kind of small but mighty indie team I love to see.

How Did They Get Over 150,000 Wishlists?

Community Management

One of the strongest aspects of Escape from Duckov’s marketing strategy was its ability to engage with it’s community. The team leaned heavily on social media, particularly Bilibili, which dominates gaming content in China. They also had a presence on Rednote, another popular Chinese social media. Though their Discord setup was minimalist, it included dedicated text channels for different languages, allowing international players to feel included.

They also encouraged user generated content (UGC) in creative ways. One of the biggest campaigns was a duck design contest, where players submitted their in game custom made ducks. This led to a wave of UGC and engagement, as players enthusiastically shared their bizarre and hilarious creations.

Beyond direct marketing, Jeff, the team’s most visible developer, became an integral part of community engagement. He frequently appears in updates and community discussions, creating a personal connection with players. The team even leaned into his public presence in their marketing, going so far as to joke in a Steam announcement that, “Hi, everyone! I’m Ducky! Jeff is currently in my hands, so hurry up and enter the world of Duckov to rescue him! (Just kidding!)” His presence in the game’s announcements, as well as his established Bilibili following, helped create an informal yet powerful spokesperson for the game. This type of self-aware, lighthearted engagement builds personality around the dev team, making them feel more accessible and fun to their audience. Similar strategies have been used by larger companies, such as Riot Games with figures like Mortdog in Teamfight Tactics promotions.

The developers also set themselves apart by being extremely transparent with their community. They openly discussed their challenges, stress, and even last-minute decisions made by their publisher. When major bugs arose, they leapt into action and posted public tutorials on how to fix them. They also wrapped up their demo with a Steam FAQ post where they answered common questions, addressed major bugs found in the demo, and discussed future plans. This kind of openness made the development team feel human, relatable, and worth supporting.

The Steam Demo/Playtest Strategy: Breaking the Rules

Escape from Duckov’s first playtest took place in December 2024 on the Chinese gaming site WeGame. From there on things took an interesting turn.

Most indie developers on Steam who want to run a playtest turn to Steam’s Playtesting features to host their playtests and make it easily accessible for players. However, Escape from Duckov took a different approach, choosing to use Steam’s Demo features while still referring to and treating it as a playtest. This decision had significant implications. While Steam Playtest requires sign-ups and approvals (this can be automated as well), demos are instantly accessible to any player. Moreover, Steam’s algorithm heavily favors demos, which lead to Escape from Duckov being featured on the front page of Steam in the Trending Free widget.

The results speak for themselves. The demo had a peak concurrent player count of 3,157 and maintained over 1,000 daily concurrent players while it was live. More impressively, the game’s wishlist count skyrocketed by 115,551 and had an average daily wishlist rate of 4,622 during the demo period (January 24 - February 17).

For indie developers considering a similar approach, this raises an interesting takeaway: using a demo as a playtest might be a better move if visibility and accessibility are the priority.2 I’d only recommend this strategy if you’re pretty confident your demo/playtest build is polished and as bug free as possible. Expectations of demos are definitely higher than playtests. It also only makes sense for a demo meant to be live for only a short amount of time. If you’ve done this strategy yourself leave a comment or shoot me a DM, i’d love to hear about it!

Press & Content Creators: Reaching Global Audiences

While Escape from Duckov primarily found success in Asia, the game didn’t stop there. Major gaming press outlets, including IGN and GamesRadar, picked up on the game’s unique premise and growing popularity. IGN featured 24 minutes of gameplay footage, while GamesRadar ran a piece calling it “one of the hottest demos on Steam right now.”

Search Escape from Duckov on Youtube or Tiktok and you’ll find dozens of creators from around the world who also posted videos during the game’s demo period. Press articles & influencer videos helped expand the game’s reach to Western audiences, generating further interest and wishlists.

Localization: Speaking Players Language

From the outset, the developers made localization a priority, translating the game into English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Japanese. More importantly, they tailored their marketing efforts to different regions. Chinese-focused content was pushed on Bilibili and Rednote, Japanese audiences were targeted through Twitter, and English-speaking players were engaged via Steam and Discord.

The results were clear. China accounted for 31.9% of wishlists, followed by Japan at 9.4%, Taiwan at 6.9%, and the USA at 5.6%.

Localize your game into any language you think may be relevant! If you have no idea where to start check out the Steam Hardware & Software Survey. The one for January shows the top 5 languages as:

1. English

2. Simplified Chinese

3. Russian

4. Spanish

5. Portuguese

Localizing your steam page is super easy nowadays. You can pay a professional but if your tight on money I would recommend using google translate and getting a friend who speaks the language to double check nothing is super off. Team Soda was upfront about using translation software in their Steam announcements and apologized upfront for any mistranslations.

If your game is unreleased its perfectly fine to translate the steam page and plan to localize the game later. Get those wishlists now and worry about translation later. The only exception to this is if your working on a very text heavy game and aren’t sure you can actually afford to localize your game in the end. You may be in tight spot if you ship a text heavy RPG game that you promised would be translated in Chinese that's only available in English. This is especially true if players buy the game only to find out they can’t understand it. That’s a fast track to returns and bad reviews.

Here's a great write up on Reddit showing how localizing their game helped them reach 90K wishlists.

What Can Indie Devs Learn?

The success of Escape from Duckov wasn’t just a lucky break, it was the result of a team that understood exactly what made their game special and how to communicate that to players. From the start, they leaned into the game’s absurd, highly marketable premise and built excitement through community-driven content. They weren’t afraid to be playful, involving fans in the fun while keeping communication open and engaging. Every decision, from how they positioned their game to how they interacted with their audience, reflected a deep understanding of what would resonate with players. For developers looking to carve out a space in an increasingly crowded market, Escape from Duckov is proof that a strong identity, genuine engagement, and smart strategic choices can make all the difference.

Thanks for reading, i’m gonna go make my new game Duck Souls now.

Data Context

The data used in this analysis is sourced from third-party platforms GameDiscoverCo and Gamalytic. You can access the full dataset in this Google Sheet.

In 2024, approximately 18,000 games were released1 . After applying the following filters, the dataset was reduced to 5,773 games:

• Released in 2024

• Classified as AA, Indie, or Hobbyist

• Generated at least $500 in revenue

The most significant reduction came from filtering out games that made less than $5002, bringing the total down from 18,000 to 6,509. This highlights how elusive commercial success is for the majority of developers.

Additional Filtering

I also filtered out games that had the the following criteria:

• Outliers classified as AA or Indie but not representative (e.g., Marvel Rivals, Black Myth: Wukong)

• Non-English games (some may have slipped through, but most were filtered out)

Data Weirdness

• If you see ??? in the Name, Developer, or Publisher fields, it’s due to character encoding issues (e.g., Japanese, Chinese, TM logos). This also sometimes caused the Steam link to sometimes be placed in the developer box for some reason, this doesn’t affect the data so just ignore it.

Classification of AA, Indie, and Hobbyist Games

Since I used Gamalytic’s filtering to collect this data, we will be using their definition for these groups:

• Hobbyist: Any publisher who made less than $10k lifetime on Steam.

• Indie: Publishers who made more than $10k and less than $50m lifetime on Steam.

• AA: Publishers who published at least 2 games, made more than $50m and less than $500m lifetime on Steam.

For the purposes of this article the status of AA, Indie, or Hobbyist has less to do with studio size and more to do with experience. They also based their definition on the publisher rather than the developer.

Key Performance Comparisons: AA / Indie/ Hobbyist

Revenue Distribution

Revenue is heavily concentrated in the top-performing games for Indie & AA games.

➡️ 83.92% of total AA revenue comes from the top 10% of AA games.

• Top 5 AA games by revenue:

  • Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 – $133,864,019.00

  • Path of Exile 2 – $129,024,321.00

  • The First Descendant – $114,750,661.00

  • Manor Lords – $73,896,051.00

  • S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl – $70,285,910.00

➡️ 84.98% of total Indie revenue comes from the top 10% of Indie games.

• Top 5 Indie games by revenue:

  • Gray Zone Warfare – $35,989,824.00

  • Balatro – $27,973,428.00

  • Supermarket Simulator – $27,136,298.00

  • Chained Together – $22,177,462.00

  • TCG Card Shop Simulator – $20,278,635.00

➡️ 32.27% of total Hobbyist revenue comes from the top 10% of Hobbyist games.

• Top 5 Hobbyist games by revenue:

  • Polismos – $9,946.00

  • Pleasure Thieves – $9,945.00

  • Helbreath Nemesis – $9,892.00

  • Two Apples – $9,863.56

  • Days With Ollie – $9,813.00

Revenue Concentration: This data reflects a winner takes all market where a small number of games are capturing a majority of the market.

Pricing Trends

• AA: Typically priced between $20-$30

• Indie: Commonly priced under $20

• Hobbyist: Consistently priced below $10

Indie games display the widest range in pricing, reflecting differences in perceived content value.

Engagement Insights

Unfortunately I ran into errors collecting the average playtime and ultimately decided to remove it as it would take far too long to manually validate the data for so many games. Here’s what I learned from the accurate data I did collect.

It’s no surprise that the order of most to least playtime was AA - Indie - Hobbyist. Indie & AA playtimes were significantly less than the playtimes in my previous Top 50 AAA, AA, & Indie games in 2024 article. It’s hard to say if this is because games that take longer to complete and/or have high replayability are more likely to do better or if great games are naturally played longer. Probably a combination of both.

Free To Play Insights

Massive F2P live service titles (LoL, Fortnite, Apex Legends) have existed for years and are basically printing money, so I was curious to see how non AAA F2P games are performing.

Usage in AA, Indie, & Hobbyist Games

• Total F2P games: 167

• AA F2P games: 8

• Indie F2P games: 120

• Hobbyist F2P games: 39

Revenue Impact

• Average revenue per F2P game: $1.7M

• Median revenue per F2P game: $26K

Lucrative F2P Genres

• Multiplayer: Appears in 80 titles with a total of 334 Million USD

• Action: Appears in 57 titles with a total of 307 Million USD

• Online Co-Op: Appears in 38 titles with a total of 306 Million USD

• Shooter: Appears in 19 titles with a total of 272 Million USD

• RPG: Appears in 73 titles with a total of 257 Million USD

• Adventure: Appears in 57 titles with a total of 231 Million USD

• Single player: Appears in 90 titles with a total of 230 Million USD

• Sexual Content: Appears in 17 titles with a total of 219 Million USD

Single player was the most surprising genre to me on this list. Usually when you think of F2P titles you think of live service multiplayer PVP focused titles. Turns out a few of them had single player tags but were still focused on multiplayer PVP, like DeltaForce, Stormgate, and Enlisted. However most of them were proper Single player experiences.

Self Published vs Published Games

I’m not gonna lie, I love a good underdog story so I was rooting for self published games, but its pretty clear from the data that games with a publisher performed better overall. Despite significantly more self published games, games with a publisher had a higher total revenue, average revenue, and median revenue!

Publishers can be a huge help. They can help fund your game, localize it, port it, and handle marketing for you. But before you take this as proof that signing with a publisher guarantees success, let’s take a step back. The most important element in your game’s success (including marketing) is the game itself. Is it fun? Is it appealing? Is it bug free and well optimized? But before you take this as proof that signing with a publisher guarantees success, let’s take a step back.

Publishers aren’t picking games at random. They’re investing in winners, games they believe will sell well and make them money. Meanwhile, self-published games are shipping whatever their creators manage to finish. So, naturally, the publisher-backed games have a better track record, it’s almost a statistical inevitability.

If you find yourself in a situation where multiple Publishers are coming to you rather than the other way around, it’s a strong sign you’ve got something special. But before handing over 40%3 of your revenue, take a hard look at what they’re actually bringing to the table. If their marketing, distribution, and platform connections can significantly boost your game’s success, the trade-off might be well worth it.

The math is actually in publishers favor. Lets use some napkin math and assume a publishing contract where the publisher is pocketing 40% of your revenue. The median revenue for a published game in our dataset is $16,222. Take away 40% ($6,489), and you’re left with $9,733, which is still three times more than the median revenue of self-published games ($3,285). That checks out with what Mirko, an indie dev I interviewed told me about his publishing experience:

Genre Insights – What Worked in 2024?

Most Profitable Genres for AA, Indie, & Hobbyist Titles

Key Genre Comparisons for AA, Indie, and Hobbyist Titles

• Strong AA Genres: RPG, 3D, Action, Co- Op

• Strong Indie Genres: First Person, Simulation, Open World, Anime

• Strong Hobbyist Genres: Cute, 2D, Adventure, Atmospheric, Pixel Graphics

Most Common Genres for AA, Indie, and Hobbyist Titles

Genres that were in the most common chart but not the most profitable list.

• AA: Story Rich, Atmospheric, Simulation, Strategy

• Indie: Adventure, Indie, Action, 3D, Story Rich, RPG

• Hobbyist: Indie, Action, 3D, Simulation, Exploration

Emerging Niche Genres

These were used in 10% of games or less and in the top 50 revenue genres.

Most Profitable Niche Genres for AA, Indie, and Hobbyist

Expanding the search a bit more I opened up the range to 10-25% usage and separated it by AA, Indie and Hobbyist.

Sharing The Love Genres

These are the highest median revenue genres that were used in at least 10% of games. Having a high median revenue and usage rates reflects genres that perform predictably well.

I’ll let you look at the combined genres of the left half of that chart and use your imagination to figure out why their consistently popular.

Tough Genres

These are the lowest median revenue genres that were used in at least 10% of games. Having a low median revenue but high usage rates doesn’t necessarily mean its not a lucrative genre but it does mean it has high competition and takes something special to stand out.

Random Genre Highlights

These are popular genres I often see debated, so I pulled the data to see what we can learn.

• Simulation games are extremely popular and tend to do well.

• 2D platformers have one of the lower median revenues, reflecting the common knowledge of it being a popular but difficult genre.

• Rougelikes/Rougelites are increasingly seeming like a genre that’s here to stay.

  • While less popular Rougelike Deckbuilders had a high median revenue.

• Horror games were extremely popular with high total revenue but lower median revenue. This makes a lot of sense. At this point many have heeded the advice to make horror games on Steam but you still need a good game to rise to the top.

Conclusion

The data from 2024 highlights the stark realities of the gaming industry. While a handful of games achieve massive success, the majority struggle to make meaningful revenue. The winner-takes-all dynamic is clear, with the top 10% of games capturing the vast majority of revenue across all categories.

Ultimately, the key takeaway is that making games is challenging, but well-informed strategies can improve your chances of success. Whether you’re an aspiring Indie dev or a growing AA studio, learning from industry trends, and adapting accordingly is crucial to navigating the ever-evolving gaming landscape.

That’s two data heavy posts back to back, so next time we’re doing another case study on a successful indie game filled with actionable insights to market your own game to success. See you next time✌️

This analysis covers the top 50 games from each category (150 titles total) released in 2024. Using data sourced from GameDiscoverCo and Gamalytic, this breakdown explores revenue trends, Early Access strategies, genre performance, and key takeaways for developers planning for 2025.

Quick note: Now that i’m a few posts deep on this newsletter I want to take a beat and check in with you lovely readers. I know we all hate surveys, but if you have 2 minutes to spare please consider filling out this survey informing me of what topics and content you’re the most interested in!

Data Context

The data in this article is sourced from 3rd party sites GameDiscoverCo and Gamalytic. The full dataset used in this analysis is available in this Google Sheet. There are definitely more insights to be found in the data than the ones mentioned in this article. Keep in mind these are 3rd party tools and as such all the data are only estimates. This data only includes information from Steam games.

AAA vs. AA vs. Indie – Key Performance Comparisons

There is no 100% agreed upon definition of what separates AAA, AA, and Indie game studios. Since I used Gamalytic’s filtering to collect this data, we will be using their definition for these groups:

• Indie: Publishers who made more than $10k and less than $50m lifetime on Steam.

• AA: Publishers who published at least 2 games, made more than $50m and less than $500m lifetime on Steam.

• AAA: Publishers who published at least 2 games, made more than $500m lifetime on Steam and have at least $10m average revenue per game

This means that for the purposes of this article the status of AAA, AA, & Indie has less to do with studio size and more to do with experience. They also based their definition on the publisher rather than the developer, an irrelevant point if the studio self published.

Revenue

A significant gap exists in revenue distribution across the three classes. AAA and AA titles are heavily skewed by a few massive hits, while indie titles distribute revenue more evenly.

➡️ 68.46% of total AAA revenue comes from the top 10% of AAA games.

1. Black Myth: Wukong – $951,505,160

2. HELLDIVERS 2 – $443,622,746

3. Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 – $142,612,930

4. Dragon's Dogma 2 – $112,065,398

5. THRONE AND LIBERTY – $98,651,549

➡️ 57.14% of total AA revenue comes from the top 10% of AA games.

1. Palworld – $435,465,541

2. Path of Exile 2 – $135,369,527

3. The First Descendant – $113,736,614

4. Granblue Fantasy: Relink – $77,873,706

5. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl – $72,957,618

➡️ 28.78% of total Indie revenue comes from the top 10% of Indie games.

1. Gray Zone Warfare – $37,867,435

2. Supermarket Simulator – $28,815,898

3. Chained Together – $23,994,004

4. Bodycam – $20,648,426

5. TCG Card Shop Simulator – $20,242,415

Revenue Concentration: A small percentage of AAA and AA titles account for a majority of their revenue. Meanwhile Indie titles share the market much more evenly.

Engagement

Playtime: The average and median playtime for AAA games stayed near 39 hours while AA and Indies fluctuated greatly. AA & Indie had similar median playtimes but AAA was a solid 10 hours or more.

Indies had the highest standard deviation in playtime, indicating the widest range of gameplay experiences.

Indies had the highest median review count, median review score, and average review score. Nice.

Key Insights:

• AAA games have a consistently high base line of playtime reflecting player expectation of premium in depth experiences from AAA studios. Meanwhile players are satisfied with greater variation in playtime from AA and Indie studios.

• Long Playtimes Are a Common Trait: Median playtime across all classes exceeds 25 hours. Players across all categories value extended gameplay experiences, regardless of the production scale.

• Indies favorable review metrics demonstrate that smaller teams often excel in innovation and delivering unique gameplay experiences that players appreciate.

Pricing

The price of games correlates strongly with their class:

• AAA games cluster around higher prices ~$59.99

• AA games range from $29.99 to $39.99

• Indie games consistently fall below $30, with many priced around $19.99

Early Access Insights

Early Access is often a subject of debate amongst devs and players alike so I was interested to see what the successful EA titles of 2024 could teach us.

Widespread Usage in Indie and AA Games: Early Access was used in approximately 24% (36) of titles, with indie games accounting for 16% (21) and AA games for 8% (14).

Revenue Impact: Early Access games contributed 23.67% of total revenue, with indie games generating $215.5M and AA titles $527.3M.

Higher Player Engagement: Early Access titles had a median of 38.9 hours of playtime compared to 27.1 hours for full releases. EA titles also had a higher median review score of 86% versus 81% for full release.

Popular EA Genres

• Multiplayer: Appears in 22 Early Access titles

• Building: Appears in 15 Early Access titles

• Sandbox: Appearsin 14 Early Access titles

• RPG: Appears in 14 Early Access titles

• Crafting: Appears in 13 Early Access titles

Iterative Content Focused Multiplayer Fun: The popular EA genres point towards a focus on open-ended experiences that encourage creative and emergent gameplay that can be enjoyed with friends. These genres are suitable for ongoing content development and refinement during Early Access. Chris over at HTMAG wrote a great article on “Crafty Buildy” games I highly recommend checking out.

Based on the data above I would suggest strongly considering if EA is right for your game if you’re an indie or AA studio releasing a crafty buildy game. A few examples of games like this include Palworld, Enshrouded, & Valheim.

Genre Insights – What Worked in 2024?

Note that the genre’s are purely based off Steam Tags. In some cases the developers use questionable tags for their games. For example Body Cam & Liar’s Bar use the VR tag while not being playable in VR.

Most Profitable Genres for AAA, AA, and Indie Titles

Key Genre Comparisons for AAA, AA, and Indie Titles

• Strong AAA Genres: Story rich, Third Person, & Fantasy1

• Strong AA Genres: Hack & Slash, Open World, & PVE

• Strong Indie Genres: First Person, Simulation, & Exploration

Most Common Genres for AAA, AA, and Indie Titles

Given this is a list of the top 50 across every studio level and every game is a wild success it’s worth looking at the most common genres as well.

Emerging Niche Genres

Many of the most popular tags are extremely broad such as Adventure, Single player, Multiplayer, Action, etc. I was more interested in seeing niche genres that are used less frequently but perform well, so I looked at the most profitable genres that were used in between 10 to 20% percent of games on the list.

Most Profitable Genres for AAA, AA, and Indie Titles (with Usage >10% and <20%)

Genres With Highest Median Playtime

Only includes tags that were used at least 5 times in AAA, AA, & Indie titles.

Genres With High Variety Between AAA, AA, & Indie

These are genres that had a gap in popularity in at least one class compared to the others.

Conclusion

The 2024 game market revealed valuable lessons across all game classes. While AAA games continue to dominate in sheer revenue, indie, and AA titles show impressive engagement, innovation, and the ability to share the market more evenly. By focusing on strategic genre choices that match studio resources with player desire and aligning marketing with audience expectations developers at all levels can find success in 2025 and beyond!

Don’t forget to fill out the survey mentioned in the beginning of this newsletter. See you next time ✌️

Making a successful indie game in today’s competitive market is no small feat, but it doesn’t have to feel overwhelming. Think of it like trying to build an epic LEGO set, challenging yes, but also a lot of fun when you have the right pieces and know where they go. Or maybe it’s more like putting together IKEA furniture for you, you don’t particularly enjoy every part of it but damn does it feel good when its finished and all the pieces are in the right place.

This blog is heavily inspired by two exceptional videos, "Marketing For Indie Games | Land a Hit Game" and "Making Successful Indie Games Is Simple (But Not Easy)" which provide invaluable insights into crafting and promoting games on Steam. If you’re at all interested in making and marketing a great game, these videos are must-watches. They’re filled with actionable advice and valuable insights from two indie focused industry veterans. This weeks article builds on their wisdom while incorporating some additional insights to help you succeed.

Making a Marketable Game on Steam

Understanding the Steam Audience

To create a marketable game, you first need to understand what Steam users want. The typical Steam audience values games that offer depth, anywhere around 20–40 hours of content, and are repayable. As for what genres are popular, Chris from How to Market a Game coined a phrase I love: "Crafty, Buildy, Simulation, Management Games”. These are games like Valheim, Enshrouded, Palworld, Factorio, Rimworld, Dwarf fortress, Manor lords, etc.

What makes these genres successful? They often include emergent gameplay systems that encourage replayability and offer players the freedom to explore and create their own experiences. This self-generating complexity keeps players engaged without requiring developers to craft every interaction manually. Think of these games as "toys" that provide endless opportunities for creativity, much like LEGO bricks. The less you have to rely on handcrafting every scenario and instead focus on creating systems that generate endless possibilities, the more your game will align with the expectations of Steam users.

AAA studios, with their vast resources, can give players the 20–40 hours of content they crave by creating massive, elaborate games like Baldur's Gate 3 and Dragon Age: The Veilguard. For indie developers, however, such a scale is unattainable. This is where the LEGO brick system focused approach to game development becomes the ultimate cheat code, allowing you to provide endless hours of engaging content without needing to painstakingly craft every moment. Incorporating systems like procedural generation or modular gameplay mechanics can vastly extend your game’s lifespan while providing fresh experiences for returning players.

Horror games, often with only a few hours of content, tend to do well too. Why? Idk I guess people like being scared. Maybe it’s easier game design wise? Or perhaps the highly marketable moments in horror games do the genre favors.

Make a Game That Both You and the Steam Audience Love

If you watch the videos mentioned above or read the previous section it’s easy to assume the takeaway is to make "Crafty, Buildy, Simulation, Management Games”. But that would be like reacting to the symptoms rather than the disease. The deeper meaning is not that you must make those games to be successful on Steam, but rather that those genre of games are the most popular because they’re very good at giving steam players what they want while being achievable to make for indie teams. This is likely why Rougelites/Rougelikes also had their time in the sun1.

Steam players crave games that have depth and provide dozens of hours of playtime & replayability. There are lots of game genres that can be creatively bent to fit that need.

Designing for Success

Genre and Fantasy Clarity

To stand out on Steam, your game must communicate its genre and fantasy, clearly. This starts with a compelling one or two-sentence pitch that encapsulates your game’s core fantasy and mechanics. This ensures your game’s appeal is immediately understandable, helping players connect with it faster. Here’s a few examples

Thronefall is a minimalist strategy game about building and defending your kingdom. Construct buildings during the day and fight alongside units at night.

Project Lost Island is a psychological VR horror game about unraveling the mystery of an abandoned island. Navigate dark, haunting environments, evade a relentless monster, and use light to uncover hidden stories that piece together the island’s tragic history.

SNØ is a minimalistic freeriding game. Push your limits for the high score, or simply explore the endless, serene wilderness.

Balancing Innovation and Optimization

When designing your game, you’ll face a choice between two fundamental strategies:

• Strategy A: Improve upon existing concepts with a better or innovate design.

• Strategy B: Create something totally unique but ensure it’s still relatable to players.

Both approaches have their merits and risks. Strategy A relies on perfecting a proven formula, ensuring players recognize and understand your game. Strategy B requires innovation that balances familiarity and novelty, allowing you to stand out while still attracting a sizable audience. The challenge is to strike a balance where your innovation doesn’t alienate players, but rather intrigues them with its fresh take on a known concept.

Hades is a good example of Strategy A. It only takes a few seconds of gameplay to recognize it as an action rougelike. From there the success comes in giving it a unique personality steeped in Greek mythology and excellently polished gameplay.

Balatro is a good example of Strategy B. It immediately hooks you in with the weird premise of being a “Poker Rougelike”. Combine the curiosity of players wondering how the f a poker rougelike is suppose to work with a banger implementation of that idea and you have explosive success of Balatro.

The Role of Prototyping

Prototyping is an essential tool for refining your game’s mechanics, testing ideas, and ensuring that your design decisions resonate with players. For most indie devs, prototyping provides a cost-effective way to explore gameplay possibilities without committing to large-scale production. By building quick, low-stakes versions of your game systems, you can:

• Test Mechanics: Quickly determine what works and what doesn’t. Does your combat system feel engaging? Are the resource management elements intuitive? Prototyping allows you to answer these questions early.

• Refine Core Loops: Focus on iterating the core gameplay loop to ensure it’s fun and addictive. If players enjoy the loop, you’re on the right track.

• Validate Player Choices: Experiment with ways players interact with your systems, such as crafting, exploring, or combat, to find the most satisfying options.

• Minimize Risk: Avoid investing significant resources into ideas that may not work by validating them in the prototype stage.

Prototyping isn’t about creating something polished; it’s about making sure you’re creating a fun game that players actually want, before committing significant resources to developing it. In the later stages its about discovering what makes your game compelling and identifying areas for improvement. A protype is a great risk averse way to identify early market signals.

Conducting Playtests

Playtesting is a vital step in gathering actionable feedback to improve your game’s design. When conducting playtests, clearly communicate the type of feedback you’re seeking. Whether it’s about gameplay mechanics, pacing, or visual clarity, targeted feedback will help you refine your game more efficiently.

Here’s a few ways you can run a playtest:

• Steam Playtest Feature: Steam offers a built-in playtesting function that allows developers to manage playtest participants. You can find more details in Steam’s official documentation.

• Itch.io: Itch.io provides an excellent platform for sharing your game with a broader indie audience. Set up a page for your prototype or playtest build to collect feedback from the vibrant community it offers.

• File Hosting: While less ideal, hosting an executable file on platforms like Google Drive is another option. However, this method can deter potential testers, as players may be hesitant to download files from unknown studios.

Two criminally underrated uses of playtesting:

1. Playtests are also great marketing beats to drive community and wishlist growth.

2. Utilize playtests to test your demo build before putting it up on your Steam page.

Leveraging the Algorithm

Your primary job with marketing is to show Steam that players think your game is interesting. By bringing in enough traffic to your store page, you trigger the Steam algorithm, which then starts marketing your game for you. Steam promotes games through features like the Popular Upcoming list, where games with strong wishlist performance are showcased, and the Discovery Queue, which introduces your game to players based on their preferences. Triggering the Steam algorithm will significantly amplify your game’s visibility, turning early traffic into a snowballing effect of interest and sales. To make this happen, focus on generating pre-launch buzz through demos, content creators, and online festivals.

Marketing Your Game Effectively

The Power of Demos

A demo is one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. It allows potential players and content creators to experience your game firsthand, building excitement and driving wishlists. Here’s how to maximize its impact:

• Use your demo to apply for online Steam sponsored festivals like Steam Next Fest as well as 3rd party festivals.

• Share it with content creators that play your genre of game. The more you can show why their audience would enjoy seeing them play your game the higher chance you’ll get a reply. It’s worth contacting creators again after each major demo update (without be annoying).

• Playtest your demo publicly before officially launching it on your Steam page to avoid a nasty surprise and ensure it’s as fun as possible.

Content Creators as Multipliers

Content creators can amplify your game’s reach exponentially. To effectively engage them, start by crafting personalized messages that demonstrate genuine interest in their content. Highlight why your game would resonate with their audience, and include specific features or elements that align with their style. Offering incentives like exclusive access or keys (to give their audience) to an older game of yours can create excitement and increase the likelihood of coverage. Additionally, ensure that any materials you provide, such as your press kit, is polished and ready for sharing, making it easy for creators to dive in and share their experience. To effectively engage them:

• Reach out broadly: Contact 300–1,000 creators, focusing on those whose audiences align with your game’s genre and themes.

• Prioritize organic promotion: Streamers and YouTubers are more effective when they play your game out of genuine interest versus sponsorship.

• Leverage their feedback: Content creator’s (and their audience) insights can help you identify gameplay strengths and weaknesses as well positioning issues.

Online Festivals and Steam Events

Virtual festivals like Steam Next Fest provide front-page visibility and attract content creators. Ensure your demo is polished and ready to shine in these high-traffic events. Success in these festivals can significantly boost your game’s algorithmic visibility. Remember to prepare marketing assets, including trailers and visuals, to support your presence at these events. This is also a great time to contact content creators, update your demo, drop a new trailer, or utilized paid ads (if you have money to burn and know what your doing).

Social Media: Engagement Over Virality

Unless you go viral, social media will likely not be the primary driver of sales or wishlists, but it’s an invaluable tool for community engagement and feedback.

• Test your game’s positioning: Share early prototypes, updates to your game, and specific features to gauge player reactions. This can reveal areas of confusion or untapped potential.

• Engage with your audience: Use social media to learn what players like, what confuses them, and what excites them. Community engagement builds goodwill and helps refine your messaging.

• Build interest organically: Focus on showcasing your game’s unique elements while not sounding like a corporate marketer. Authenticity resonates far more deeply with audiences than fancy marketing copy.

Final Thoughts

Creating the right game and marketing it on Steam requires a strategic balance of creativity, player alignment, and effective promotion. Start by designing a game that fits player expectations and offers replayability through emergent gameplay. Use demos, content creators, and online festivals to market your game effectively, and leverage social media for community engagement.

By combining innovation with proven strategies, indie developers can create games that stand out in a competitive market. Success comes not just from making great games but from making the right games and ensuring they reach the right audience.

I’m gonna go take a much needed vacation now and finally finish Dragon Age: The Veilguard, see you in 2025!

What began as a 6 month project turned into an 18 month odyssey, revealing harsh truths about timelines, budgets, and the grind of indie development. Along the way, the developer leveraged creative marketing strategies to turn limited resources into meaningful visibility.

Using insights gleamed from an interview with Ignas, solo developer of Graveyard Gunslingers, we’ll explore the marketing strategies he deployed to carve out his own space in the market. Ignas’s journey provides an insightful look at the challenges and triumphs of solo development, offering valuable lessons for small teams and solo devs.

The Reality of Solo Development

Throughout Gunslinger’s development Ignas juggled a day job as a programmer while chasing his indie game dreams. Like many solo devs, his evenings and weekends became a second workday, filled with coding, design, and debugging.

Originally scoped as a six-month project, Graveyard Gunslingers ended up taking 18 months of part-time work, but he estimates he could have finished it in less than a year if he was working on it full time. Even with careful planning and a detailed GDD (Game Design Document) miscalculations were inevitable. Show me a game dev who accurately predicted how long their game would take to make and i’ll show you a liar.

Self-Publishing vs Publishing

It’s no secret that publishers can be very hit or miss. While some are exemplary, supporting developers, taking a fair cut, and conducting business ethically, others fall far short of these standards. In my interview with the developer behind Shogun Showdown, for instance, I detailed how he had a fantastic experience with his publisher, gladly sharing a portion of the revenue in exchange for valuable support. Unfortunately, Ignas’s experience with his first commercial game on Switch was the stark opposite, highlighting the challenges and risks that can arise when a publisher fails to deliver.

Ignas’s Experience with a Publisher: Lessons Learned

For many indie developers, signing with a publisher seems like a shortcut to success, a way to secure funding, marketing support, and distribution expertise. However, as Ignas discovered with his previous game, the reality can be far more complicated and, in some cases, disappointing. His experience with a publisher during the release of Cyber Velocity Run serves as a cautionary tale for other indie developers.

The initial excitement of partnering with a publisher quickly turned into frustration. Ignas found himself tied to a terrible contract that left critical details like timelines, responsibilities, and revenue sharing extremely vague. Despite the publisher's promise to handle marketing and promotion, little was done to support the game after launch.

This experience highlights a common issue: publishers that take on numerous projects, hoping a few will succeed while neglecting those that don’t show immediate promise. For Ignas, this meant a lack of support and a significant portion of his revenue going to a publisher that didn’t do much in the end.

Lessons for Indie Devs Considering a Publisher:

1. Understand the Contract Thoroughly:
   Try to contact game devs who have published games with that publisher to get their honest opinions. If possible, have a lawyer or trusted advisor review the publishing contract. Look for clarity on revenue sharing, promotional commitments, and what happens if the game doesn’t meet expectations.

2. Evaluate Publisher Fit:
   Research publishers carefully to see how they’ve treated other indie devs and how their games have done. Pro Tip: Naturally a publisher will want to show off their best performing games, so rather than checking their website, look at the publisher on Steam to see the full list of games they’ve published and how they performed.

3. Don’t Undervalue Your Capabilities:
   Ignas realized that he could handle much of what a publisher typically offers, such as outreach to influencers, social media promotion, and managing the game’s release.

4. Be Realistic About Expectations:
   While publishers can provide valuable resources, they’re not a guaranteed path to success. For solo developers, retaining creative control and profits might outweigh the perceived benefits of signing with a publisher.

Ignas’s story underscores an important lesson: publishers aren’t always the right choice for every project. For some indie developers, learning to manage marketing and distribution independently can lead to better results—and more rewarding experiences—in the long run.1

Winning Marketing Strategies

Building Momentum with a Demo

As pointed out in the Postmortem by Ignas, the turning point for Graveyard Gunslingers was its demo. After launching the demo he reached out to 150 Youtubers that play games in his genre. The result: A dramatic increase in wishlists from 2,000 to 6,000 in a single month. It’s worth noting that only a handful of Youtubers ended up covering his game, but it was more than enough to make a big splash.

After the success he found combining demo updates with influencer marketing, he found it far more efficient to double down on this strategy and largely abandoned social media as a marketing tool. There’s a great lesson to be learned here. There is no one size fits all marketing strategy that applies to every game. When you find a strategy that works well for your game it’s best to focus and scale that strategy, especially if your a solo dev with limited time.

Festivals

Realms Deep : 650 wishlists
Games Baked in Germany: 588 wishlists
Steam Next Fest Oct 2024: 1,400 wishlists

Another reminder to always join as many festivals as possible. They’re a pretty reliable way to get at least a few hundred or thousand wishlists depending on the festival.

The most recent Steam Next Fest was a special one. Due to the increasing amount of games in Net Fest, Valve decided to update the algorithm along with a number of other changes. Chris gathered some data and wrote a great article that concludes with “The new Next Fest Format was kind of bad for top performing games and about the same for everyone else.” I asked fellow game devs who had been in previously next fests how this one compared to previous ones and the general conscious was that it was “alright” but worse than before. It could be valve’s changes but its more likely the fact that Next Fest has significantly more games than before.

Leveraging Social Media For Authentic Relationships

Ignas used Twitter2 to engage authentically with content creators by commenting on posts and building genuine relationships. He’d engage with them in a friendly manner and let them discover his game on his profile or only bring up the game when it felt natural.

This strategy was a fantastic way to foster goodwill and get organic coverage.

Using Assets: The Smart Approach to Solo Dev

Premade Assets as a Strategic Tool
To manage scope and cover skillsets he lacked, Ignas leaned heavily on assets like Synty’s low-poly packs for visuals and freelancers for music and sound design. This approach minimized costs while keeping the art style cohesive.

This largely applies to solo devs and small teams, studios are generally expected to create custom content. Creating a game requires a combination of a ton of different disciplines. My personal advice is to hand craft the areas you are passionate about and either outsource or use assets to cover everything else.

Avoiding the "Asset Flip" Trap
Ignas emphasized that when using premade assets, especially popular ones like Synty, customization is extremely important. Using shaders, effects, and post-processing are all effective ways to make your game look unique.

Post-Launch Struggles: Lessons in Managing Expectations

Despite its marketing successes, Graveyard Gunslingers currently sits at a mixed review rating, with reviewers citing a lack of content and features common in competing games, such as meta-progression.

The point of this blog is not to review games, but I wanted to highlight this part because there’s some great lessons in community management and market research to learn here.

Reacting to Negative Reviews
Upon reading the reviews Ignas immediately leapt into action releasing a simplified roadmap promising more content to come. This is absolutely the best response in this scenario! If you see a common trend among negative reviews, it’s vital you get in front of it ASAP. Ignas has already implemented many of the features that negative reviewers pointed out as missing. After shipping a “fix” for a specific issue, it’s worth the extra effort to reply to negative reviews mentioning that issue thanking them for the feedback and informing them a fix has been implemented.

Market Research
Ignas pointed out that he actually agreed with players complaining about the lack of meta progression in the game. This a great example of the importance of analyzing competitors gameplay features during market research. It’s a good idea to actually play your competitor games and identify common features across them as well as what makes them “fun”. Some of these things can be identified by simply reading the reviews, but I like to think it helps to be the player yourself.3

Managing Expectations: I vs We
It’s common for solo ventures to say “we” in their marketing to help establish trust and confidence, when in reality it’s one person. Personally, I think this can backfire if your a solo dev making an indie game. If players are aware that it’s only one dev behind the game they’re more likely to have empathy for the developer for a problem like lack of content. While its anecdotal, I have seen multiple reviews and Reddit threads where players came to the defense of the developer asking for people to be reasonable since it’s one person trying their best, especially when the dev is clearly actively addressing issues. There’s also the fact that public affection for AAA studios has waned recently, so there’s never been a better time embrace the underdog indie identity.

Great examples of this are Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles and Thronefall who proudly embrace their indie identity to the point of having their face or voice explaining the game on their Steam page.

Crunching the Numbers

Sales and Revenue
At the time of writing, Graveyard Gunslingers has sold over 6,100 copies, grossing $42,000 and netting an estimated $30,000. While modest, these figures are significant for a first time Steam release by a solo dev.

Wishlist Performance
Graveyard Gunslingers launched with around 12K wishlists. Across it’s opening weekend it actually gained over 10,500 wishlists from Nov 8 - 12! This was largely due to Graveyard Gunslingers appearing in New and Trending and Popular Upcoming on the front page of Steam. Hopefully this signals strong future sales when Graveyard Gunslingers is discounted more heavily!

Localization Matters
Localization was a surprise win for Graveyard Gunslingers. With top audiences in Russia (27.5%) and China (20.9%), translating the game into Chinese & Russian was definitely worth the effort. Fun fact: According to the Steam Hardware Survey, Simplified Chinese is the leading language at 33.48% followed by English at 32.68% and Russian at 8.56%.

Regional sales for Graveyard Gunslingers:

1. China 21.2%

2. United States 16.3%

3. Korea 14.4%

4. Germany 11.2%

5. Russia 5.4%

Takeaways for Aspiring Solo Devs

1. Start Small and Learn: Start with smaller projects to fail fast and learn rapidly.

2. Plan for the unplanned: Expect your game to take longer than planned and factor that into your budget and schedule.

3. Focus on developing and marketing a strong demo: A great demo combined with influencer marketing can be a fantastic marketing beat. If this works during your initial demo launch, utilize demo updates as an excuse to reach out to content creators again.

4. Leverage Premade Assets Wisely: Premade assets are great time savors but make sure to add customization to make them your own.

5. Know Your Market: Research your audience and competitors, make note of key features that audiences expect in your genre.

6. Localize Your Game: With China, Russian, & English representing a significant portion of the player base on Steam, it’s worth the effort localizing your game. The most recommended are: English, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, and FIGS (French Italian, German, Spanish)

7. Plan for Post Launch Sales & Updates: Massive jump in wishlists upon release is a reflection of potential buyers who are either waiting for future updates or sales before buying.

8. Clear Your Schedule During Launch Week: Getting in front of negative reviews ASAP is crucial for success. This often means burning the midnight oil shortly after release implementing changes and responding to negative feedback.

Final Thoughts

Graveyard Gunslingers may not be a breakout indie hit, but it is a realistic success story, a steady win that many solo developers can aspire to. With over 5,700 copies sold, nearly $27,000 in net revenue, and lessons learned in localization, marketing, and game design, Ignas’s journey offers a relatable and achievable blueprint for indie developers. While triple-A success may seem out of reach, a project like Graveyard Gunslingers shows how determination, strategic thinking, and embracing your indie identity can lead to meaningful victories.

Recommended Readings

The State of Indie Games in 2024 and Beyond: Assessing both the current year and the future of the indie scene

How to Find Market Signal: Part Two: Finding your vision and strong market signal in the early stages of game development

How to Find Market Signal: Part One: Games marketing in the age of the algorithm

How was the October 2024 Steam Next Fest: A look at how game devs faired in the recent Next Fest.

An informative LinkedIn post about how it’s probably a good idea to approach your game as if you’re self publishing it, even if you don’t plan on that.

Love it or hate it, marketing is an unavoidable aspect of game development. While I personally love marketing, I know that most game developers would rather focus on their game and worry about that “marketing stuff” later. Unfortunately, unless your very lucky, making a great game is not enough, people need to find your game amongst the thousands released every year. The good news is that marketing is not as complex as you may think and when done correctly it will not only increase the discoverability of your game but it’s quality as well.

Marketing is important, but I also don’t want you to burn valuable development time stressing about how to best market your game. My full time job is indie game marketing and I still never feel like I know enough, so believe me it can be very time consuming. I made this newsletter with the mission to provide a consumable way to learn & get inspiration on how to market your game.

This article is designed to be the starting point on your game marketing journey. Let’s get started.

Make A Marketable Game

What’s the first step in marketing your game? Do yourself a massive favor and make a marketable game.

Choose Your Genre and Art Style Carefully

Your choice of game genre and art style is the single most important marketing decision you’ll make. It changes your target audience, price, scope, and oh so much more.

So how do you decide your genre and art style? A combination of the following:

Interest

We all know examples of games that feel like soulless crash grabs. Choosing something with an addressable market is important, but make sure you balance that with your interest in it. Game dev is hard enough, don’t make it harder by working on something you’re not passionate about.

Skill Set

Learning new skills should be encouraged, but ideally you should lean into a genre or art style that fits your skill set.

Budget

If you have a healthy budget, then you can hire the talent needed to go for the genre or art style you want.

Market Research

The best case scenario is a genre that is popular with relatively low competition. Here’s two examples of this in action:

1. Create a game in an emerging subgenre
   The explosive popularity of Vampire Survivors gave birth to a whole new subgenre: Survivorlikes. If you released a survivor like game in 2022 you would be releasing your game into a new and popular genre with low competition. However, fast forward to 2024 and it feels like a week can’t go by without seeing a survivor like game. Timing is crucial for this strategy.

2. Reimagine and bring back an older game
   Check out these two games: Gang Beasts (released 2017) & Party Animals (Released 2023). It’s pretty obvious that Party Animals was heavily inspired by Gang Beasts. By taking a game concept with proven success that had little competition and creating a new game years later they had a pretty safe bet that their was an audience for the game.

Do Preliminary Market Research

Ideally you should make two of these. One to choose the type of game to make and another to research the landscape of the game you choose. Your research should answer the following:

• What game genre should I make?

  • What art style fits this genre well?

  • How many games in this genre were released recently and what was the median revenue?

  • What’s the balance between the popularity of the genre and the amount of games released (competition)?

• How much should I charge for my game?

• How much money could my game make?

• Who are my competitors?

  • What game will mine be compared too?

    • What do I different from them? (see optimizer vs innovator below)

    • What elements of their game did the community respond positively and negatively too?

  • What were their marketing strategies?

    • Where and how did they announce major marketing beats (demo, playtest, announcement trailer, etc.)

    • What was their go to market strategy?

    • What steam festivals or other events did they join?

    • What caused spikes in their wishlists? (use third party data like Gamalytic.com)

• SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)

• Who is my target audience?

  • Where do they live?

• UVP (Unique Value Proposition) and Positioning.

This is not an exhaustive list but it should give you an idea of what you should be looking for and why this research is useful. You might be wondering how you find answers to the questions above. I’ll be writing an article soon on how to do market research for your game, so make sure you’re subscribed. :)

Understand your positioning and have a good elevator pitch

Positioning

A drastically oversimplified definition of positioning (for video games) would be where you lay in relation to other games. Specifically through the players eyes. If your FPS game is closer to a tactical shooter like counter strike but your audience is comparing you to overwatch that’s a warning sign to work on your positioning.

If you want to learn more about positioning for your game I highly recommend giving this a read:

Push to Talk

5 Hard To Swallow Pills For Better Game Positioning

EDITOR’S NOTE: There were a ton of fun responses to my essay about games marketing difficulty levels, so this week I figured I’d take a risk and talk about an aspect of games marketing that I’m still learning about: positioning…

Read more

2 years ago · 27 likes · 8 comments · Ryan K. Rigney

Elevator pitch

You likely already know why an elevator pitch is important for landing an investor or publisher, but it’s just as important in quickly capturing interest in your game. You often have seconds to capture the interest of potential players, whether its your steam page or a tiktok video you need to be able to quickly and accurately describe your game.

I’ll be borrowing a great framework (pictured above) for this that Jonas Tyroller used for his game Thronefall. Here’s how Jonas used it for Thronefall:

Thronefall is a minimalist strategy game about building and defending your kingdom. You construct buildings during the day and fight alongside your units during the night.

If you’re unable to sufficiently describe your game in two sentences or less, you’re going to have a hard time with marketing. This will also help with your positioning.

Make A Good Game

The final step in making a marketable game is to make a good game. This advice is not as obvious as you may think. The 4 ps of marketing are:

• Product

• Place

• Price

• Promotion

Most people, especially game devs new to marketing, primarily think of promotion when they’re thinking about marketing. However, Product (in this case your game) is by far the most important. You can nail everything else but unless your game is good it will never catch on.

So how do you make a good game? Beats me, i’m a marketer by trade not a game designer. So with that in mind ill be heavily borrowing from Jonas Tyroller again who has released multiple indie bangers. I’ll be writing a TLDR with a few extra thoughts, but I highly recommend watching his full video below.

To make a fun game and offer something unique in the market you need to either be an innovator (do something different) or an optimizer (do something better). Naturally you can do both of these at the same time as well. A great example of a company that follows this philosophy with nearly every game is Riot Games.

• League of Legends innovated/optimized Dota

• Teamfight Tactics innovated/optimized Dota Auto Chess

• Valorant innovated/optimized Counter Strike.

Jona’s points out that a great game is built on 4 pillars:

1. Fun

   1. The game needs to be fun to keep players playing.

2. Appeal

   1. The game needs to be appealing to attract players

3. Scope

   1. The scope needs to be manageable to finish the game

4. Monetization

   1. You need to monetize your game to make money.

Check out Jona’s youtube video for a deeper dive into these pillars, but i’ll mention a few notes on each.

Fun

This is probably the most difficult one. It’s actually pretty hard to make a fun game. But your game is fun right? Of course it is, you made it, how could it not be. Hopefully you caught how sarcastic I was being, but seriously you cannot trust your own judgement that the game is fun. Of course you think it’s fun because your heavily invested in it. So how do you find out if it’s actually fun? Make an early prototype of your game and collect feedback. Having your friends or your mom play it does not count, put it on itch.io and collect real feedback.

Appeal

Having an appealing game means that someone can see a 10 second clip of your game and be interested enough to check it out. This will be decided by the genre of your game, it’s art style, and perceived understanding. If whoever sees your game is interested in that genre, likes the art style, and like’s what your game is about then congrats you probably have a wishlist or purchase. If you get 2 out of 3 of those things you probably earned at least a visit to your steam page.

To fully appreciate how important appeal is check out Ryan’s article on how it can decide if your game’s marketing will be on easy or hard mode:

Push to Talk

Games Marketing on Easy Mode, Hard Mode, and the Dark Valley Between

Before we hop into this one, a quick editor’s note…

Read more

2 years ago · 18 likes · 3 comments · Ryan K. Rigney

Scope

The hidden killer of indie games. Do yourself a favor and make small games. Skip down to the bottom of this blog where I talk about how your first game will probably fail and you’ll see why spending 4 years making your dream game as your first game is an awful idea. Smaller scope also means less overhead and a lower bar for commercial success.

Monetization

You probably want to make money, so you’ll need to think carefully about how your game will make money. Unless your making a free to play live service, you usually just need to do some market research to determine a relevant price point. An underrated strategy for this: Just ask. Along side a demo or playtest include an optional survey with a question asking how much they would be willing to pay for the full version of this game upon release.

Marketing Your Game

Now that you did the most important step of making a marketable game, we’ll go into how to actually market it.

The End All Be All: Triggering the Steam Algorithm

This is the whole ball game folks. With today’s competition so fierce the only consistent way to succeed is getting Steam to market your game for you. This is why you pay them 30% of your revenue. The primary goal of your marketing efforts should be to bring enough traffic to your steam page that you give Steam a reason to then market your game for you. When Steam sees significant interest in your game it’s in their best interest to market your game further because you have proven that it will probably sell well.

So what happens when you trigger the steam algorithm? In short it means you end up on the front page of Steam with your game being shown to millions of daily visitors on Steam. You can be on the front page by being featured in one of the following widgets:

It’s important to note that no one except valve knows exactly how the algorithm works. The insights below are a combination of data collected from Valve Q&As, third party resources, and research from other marketing professionals.

Popular Upcoming

Games that are approx. 1 week from launch and deemed “popular” by Steam will be promoted in this widget. Getting on this list typically nets you thousands of wishlists per day. Appearing on popular upcoming is dependent upon a combination of your wishlist velocity and competition upon release. The numbers most commonly thrown around for this are 5,000 - 7,000 wishlists for a chance of appearing on popular upcoming. However, you could need closer to 10,000 or more if you release next to some tough competition.

New & Trending

It should come as no surprise that the way to get on New & Trending is to have great initial traction shortly after launch (page traffic, downloads, purchases, etc.). Two unique elements of New & Trending is that it’s country specific and is listed in chronological order. You will slowly drift down the chart as newer games get into the category. Games on this list are only updated on weekdays so if you have a lot of wishlists it’s worth releasing on Friday so that your game stays on New & Trending over the weekend. However, for this same reason I would avoid this if your wishlists numbers are low as Friday will be a highly competitive release date.

Trending Free

This is a new widget that Steam added after the great Steam demo update. This update resulted in the option for demos to have their own page and appear on New & Trending. This caused an issue where demos started pushing full games out of precious slots on the New & Trending widget. To address this a new Trending Free widget was added. This is a relatively new widget so there isn’t much data available on what it takes to get on it yet, but it seems likely that things like demo downloads and time played will determine if you qualify. Wishlists still matter here due to the fact that you can send an email to your wishlisters notifying them of your demo release.

Top Sellers

Getting in this category is huge but it’s very difficult for most indies. As the name implies, to be featured on the top selling widget your game needs to be flying off the shelves compared to other games.

Special Offers

This widget is unique where the other widgets are automated by an algorithm, games in this section are actually curated. The special offers on steam include Daily Deals, Weekend Deals, and Free Weekends. To get on this widget you must open a support ticket with valve and plead your case as to why you should be featured with a special offer. Chris wrote a great article on this if you want more insight on what it takes to get on this widget.

Discovery Que

The Discovery Que is a more personalized widget that shows a combination of popular games and games that the viewer is most likely to play. If a Steam visitor primarily plays games with the FPS tag then they will likely see a lot of FPS games in their Discovery Que. Although less than other widgets, being on the discovery que can still provide a significant amount of traffic. Once again wishlists are important to gaining access here. The Discovery Que is also why it’s really important that the tags for your game are accurate. If you use inaccurate tags you are missing the opportunity for the discovery que to market your game to your target audience.

How to Trigger the Steam Algorithm

How do you trigger the Steam Algorithm? Marketing. Duh. Many devs hear marketing and immediately think about posting on social media or ads. That however is only the tip of the iceberg and far from the most useful thing you can do.

You should approach your marketing like a deck building strategy game. The character your playing is your game, your cards are your marketing beats (releasing a demo, gameplay trailer, etc), and your win condition is getting as much wishlists as you can in the shortest amount of time possible (aka wishlist velocity). How and when you play these cards will ultimately determine if you win or not. Meanwhile, how marketable your game is determines the difficulty level.

Game Marketing Checklist

These are the main things that every game should do for the best chance at success.

Great Store Page

All of your marketing efforts will ultimately lead to your Steam Page. The quality of your Steam page will determine how effective it is at converting visitors to wishlist or buy your game. It would take it’s own article to explain how to make a great Steam Page, so instead i’ll link a great video on the topic below.

Great Trailer

Your trailer will live on your Steam page or Youtube, but it’s also what will be shown by press outlets and other media that talk about your game. Having a great trailer is vital since it’s one of the most informative things a potential player will consume to see if they’re actually interested in your game. I highly recommend checking out Derek Lieu for more info on how to make a great trailer. It’s harder than you may think.

Playtest Your Game

For the purposes of this article playtesting is referring to any time limited playable build of your game before release. This includes things like open & closed betas. There are 3 great reasons to playtest your game frequently.

1. Identify bugs

   1. Your game may run great on your device but your only one person with one piece of hardware. Ideally hundreds of people should playtest your game so that you can identify problems with different hardware or weird bugs that appear in niche situations.

2. Improve your game

   1. When you playtest you should also be collecting player feedback that you utilize to improve your game.

3. Marketing

   1. Playtests (especially Open & Closed Betas) are great marketing opportunities. There’s a lot of ways you can promote your playtest but at a minimum you should promote your playtest on social media. Open or closed betas are also a great time to reach out to content creators you think may be interested in playing.

      1. You can easily hosts playtest using the Steam playtest feature.

      2. One clever tactic I saw from Tactical Breach Wizards was distributing keys through their newsletter. So not only did they gather playtesters and wishlists they also built up their newsletter!

One final note on playtesting. Playtest your demo! Before releasing your demo on Steam you should playtest your demo build so that you launch with the strongest demo possible. The last thing you want is to be in the middle of Steam Next Fest panic fixing a bug or trying to trim down your way too long tutorial after seeing the feedback.

Festival Participation

Next to contacting creators, festival participation is probably the most effective marketing tool you can do. You should aim to join as many relevant festivals as possible, they are free visibility and serve as great marketing beats. There are official Steam festivals that are announced early, but there are also a TON of other festivals that take place on and off Steam. Some of are themed around a specific genre, art style, or mechanic, while others are focused on indies or people of color. There’s a festival for everyone. Here’s some examples:

• Official Steam Events

  • Steam Next Fest

  • Tower Defense Fest

  • Fighting Games Fest

  • Turn - Based RPG Fest

• There are also a ton not sponsored by Valve

  • Indie Live Expo

  • Adventure X

  • MIX Fall Showcase

  • Cozy Quest

Pro tip: Head over to the HTMAG Discord and follow the event reminders channel to get notified about upcoming festivals. You can also try contacting Valve and pitching a Steam event you’d like to host, this a common move by Publishers who then use the opportunity to host a Steam event in the style of games they publish.

Reach out to Press & Content Creators

Reaching out to content creators (Streamers, youtubers, influencers, etc) is one of the most effective marketing efforts you can possible do. I’m not gonna lie to you the conversion rate for this is pretty low. Its fairly common to reach out to hundreds of content creators only for dozens (or less) to reply or cover your game, but it’s well worth the effort. You can increase your chances by writing a personalized email and targeting the right creators. Your email should include why you think their audience would enjoy your game. If you’ve had your game covered by games press or another big creator before its worth referencing that in the email as well.

Many creators will reply asking for an official sponsorship. If you have a marketing budget to work with it may be worth it but make sure whoever you sponsor is a great fit for your game. Content creators will openly tell their audience if a game their covering is sponsored making it less impactful then if they covered it out of their own interest.

Here’s an Email & Presskit Template For Contacting YouTubers & Streamers created by one of the biggest content creators out there: Wanderbots. This Reddit post has some handy step by step instructions on how to reach out to content creators:

The Press is worth reaching out to, but they have become far less effective than they were in the past. All the same getting your trailer featured by IGN or good reviews across various press outlets is of course good.

Launch a Demo

Launching a demo is pretty much a no brainer. Without a demo you will kneecap your marketing due to the fact that you won’t qualify for most festivals and content creators won’t cover your game. The great Steam demo updated provided even more reasons to have a demo.

Should you take down your demo? The prevailing advice is no, but you need to do what makes sense for your game. Tiny Glade took down their demo because they were worried players would get creatively tapped out and feel that they had their fill before purchasing the game.

Pro tip for demos: Provide a reason to play and finish the demo. Reward players who make it to the end with something special (in game cosmetic, free wallpaper, etc). If you’re working on a story driven game, create a side story or prologue that ties into the main story of the game giving players a reason to play.

Strategic Announcements

Remember the deck building analogy I gave earlier? Strategic announcements are the part about knowing when to play your cards. By strategic announcements, I’m referring to using your marketing beats strategically so that you deploy them at the right moment for maximum impact. Most of the time this is in service of wishlist velocity. Here’s some examples

• Lining up various content creators before a major moment like festival participation or game release, then deploying them all at the same time.

  • Omega Strikers Creator VS Event: To help promote both their beta and launch, Omega Strikers hosted a wildly successful in game tournament with some of the biggest streamers out there.

• Offering an exclusive drop like your launch date trailer or demo release to a festival in exchange for coverage.

  • Tiny Glade dropped the official announcement of their game during the Wholesome snack game show.

• Drop updated trailers along side other major news like demo launch or festival participation

  • Tactical Breach Wizards regularly dropped new trailers ahead of Betas and updated their demo ahead of new festivals.

Website/ Press Kit

Another thing you need if you want content creators and press to cover your game is a Press Kit. Anyone that wants to cover your game is going to search for your press kit and you will make their life very difficult if you don’t have one. There are a lot of Press Kit templates out there but here’s a great one by Wanderbots.

Your website serves as a one stop shot for information on your game and can host important elements like your press kit and newsletter signup. A website is especially relevant if you have other games or launch across platforms. Here’s a great example of a simple but well done website for Yes Your Grace: Snowfall.

Active Social Media

Social media is useful for a few things:

• Trying to go viral

  • If you have a visually pleasing game (Tiny Glade) or strong gimmick (Palworld, Oh Deer ) this is much easier.

  • It’s worth noting that going viral or being popular on social media in general doesn’t always translate to sales or wishlists. If the video about your cool optimization hack for your game goes viral in the UE5 subreddit it probably won’t convert well. It went viral due to game devs interest in what you did rather than a players interest in buying your game.

• Building a community

  • Replying to users in your comment section is a great way to show the human behind the game and engage with your community. Reply like a human and avoid sounding corporate.

  • If you’re lucky enough to have players creating UGC (User Generated Content: Fan art, in game screenshots, etc) about your game make sure to reshare it on your socials! It helps build up your social media presence, motivates others to share, and makes the creator feel valued.

• Catching misunderstandings about your game

  • You may know what your game is about but that doesn’t mean your doing a great job illustrating that to players. Tiny Glade realized after posting on social media that due to the towers in their game many people assumed it was a tower defense game. This prompted them to change their marketing materials and update their steam page description with “No management, combat or goals: just kick back and turn forgotten meadows into lovable dioramas.”

• Steady Stream of Wishlists (potentially)

  • This is usually a byproduct of posting consistently over a long period of time.

It’s extremely useful to be on social media but don’t fall into the trap of only posting on social media and thinking you’ve checked the marketing box for your game. There’s a reason the meme above this section is so accurate.

Email Newsletter

One of the most underrated strategies used by indie game devs. There’s this weird notion that gamers and/or “young people’ don’t use email. Guess what wishlists are? An email list owned by Steam.

Paid Ads

This is by no means required and I only encourage diving into this if you have a budget and ideally a marketing professional on your team. This is because running effective ads is not easy and if you don’t know what your doing you will probably end up wasting money. If you have some budget to work with but don’t want to risk ads it may be more worth it to spend it on sponsoring content creators.

One noticeable element missing form the infographic above is reddit. Reddit ads can be effective if done right. Also remember that Google owns Youtube so when talking about gaming google ads really means Youtube.

Indie Game Dev in 2024

This a combination of prevailing advice echoed throughout the indie dev scene with a few hot takes by yours truly.

Your first game will probably be a commercial failure

You could be the next Stardew valley or tiny glade but statistically speaking it’s very unlikely your first game will be a commercial success. For every hit indie game there are hundreds of devs who spent years making a game that generated less than $500.

If you’re a small studio the situation is a bit different. On one hand you have the resources and expertise to have a much higher chance at making a great game, on the other hand you need to sell way more copies to be profitable due to your team size.

Please note that I specifically said your first game will be a commercial failure. Making games is super hard, releasing a game on Steam already puts you in a special club of people who actually finished and published a game. That in itself is a huge accomplishment to be proud of. If your first game fails, realize that’s completely normal and take what you learned into your next game.

Make Small Games

By small games I mean small polished games that take 6 months to 1 year to finish. This advice is born out of practicality. It’s better to fail fast and improve rapidly then spend years betting it all on one game.

Ironically for some indie devs these small games actually end up out performing their games that took years to develop. BiteMe Games made a game in one month that outperformed their previous game forge industry that took years to develop. Some personal friends of mine are experiencing this as well with their recent game SNØ: Ultimate Freeriding. While it has yet to release, it’s looking very promising and only took a few months to create versus their previous game that took years.

If done correctly releasing games every 6 months to 1 year can also build up a steady stream of passive income. Let’s say a solo dev releases 5 small games in the span of 2 - 3 years that all do “okay” and are bringing in around $500 a month each with spikes during sales. That may not be much to a big studio but for a solo dev that’s enough to start considering making indie games full time.

After making smaller less risky games and finally hitting a banger that brings in a decent amount of cash you can use what you learned, double down on what worked, and take a stab at making a bigger game with a 2 year dev cycle or something similar.

It’s Okay To Use Premade Assets

If you have artistic skills or have an artist on your team go ahead and skip this section. You should absolutely make custom art if at all possible, but if your a solo dev with no artistic skills I don’t think you need to spend years becoming a decent artist to make a solo game. Alternatively if you have a budget to work with considering hiring an artist. However, if you’re a broke dev with no artistic skill keep reading.

We all know of terrible “asset flips” and due to this many devs are scared to release games using premade assets. The ironic thing is those terrible asset flip games get a terrible reputation because they’re poorly made games with little soul, not because they’re using premade assets. There are plenty of great games out there utilizing pre made assets like the low poly assets available in the Synty store. The Bloodline and Polygon are great examples.

Premade assets are also great as placeholders while your game is in development. Remember the protoype I mentioned earlier? By using premade assets you can more more quickly develop your protype with the intention to swap them out for custom art later. This is exactly what Shogun Showdown did with great success.

While you can still make a great game with pre made assets it’s vital your game is still original and fun. If it’s within your skill set you should also customize the assets by using a custom shader or something else to make them unique.

My final argument for why you shouldn’t be scared of premade assets is that while game devs can often spot them a mile away, players often have no clue (or care) they’re premade assets. Here’s a great example of this in a Reddit post I spotted. Everything from the Paragon characters to the environment are premade assets. I even know the exact tutorials he used to set up some of his functionality because I followed them myself. But guess what? He got dozens of comments talking about how great the game looks. Most people had no clue and thought his game looked amazing even though he’s using some the most well known assets to game devs.

Prototype

Making games is very akin to releasing a product as a startup (especially true if you’re a small studio) and yet people shy away from using the same strategies. One of the most common strategies to help mitigate risk is building and testing a minimum viable product (MVP). The basic idea is to build a small slice of the product your planning on selling and testing it in the market to make sure there is demand for it before you commit significant resources. Games can and should do this same thing with prototypes.

More studios are starting to do this and I think it’s extremely smart. Ryan Rigney, Marketing Director for Odyssey Interactive, wrote a great article breaking down why their prototyping for their next game. In it he explains that he openly told players that the playtests they’re running on Steam will determine whether or not they move forward with development on it.

Push to Talk

Should We Make This Game?

This week’s newsletter is a short one. Things got a little hectic with the day job…

Read more

2 years ago · 20 likes · 4 comments · Ryan K. Rigney

Start by rapidly prototyping ideas for your game with your social circle or studio. Check out Jonas’s video below to see how he went through a series of protypes before landing on the game that would eventually become thronefall. After landing on an idea you like and having a prototype I would consider uploading it to itch.io and posting on social media to gauge interest in it. A common strategy by big mobile game companies is to run ads for games that don’t actually exist yet to test user interest. Unless you have some money to burn its probably enough to just post on social media and gather feedback on the prototype however you can.

Verifying you’re on to something with a prototype can save you from getting over committed to an idea only to realize a year(s) into production there’s no audience for your game.

Start Marketing ASAP

AAA & AA studios often wait until they are significantly into development with finished characters and environments before they begin marketing. As an indie game with no prior following there is a very high chance that your amazing reveal trailer for the game you worked for years on may drop with a measly few hundred views. It’s far less risky to begin marketing early and building a following over those years than hope that the world will suddenly take notice when your game trailer drops. That works for studios like Riot Games or Blizzard, but not indies working on their first game.

For indies, success often lies in embracing their underdog identity and building their game with players from day one. It’s pretty much never too early to begin marketing your game. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Unreal Engine grey boxed environments and the game is still finding it’s identity, as long as you’re clearly communicating your in early development.

By marketing at this stage i’m mostly referring to posting on social media. Early development is not the right time to be entering festivals or contacting content creators.

Useful Resources

Great Social Media

Youtube

Jonas Tyroller

Tom Francis

Len’s Island

Twitter

Tiny Glade

Yes, Your Grace: Snowfall

Tiktok

Mortal Rite

Aggrocrabgames

Steam Knowledge

How to get special Daily Deal featuring on the Steam Front page

What is the Discovery Queue?

What does it take to get in the Discovery Queue?

How To Market A Game: Benchmarks: How many wishlists are normal? How many reviews should I have? Some valuable numbers here from Chris who has lots of data to determine what “normal” numbers look for indie games!

What is wishlist velocity and is it a better indicator of success: A great article on the importance of wishlist velocity.

Market Research

Sully Gnome: A great tool for researching streamers.

Gamalytic, VGinsights, & GameDiscoverCo are all great tools where you can find information on other games such as copies sold, wishlists, etc.

5 Hard To Swallow Pills For Better Game Positioning

Great Blogs & Resources

Push To Talk: A fantastic weekly newsletter about the business of making and marketing video games.

How To Market A Game: A one stop shop for game marketing knowledge with regular blog posts, courses, and a very active discord I highly recommend joining.

Miscellaneous

How My Indie Game Hit 10k Wishlists: The Power of Demos, Festivals, and YouTube – A Postmortem

How to Properly reach out to content creators

Publisher Database

5 Hard To Swallow Pills For Better Game Positioning

Games Marketing on Easy Mode, Hard Mode, and the Dark Valley Between

Final Thoughts

This guide gives you the big-picture framework for building your marketing strategy, but the details make all the difference. Subscribe and we’ll flesh them out by looking at the marketing campaigns of successful games.

1 The marketing strategies discussed in this article primarily apply to pc games releasing on Steam, but the large majority of it still applies to other store fronts and consoles.

Huge thank you to Mirko, the developer behind Shogun Shodown, for taking some time right before his game’s release to sit down with me and answer my burning questions!

The Story of Shogun Showdown

From Software Developer to Game Dev

During Covid Mirko decided to take his skills he learned as a professional software developer and combine it with his passion for gaming. After spending a few months learning Unity and prototyping a few game ideas he landed on a “generic deck builder game”. Fast forward a year and he had a 1D movement based tile game that would eventually become Shogun Showdown.

His only real goal in the beginning was to get a functioning alpha version of Shogun Showdown onto itch.io to get some feedback. Mirko shared that he was very unsure back in the itch.io days if the game was actually fun or not. It’s very difficult for you or your social circle to look at your game with unbiased eyes because it’s natural to be proud of something that took so much work to create. Mirko’s first sign that he actually had a fun game on his hands was once people started coming to his discord to trade strategies and techniques to further in the game.

Even with some good feedback happening he still only had a relatively small amount of traffic, that is until Retromation picked it up and left a stellar review! As of the time of writing Retromation has made 7 videos on Shogun Showdown garnering a total of 180K views. That’s a ton of free visibility from one happy content creator. After the Retromation video Mirko’s itch page received a huge amount of traffic leading to a snowball of attention coming his way.

Securing a Publisher

While in the middle of deciding what to do next Mirko was contacted by the head of Goblinz publishing who had played the game and loved it. Mirko signed with Goblinz publishing and switched to working on Shogun Showdown part time (versus in his free time) before later transitioning into full time work.

Mirko wasn’t sure how Goblinz discovered his game but I wouldn’t be surprised if publishers stalk channels like Retromation or regular browse itch.io to find hidden gems. I imagine having a popular content creator and his audience pick up and leave great feedback on a game must be a good sign of potential to publishers.

Getting Some Help

Now that Mirko had a publisher he knew he had to turn things up a notch. He used some of the funding he got as part of his publishing deal to enlist the help of two pixel artists: Penusbmic and Camille Unknown. Penusbmic focused on character design and animations while Camille Unknown did the background art. He also reached out to his friend Oscar to make the soundtrack!

There’s a few game dev related notes I want to highlight here. The first is that Mirko actually used premade assets made by Penusbmic in his alpha build before later hiring him to make custom assets. This is absolutely the way to go! Use premade assets to cover the areas your not as skilled in so you can get to the first playable version of your game as quick as possible, then you can worry about swapping them out for custom assets later. The second thing is that I personally really love when friends contact friends to help make their game. Chances are if you work in game dev you have some talented friends. Whether it’s through promotion or payment consider seeing if people in your circle want to work on your game, they will often appreciate the opportunity.

Goblinz Publishing Marketing Strategies

Outside of a handful of reddit posts, Mirko had little involvement in marketing Shogun Showdown. So naturally we’re going to be taking a look at the strategies used by Goblinz publishing to market his game.

Ongoing Marketing Efforts

Social Media
Goblinz regularly posts about all of their games across their social media accounts. I highly recommend checking out their Twitter account for some inspiration on what to post about your own game.

Bundles and Cross promotion
One of the huge advantages of working with a publisher is their ability to put your game in front of fresh eyes through bundles and cross promotions with their other games. This is especially relevant for publishers that focus on a niche genre. Goblinz focuses on publishing simulation and strategy games. By using bundles and cross promotions with other Goblinz’s games, Shogun Showdown was shown directly to gamers who played similar games.

Leading up to Early Access

Itch.io
Shogun Showdown started on itch.io before landing a publisher and getting a Steam page. Hosting your game on itch.io is one of the best ways to get low risk early feedback on your game. Users on itch are very used to playing games in a prototype or alpha stage, where as users on Steam expect a bit more polish regardless of the game being a demo, prologue, playtest, beta, etc. I would encourage most devs to consider putting an alpha version of their game on itch to start collecting early feedback. Alternatively you can use itch.io to host your demo while you continue to improve it before officially releasing your demo on Steam.

The Prologue Strategy
If you’ve never heard of the prologue strategy it’s basically where you take a small slice of your main game and create a brand new steam page for it and market it as the “prologue” for your main game. You then heavily push players from the prologue to wishlist your main game by including a CTA to wishlist in the main menu or other prominent areas. But wait isn’t that just a demo? Not quite. Since a prologue features it’s own steam page it is effectively treated as an entirely new game by Steam. This means it gets all of the algorithm benefits such as potentially getting featured on popular upcoming and a boost upon release. Meanwhile it was impossible for a demo to be featured on the front page of steam in any form.

Okay now forget everything I just said about prologues and demos, because as of a month ago, Steam updated how Demos work making the prologue strategy redundant. Demos can now have their own Steam Page where players can leave reviews and your demo can be featured in popular upcoming on the front page of Steam.

I asked Mirko if he would still do the prologue strategy after the recent demo changes and he stated that he would most likely just stick with a demo as there’s no longer much reason to do a prologue and it’s also a lot more work to put together.

Demo
Shogun Showdown published a demo right before it’s early access release. Interestingly, the demo is still playable now even after the 1.0 release. There’s a long list of great reasons to have a demo, a big one being that many Steam festivals require having a demo for participation. However, how long you should keep up a demo depends on your game and/or marketing strategy. If your demo is designed to leave players wanting more it’s probably a good idea to keep it up, meanwhile if players get their fill during the demo they may be less inclined to purchase. Tiny Glade opened their demo for a very short window during Steam Next for this exact reason. After seeing that players were spending dozens of hours in the demo they knew there was a risk that players could get creatively tapped out and not be as interested in buying the full game when it released.

Enter Publisher #2: Gamera Games
2 publishers!? This is commonly done when it’s hard for you or your current publisher to reach difficult to access markets such as China or Japan. Gamera Games was brought on board to help market Shogun Showdown to Chinese players. Based off the number of reviews from China in the graph below, i’d say they did a decent job!

Steam Next Fest/ Early Access Release
The last major marketing effort made before releasing into EA was Steam Next Fest! Steam Next Fest is the one festival that absolutely every game releasing on Steam should join before their EA or 1.0 release.

Shogun Showdown announced it’s EA date in combination with its Steam Next Fest announcement. This has the nice benefit of new players knowing that the full playable game is coming soon thus increasing the chance they try your demo and wishlist. The marketing push by Goblinz when announcing the EA release date also helped their wishlist velocity ahead of Steam Next Fest! A very important metric in deciding if Steam shows you on the front page of Next Fest. However a potential down side to this release timing is that a lot of games release shortly after Steam Next Fest so you may face more competition than normal in trying to get to get those coveted spots on the front page of Steam.

So what was the marketing push done by Goblinz for the EA announcement? They ran a few ads and posted on social media but the core of their strategy was utilizing content creators (specifically youtubers). Some of the creators were sponsored but many of them were not. Northern lion for example picked it up for free and has since made 4 videos on Shogun Shown! Ideally you can get content creators to cover your game for free by showing why their audience we’ll love it, but doing some sponsored can be a great way to get it on the radar of other creators especially if they see that audiences are responding well to the game.

Pro Tip: Once you have someone like Northern Lion or Retromation pick up your game you can link that video in your out reach email to other creators or even games press as evidence your game is worth checking out! You need to word this right but you get the idea.

Road to 1.0

Roadmap Release
Shortly after the EA release a roadmap for the game was published. Publishing a roadmap alongside your EA release is always a great idea since it will either get players excited for the future or explain what’s missing from the game. A roadmap could change the review of a player who thinks your game has too little content or is missing X.

Turn based Carnival
In November 2023 they participated in the turn based carnival Steam event. I won’t harp on this too much here because it’s fairly obvious but you should be joining as many relevant steam events as possible. They’re a great way to get in front of your target audience.

Released their demo on console
During my interview with Mirko he mentioned that they decided to create a store page on console and release a demo on switch to see if wishlists were worth pursuing on those platforms. While they are of course useful we both agreed that it’s far less common to wishlists on those platforms. Either way the more platforms you can be on the better! It also helps that Shogun Showdown seems like a game that would be great on Switch. Given the limited input needed to play the game I for one plan on getting it on Switch over PC.

1.0 Release

Shogun Showdown officially released into 1.0 on September 5th. Since their release they have sold an additional 19,000 copies and also had a huge jump in wishlists from 186K wishlists on Sep 5 to 266K on September 18th. As of September 18th the estimated gross revenue is just over $1 million and that’s only the sales on Steam!

Multi Platform Release
While early access was only on PC the 1.0 release brought the game to Switch, Xbox, and Playstation. Mirko actually ported the game to switch himself, but worked with a 3rd party for the port to Xbox and PlayStation. An interesting insight Mirko shared during our interview was that once you do a port for one console it becomes much easier to do the rest. Odds are that if he had to do something unique for the switch that same thing needed to be tweaked for Xbox and Playstation.

Working with a Publisher

Mirko’s experience with Goblinz Publishing

Revenue Split
I didn’t ask for details, but Mirko described his split with Goblinz Publishing as the “usual split”. Even with the best publisher in the world the unavoidable con is the loss in revenue that you split with them. However, in Mirko’s words he’d “rather have X percent of a big pie rather than 100 percent of a small pie”. Considering Shogun Showdown has made around 1 Million (USD) in gross revenue on Steam alone, I think it’s safe to say that Mirko is happy with his slice of the pie.

Publisher Involvement
We’ve all heard the horror stories of devs signing with a publisher only for them to pressure or bully them into making various decisions that are not what the developer had in mind. Mirko’s experience with Goblinz Publishing was a refreshing look at what a healthy relationship with a publisher looks like. Mirko was happy to let them take care of everything related to marketing, but even so they made sure to run everything by him and get his opinion on it before continuing.

They also never requested or suggested any game design elements. He was completely independent in that regard. He mentioned that people often had ideas but it was often from the lens of “wouldn’t it be cool if we did x or y”. It was always from the perspective of a fellow gamer and not pressuring him to do something.

Should you work with a publisher?

Here’s a quick and dirty list of the pros and cons, followed by some extra thoughts on if your thinking about getting a publisher.

• Pros

  • You don’t have to deal with marketing and can solely focus on developing your game.

  • Funding

    • Publishers often, but not always, come with funding. It’s common for the revenue split in their favor to scale with the amount of upfront funding given.

    • You can also find an investor if your seeking funding, however investors usually invest in the company while publishers invest in the game.

    • In most cases you will be going for a publisher especially as a solo dev. Investment usually only makes sense at a small studio level and/or if your working on live service games. A great example of this are former Riot devs turned new studio like Odyssey interactive and Theorycraft games.

  • Increased visibility (potentially). More on this below

• Cons

  • Split revenue with Publisher.

  • Potentially predatory contracts and behavior

    • Unfair revenue share

    • Heavy pressure to change your game design

My very boring answer on if you should consider a publisher is….it depends. It’s worth looking into if you are in the following situations:

Don’t have time or want to do marketing and are willing to give up revenue for someone else to take care of it.
Ideally you should make marketing a priority and do it yourself. But look i get it. My full time job is doing marketing for the games my studio is developing and I still always feel like i’m not doing enough. However the reality is you really only “need” to hit a few key marketing beats (Steam Festivals, Demo release, Launch, contact press & content creators, etc). Outside of preparing for these key marketing beats, dedicating one day a week to marketing is often enough. However if you absolutely despise marketing for whatever reason, then sure maybe it’s worth the loss in revenue to have a publisher to take it off your hands.

Need funding
Indie games are very often bootstrapped. Besides some minor expenses here and there like setting up a page on Steam, paying for premade assets, and software licenses you really don’t need much money to make a game. Technically speaking the only thing you have to pay for is a $100 fee to publish your game on Steam.

Funding is most relevant for game devs looking to leave their 9-5 and do full time game development or small studios who could use the funding for marketing or hiring for a specific skill set. If your a solo dev or small team who are making their game in their free time while still retaining full time jobs, you probably don’t need funding.

Final Thoughts

Once conclusion I hope you don’t draw is that the secret to success here was “they had a publisher”. Not only can you have a publisher and still completely flop but the large majority of what the publisher does can be done by you.

Look at everything Goblinz did for Shogun Showdown and you’ll discover that it’s all things you could do yourself, given you had the time. The main visibility advantage that a publisher brings that you probably can’t do yourself is quickly accessing a built up and relevant audience. For example any strategy game that signs with hooded horse ( a publisher specializing in strategy games) instantly get’s their games put in front of fans of strategy games.

A huge thank you to Mirko for sitting down with me and having a chat about his game and a massive congrats on a successful 1.0 launch!

See you next week ✌️

Now that we’re three case studies deep, I wanted to take a moment to look back and see what actionable insights we can gather. This blog dives into the marketing tactics that propelled these games to success!

Dramatically Oversimplified Marketing Strategy For Each Game

• Tiny Glade: Leveraged consistent early content sharing, community engagement, and UGC to build a massive following.

• Tactical Breach Wizards: Combined regular dev logs with a strategic use of betas and humor-driven marketing to cultivate a dedicated audience.

• Yes, Your Grace: Leveraged there existing fanbase, betas, and festival participation to drive visibility and sustain momentum.

Key takeaways

1. Know Your Target Audience and Positioning

2. Market Early & Consistently

3. Utilize Email Newsletters

4. Strategically Use Betas, Playtests, and Demos

5. Combine Game Festivals With Important Updates

The above takeaways are specifically from the strategies used by Tiny Glade, Tactical Breach Wizards, and Yes, Your Grace. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list of marketing strategies and each takeaway will not apply to every game, but I can almost guarantee there will be a useful marketing strategy to copy here.

Knowing Your Target Audience & Positioning

Tiny Glade: The developers of Tiny Glade honed in on the “cozy gamer” niche -players who enjoy low-stress, creative experiences, and everything cute & cozy! They identified this audience early on, tailoring their game’s design, visuals, and marketing messages to appeal directly to this group.

• The devs behind Tiny Glade cleverly used social media to identify potential issues with their positioning. Comments on their social media revealed that due to the presence of castles, many players incorrectly assumed Tiny Glade was a tower defense game.

• Social media is a great place to test messaging and see what works best with your audience. Armed with this knowledge you can optimize your Steam page and other places players land (website, etc).

Yes, Your Grace Snowfall: For Yes, Your Grace Snowfall, the developers tapped into a well-defined audience that enjoys narrative-driven, medieval-themed strategy games. They understood that their target players were those who loved intricate storytelling combined with strategic gameplay. Fans of pixel art were also a prime target!

Tactical Breach Wizards: The developers knew their game would appeal to fans of tactical strategy games with a narrative twist, particularly those who appreciated humor and unique gameplay mechanics (such as optimizing throwing people through windows).

Analysis
Each of these games deeply understood their target audience. By knowing who they were making the game for, the developers could tailor every aspect of their marketing to appeal directly to these players. This not only influenced how they communicated their game’s value but also shaped the design and development of the game itself!

Actionable Takeaway

Identifying your target audience is one of the first and most crucial steps in any marketing strategy. Start by researching similar games and their communities. Who are the players? What are their preferences? Where do they spend their time online? Use this information to guide your game design and marketing efforts. Remember, the more specific your understanding of your audience, the more effectively you can tailor your game and messaging to resonate with them.

This topic deserves it’s own post so I won’t go to into it now but the best way to get started is always research. I highly recommend starting by looking at what other games around you are doing. Here’s a grossly oversimplified guide on researching how your competition is talking to their audience:

1. Create a list of 10 similar games to yours (competitors).

   1. Make sure to not only include the famous successful games in your space but also the games that performed “okay” as well as the ones that flopped.

2. For each game do a small case study on their marketing.

   1. Look at their social media, Steam Page, Subreddit, Website, Games Press, Influencer coverage, Publisher, etc.

   2. How are they talking about their game?

      1. What features are they highlighting?

      2. What language are they using? I’m not talking English vs Spanish here, more Rougelite vs Rougelike.

      3. Where are they talking to their audience?

   3. How are people reacting to it?

      1. Do the comments seem positive?

      2. Do the reviews indicate players got what they expected through the marketing?

      3. Are people clearly understanding their game?

      4. Can you identify who it does and does not appeal to based off the comments?

      5. Are they drawing comparisons to other games. Ex. “Valorant copy”, “COD Killer”.

   4. Are there elements in the game itself that make it more marketable? Such as Tiny Glade being UGC machine.

3. Identify patterns in the successful games vs the unsuccessful games.

   1. Make note and replicate the successful patterns.

Market Early & Consistently

Tiny Glade: From the earliest stages of development, Tiny Glade’s developers were active on social media, sharing work in progress updates and engaging with their audience. This consistent communication helped build a loyal following long before the game was ready for release or even had a name!

Yes, Your Grace Snowfall: Used social media to echo important updates and participation in game festivals.

Tactical Breach Wizards: Regular updates and in depth devlogs were central to Tactical Breach Wizards' strategy. By consistently sharing development progress and engaging with their audience, they kept interest high over the long development cycle.

Analysis:
In most cases, the sooner you can start and the more consistent you can be the better. This becomes less necessary the bigger your game is. If it’s your first game and you have no established audience, your starting from ground zero and need to build your audience. Start your marketing efforts early to build anticipation and a community around your game. Consistent updates, even small ones, keep your audience engaged and invested in your project. This ongoing communication helps build trust and keeps your game in the minds of potential players.

If you have an existing audience from previous successful games, then you can afford to wait until the game is further along in development to announce and have longer time between marketing beats.

Apply this advice to your own game, there are always unique situations. For example if your like Fuzzy Bot and you have significant investment backing you. You can afford to develop most of your game in secret and drop the trailer for your first game at Gamescom with zero marketing until that point.

Actionable Takeaway:
Begin marketing your game as early as possible. Use whatever social media makes sense for your game. Solo dev? Try devlogs on Youtube. Have a dedicated marketer? Try frequent updates on all major social media platforms. Familiar with Twitter but not much else? Start sharing updates there. It doesn’t have to be polished content; behind-the-scenes looks, development challenges, funny bugs, and even small wins can all be part of your updates. The goal is to maintain a consistent presence and keep your audience excited about the game’s progress.

Consistently posting content about your game is great but the core of your go to market plan for your game should be made of a series of known marketing beats that you go all out for. These are often things like: announcement trailer, gameplay reveal, playtest, demo drop, EA launch, 1.0 release, etc. Around these core beats you’ll want to prepare content well ahead of time and strategize how best to get maximum exposure during them. Perhaps you drop your announcement trailer during a related gameshow or give streamers keys to give their audience to your closed playtest. This is where the hard (fun) part of marketing comes in!

If you need inspiration on how to handle these marketing beats reference what your competitors have done. Or you know, just read my blog and i’ll do the research for you :).

The Under Appreciated Power of Email Newsletters

Tiny Glade: Without a Steam page or even a name, Tiny Glade’s developers smartly used email newsletters to capture and nurture interest. This ensured that they could keep potential players informed and engaged, converting this interest into wishlists when the game finally had a Steam page.

Yes, Your Grace Snowfall: Utilizes one newsletter for their previous game and their in development sequel since it has the same target audience.

Tactical Breach Wizards: The developers consistently used email newsletters to keep their audience updated and announce important milestones. This regular communication helped maintain momentum and keep their community engaged over a long development period.

• Tactical Breach Wizards cleverly encouraged newsletter signups by only giving out beta keys through their newsletter.

Analysis:
Email newsletters are an often-underutilized tool in indie game marketing. They allow you to communicate directly with your most engaged fans, providing updates, exclusive content, and early access opportunities. This direct line of communication can be invaluable for maintaining interest over time and ensuring your audience is ready to support your game at launch. Personally, I would rather have 10,000 subscribers to my newsletter than wishlists. But hey why not both.

Actionable Takeaway:

Set up an email newsletter early in your game’s development. Use it to capture the interest of players who discover your game, and keep them engaged with regular updates. Make sure to put effort into your newsletter with theming and messaging that matches your game and target audience. Offer exclusive content and early access to betas to keep subscribers invested. Make sure to not spam! In most cases it’s probably a good idea to not email more than once a month.

Strategic use of Beta, Demos, and Playtests

Tiny Glade: The developers used early playtests to gather feedback and build anticipation. By involving their community early on, they were able to refine the game and keep interest high. These early playtesters were later used to test and improve their demo ahead of Steam Next Fest.

Yes, Your Grace Snowfall: Participation in festivals combined with new betas provided nice marketing beats driving interest in Yes, Your Grace.

Tactical Breach Wizards: Ran multiple closed betas with the only access to keys locked behind signing up for their newsletter.

Analysis:
Betas, demos, and playtests serve a dual purpose—they’re invaluable for gathering feedback and improving your game, but they’re also powerful marketing tools. By giving players a taste of what’s to come, you can build anticipation and get players involved in your game’s development.

There’s a lot of ways you can use betas, demos, and playtests creatively depending on your goals. However there is one thing every dev should use them for - testing your demo ahead of Steam Next Fest! Running a playtest of your demo build months ahead of next fest ensures you have ample time to iron out bugs and improve it.

Actionable Takeaway:
Consider how you might be able to use betas, demos, or playtests strategically. Consider timing them around festivals, using them to increase newsletter signups, or testing specific updates and features. Use these opportunities to not only refine your game but also to build hype and encourage wishlisting. Make sure to gather feedback and show your community that you’re listening and making improvements based on their input. Don’t just say “thanks for the feedback” actually show them how you changed something based on their feedback.

Combine Game Festivals With Important Updates

Tiny Glade: The developers strategically aligned important announcements with major game festivals such as officially announcing their game during Wholesome Snack.

Yes, Your Grace Snowfall: Hosted their own steam event, Pixelated Adventures, and paired beta releases and demo updates with participating in numerous Steam events.

Tactical Breach Wizards: Dominated Steam Next Fest with one of the most played demos earning 108K wishlists.

Analysis:
Game festivals and major updates to your game are both great marketing opportunities. By combining a major update to your game with the reach of a game festival you can significantly amplify your marketing efforts. These events often provide rare opportunities to showcase your game directly to your target audience audience, leading to significant increases in visibility and wishlists.

Actionable Takeaway:
Research and participate in game festivals that align with your target audience. Plan significant announcements around these events to take advantage of the increased visibility they offer. These announcements include things like a demo release, demo update, new trailer, announcement date, etc. Consider offering exclusive content or demos during these times to further incentivize engagement.

Most OP Strategies

A large motivation behind creating this blog was to discover clever marketing strategies that other game studios are using and steal share them. I’ve only done 3 case studies so far and have already found some OP strategies worth highlighting:

1. Exclusively delivering beta keys through newsletter signups.

   1. This one tops the list due to its effectiveness in increasing newsletter signups, which are super valuable!

2. Locking final part of a beta/demo/playtest behind a feedback form.

   1. If you’ve every conducted a playtest of any sort than you know that even when people enjoy your game it is incredibly hard to get people to care enough to leave meaningful feedback.

   2. This is a really clever way to simultaneously incentivize feedback and make sure that those giving feedback have played a significant portion of your game.

3. Use social media as a testing ground for positioning and messaging.

   1. An underutilized usage of social media that I wish every game dev did!

4. Giving unique gifts for finishing the demo or buying during release week.

   1. While offer users an in game reward for doing something is not a revolutionary strategy, using that to motivating finishing your demo or buying during release week is a fantastic idea! This might be just enough to push you from “maybe ill wait to buy it on sale later” to “oh man I was already gonna buy it later but if I buy it now I get a unique weapon, say less here’s my money”.

5. Combining important updates with game festivals

   1. Important updates area always nice marketing beats but if you don’t already have a significant following you may make your important announcement only for no one to care. By combining it with a game related festival such as Steam events, gamescom, wholesome snack, next fest, etc you amplify your reach while also talking to your target audience in most cases.

Final Thoughts

From understanding your audience and starting your marketing early, to leveraging email newsletters and engaging with your community, these strategies are designed to help you build anticipation and drive interest in your game. Remember, successful marketing is about persistence, creativity, and a deep understanding of your audience.

Your game deserves to be seen, and with the right strategy, it will be. See you next week ✌️

Tactical Breach Wizards, the latest title from game journalist turned indie developer Tom Francis, exemplifies how humor, passion, and throwing people through windows (more on this in a moment) can capture the hearts of gamers and drive significant wishlist growth. Today we explore how Tactical Breach Wizards built a dedicated following, drove wishlist velocity, and ultimately set itself up for a successful launch.

The Defenestration Trilogy

Tactical Breach Wizards is the third title in what has come to be known as the “defenestration trilogy”. No need to feel ashamed , I had to google that one too. The defenestration trilogy is a thematic series of strategy games that share a common blend of tactical gameplay, humorous narrative elements, and of course throwing people through windows. The trilogy includes:

1. Gunpoint (2013): A stealth puzzle game that lets you rewire its levels to trick people. You play a freelance spy who takes jobs from his clients to break into high security buildings and steal sensitive data.

2. Heat Signature (2017): A top-down action game set in space. Players take on the role of mercenaries who infiltrate enemy spaceships using a combination of stealth, combat, and gadgetry.

3. Tactical Breach Wizards (2024): A turn-based tactical game where players control a team of wizards equipped with modern tactical gear. The game features a mix of spell-casting, tactical combat, and a storyline filled with conspiracies and humorous undertones.

This blog will purely focus on Tactical Breach Wizards, but needless to say the previous games helped their marketing efforts.

Tom Francis: Developer/ Designer/ Writer & The Beating Heart of Tactical Breach Wizard’s Marketing

Tactical Breach Wizards was made by 3-5 devs (conflicting sources on this) that together form Suspicious Developments. With that being said CEO Tom Francis is undeniably the master mind behind the game. Game Developer wrote a great article on how Tom arrived at the idea for a game that somehow mashed together wizards with navy seals when he was a journalist at PC Gamer.

From time to time you see an indie game’s marketing that is almost entirely composed of one person’s (usually the main dev) activities. Other examples include Pirate Software, Pontypants, and Mortal Rite. Mortdog, is a rare example of a AAA version of this. This strategy usually consists of gathering a large following through devlogs, blogs, and openly developing your game in public.

For Tom this meant regularly posting devlogs and cool game dev rants on Youtube, as well as managing an active twitter and blog on his website. There’s no way around it, this takes a lot of time and effort to do, but the payoff can be substantial. If your considering doing devlogs i’d highly recommend checking out Tom’s channel. He doesn’t do fancy editing and half the time he’s just speaking his mind and always seems genuinely excited to share updates.

Marketing with A Heart: Why Tactical Breach Wizards Stands Out

Tactical Breach Wizard’s marketing excels due to its authenticity and humor.

People hate being marketed too. We’re bombarded by marketing constantly and we immediately put up a shield the second we feel like we’re being sold something. The brands & products we see consistently winning are those that manage to entice you without making you feel like your being marketed too. What’s the easiest way to do this? Humor. If you don’t believe me just check out the marketing efforts of Deadpool or The Boys for some entertaining homework.

In my case study on Tiny Glade I mentioned how all of their copy was cute and cozy matching their target audience and theming. Tactical Breach Wizards also knows it’s audience and speaks their language. The only active official online presence for Tactical Breach Wizards is it’s Twitter and Steam Page, which i’m pretty sure are both run by Tom. Every piece of content is either humorous, authentic, or both. The copy in their content matches the same humor present in their game (probably because it’s written by the same guy). As for authenticity they nail this by developing openly, sharing bugs and funny moments, sharing successes, and generally not taking themselves too seriously. Here’s a few examples:

Humorous

Authentic

Tactical Breach Wizards Launch Strategy

Finally, let’s get to what we’ve all been waiting for….some sexy data. Tactical Breach Wizards maintained wishlist momentum through promoting various betas, Tom’s marketing efforts (devlogs, tweets, etc.), and great use of Twitter. Finally they skyrocketed after launching their demo and entering next fest with tons of games press and creators covering their game.

1. Game announcement & Steam Page Launch (March 2019)

2. Closed Beta 1 (March 2020)

3. Playtest (May 2021)

4. Closed Beta 2 (June 2022)

5. Closed Beta 3 (March 2024)

6. Demo (June 2024)

7. Next Fest (June 2024)

8. Launch Time Baby 🍾(August 2024)

Game Announcement & Steam Page Launch (March 2019)

Tactical Breach Wizards was first announced in March of 2019. Tom nervously revealed it in a tweet before pushing people to the newly created official twitter account for the game. The above video was also dropped along with a steam page update with a few more details.

I would call this a “soft announcement”. I have know idea if that’s a real thing but that’s what I call it. It’s when a studio announces their game when it’s in a really early state then announces or reveals it again later with a fancy new trailer and usually at a gaming show. You can also do like Tiny Glade and market your game with no name then do a big drop with a name reveal. That works best for when you’re really early development and don’t have a steam page yet.

I also want to point out the video they announced with. Most people would go with a trailer of some sorts rather than a 10 minute long gameplay video. However, given Tom’s intimate relationship with his audience, his long history of dev logs, and the early state of the game, this was probably a smart call over a snappy 1 minute trailer.

Closed Beta 1 (March 2020)

Steam Announcement / Steam Announcement 2 / Twitter Announcement

They did an awesome job getting signups for their mailing list here. Keys were released in three stages simultaneously pushing people to their mailing list, following on steam, and following socials. So so good.

Playtest (AKA Act One Beta) (May 2021)

Steam Announcement / Twitter Announcement

This time they opted to use Steam’s playtest function. Interestingly after this they returned to doing closed betas with keys distributed through mail. Once again they pressed on FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) by stating that only 1,000 playtesters will be approved.

They with another gameplay video featuring Tom. I think this is a great alternative to making a trailer if you fit in any of the following categories:

1. You don’t know how to make a good trailer. Seriously it’s hard. Feel free to roast the trailer I made for Setback in the comments.

2. A lot of your marketing is centered around a dev’s personality.

3. The game art is still really early so a trailer may not be the way to show it off. People are way more forgiving of rough art and early gameplay if presented in a devlog style.

Closed Beta 2 (June 2022)

Steam Announcement / Twitter Announcement / Twitter Announcement 2

Significant update here is that they finally dropped a trailer that was revealed during the 2022 PC Gaming Show (probably helped he used to work at PC Gamer). So this would be the hard announcement vs the soft I mentioned above.

Following up on the first point of why you might not want to make a trailer in the section above this, they got Derek Lieu to make their trailer! If you don’t know Derek Lieu he’s basically the go to guy for indie game trailers. He actually did a break down of how he made the Tactical Breach Wizards trailer if you’re interested.

As they did for all the betas, except for the one where they utilized the playtest function, they pushed people to their newsletter to claim keys. I would assume the benefit of more newsletter signups is why they stopped using the steam playtest function.

Closed Beta 3 (March 2024)

Steam Announcement / Twitter Announcement

Once again pushed to their mailing list for keys, However a bold new feedback strategy emerges!

If you’ve ever conducted a playtest or beta than you know that getting people to play is hard, but getting people to leave feedback is much much harder. Tactical Breach Wizard’s helped get around this by blocking the final 25% of the beta behind a feedback wall. By putting it at 75% he guarantees he’s only getting feedback from people that have played long enough to give it a proper chance and are genuinely interested.

This is one of those moments where I face palmed and thought “why didn’t i think of that”. Suppose that’s why I started this blog.

Demo (June 2024)

Steam Announcement / Twitter Announcement

The June 2024 Steam Next began on June 10 so why release their demo on June 3rd?

They did address that question above using the sarcastic humor that defines their game. But why did they actually launch a week early.

1. Playtesting

2. Games Press & Content Creators

3. Wishlist Velocity

By launching your demo early you can playtest your demo and iron out any bugs or make improvements before Steam Next Fest. The last spot you want to be in is feverishly working to fix your demo right in the middle of Next Fest. This is an even bigger deal now since users can leave reviews on your demo. You can say goodbye to precious wishlists if your demo gets bad reviews during next fest due to problems you could have fixed beforehand. Scare you enough yet? Good, its tough love. You only get one shot at Next Fest so treat it seriously and prepare accordingly. To be honest you probably want to launch your demo at least a month ahead of next fest so you have proper time to fix and improve it. Tactical Breach Wizards got around this due to their numerous betas. They regularly tested the build that eventually became their demo so they were in a healthy spot, that being said they still shipped an update to their demo right before next fest.

Another reason to make your demo available early is so that games press & content creators can get their hands on it and begin covering it garnering excitement for your game ahead of next fest.

Wishlist velocity. It’s a thing. Consider the following two games.

1. Game one: 100,000 wishlists over 10 years.

2. Game two: 10,000 wishlists over 1 month.

Game 2 is likely to sell better due to wishlist velocity. Simply put a game that is racking up a lot of wishlists in a short amount of time tells Steam that their is excitement around the game. This is an extremely important factor in getting onto the Trending upcoming category during Steam Next Fest.

I think its likely that Tom knew how popular their game was so even though they could have released their demo sooner (still the best advice for most games) they knew that by doing one week ahead of time, it would increase their wishlist velocity. This bet paid off with them acquiring around 20,000 wishlists between June 6 - June 10.

Next Fest (June 2024)

Steam Announcement / Twitter Announcement

A release date trailer was dropped and once again announced at the PC gaming show. They also livestreamed with Hbomber guy where he played their full game while Tom hosted a Q&A. Hbomber guy has 1.72M youtube subscribers, so this was a huge win.

Their Next Fest formula was as follows

1. Drop demo a week out

   1. Get it in the hands of Games Press & Creators

   2. Test and improve Demo

   3. Improve wishlist velocity

2. Live Stream with popular game creator who genuinely loved their game

3. Drop release date trailer (August 22nd btw)

The result? 108K wishlists. More wishlists earned in a week than the large majority of indie games get before release.

Launch Time Baby 🍾(August 2024)

Its currently August 21st as i’m writing this so Tactical Breach Wizards should be releasing in a handful of hours. I can see them sitting comfortable in the popular upcoming section ( no surprise there) so i’m sure their launch will go stellar. I’m gonna return to Tactical Breach Wizards in about month to see how their doing sales wise and what marketing efforts they put in post launch, so make sure to subscribe to check that out!

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Recommended Readings

The state of games publishing: "The era of the generalist indie publisher is over": An informative look into how the publishing landscape is changing.

Signing with a Publisher in 2024: Lessons learned from my year-long negotiation process as a solo indie game developer: Some more great insight into working with a publisher from an indie dev.

On Perennial Sellers - games just keep selling, years after release: A fantastic read that points out the under appreciated importance of reviews per week as a success metric.

What is wishlist velocity and is it a better indicator of success: A great article on wishlist velocity by Chris.

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Yes, Your Grace’s Humble Beginnings

In an ideal world I’d have a full breakdown of their first game Yes, Your Grace before making this blog, but I only have so much time and I prefer to focus on games released in the last few years or close to release. So instead of a full blog here’s a few quick facts:

• Yes, Your Grace was developed by only 4 people and was partially funded by a successful Kickstarter

• Published by No More Robots

• According to the devs, they had around 50,000 wishlists at launch (Spoiler Alert: they got that same number only 4 weeks after announcing their sequel!)

Social Media

The reality is that only a very small percentage of indie games take off through social media. It’s best viewed as one tool of many in your indie marketing arsenal. Don’t get me wrong, you absolutely can pop off on social media (see Mortal Rite), but betting on “going viral” is a risky strategy I wouldn’t recommend. Rather than strictly treating social media as a tool to get more eyes on your game, it should be used as a testing ground for targeting and talking to your target audience. It only takes a few consistent comments to identify if your messaging is right or if there’s confusion around your game’s marketing. I went into more detail on this in the Tiny Glade blog if your curious.

While they have a few social media accounts, the only one they’re consistently active on is Twitter. Their twitter content is definitely worth checking out. The content is thematically appropriate for their audience and they utilize it well for important events and announcements. They also garnered a lot of good will with players and other devs by regularly reposting updates from other indie games. This has the added benefit of exposing them to more people in their target audience since they often reposted games with similar art styles and target audiences as theirs. I’ll highlight strategies used on their twitter in the latter sections but the main take away here is that you should absolutely use social media. If that stresses you out, pick the one your the most familiar with and roll with it.

Although it’s not technically social media they did a great job posting regular updates on their Steam page and Discord. It’s worth checking out as well! They also have a simple but top notch website with a fantastic Press Kit.

Events & Festivals

As you can see from their Wishlist spikes, Snowfall’s marketing success primarily revolves around events, festivals, and timely announcements. We’ll work our way through the timeline and see what they did to excel during each spike. While joining events is hardly a groundbreaking marketing strategy, they are getting 6 figure wishlists so they must be doing something different that’s worth looking into.

June 2023: Summer Game Fest

Yes, Your Grace: Snowfall was officially revealed during the Summer Game Fest on June 8, 2023. One month later and they were already at 50,000 wishlists. If at all possible you should always try to announce your game during a gaming showcase (festival, event, etc). If it’s an exclusive event, the reach you can get is insane. Not only do thousands tune into watch the showcase but games press and creators are always eager to make content covering the newest games announced during them. So you instantly get in front of TONS of eyes, which is a lot better than making a simple social media post about your new game and hoping you’ll go viral.

This doesn’t mean you have to wait to market your game until it’s announced. You can do like Tiny Glade and market the game early without an official name, then officially announce it during a showcase! Alternatively you can drop news of your Demo (especially with recent changes to demos on Steam), EA, or full release if your game is already announced. In a perfect world every one of these marketing beats happens as part of a gaming showcase or festival.

How do you get accepted into a relevant gaming showcase? Exclusivity & Relevancy! Offering an exclusive announcement will always help your chances of getting accepted. Some showcases our also very specific, such as Wholesome Direct, by showing how your game is relevant to their target audience you will drastically boost your chances of acceptance.

November 2023: Closed Beta

The first big wishlist spike for Snowfall was their sudden announcement and release of their closed beta. Check out the numbers:

After announcing the beta, their daily wishlists jumped into the triple digits, then onto the thousands after the beta started! As you can see from the numbers it lead to a nice tail as well. To promote it they

• Posted on Twitter, Reddit and Discord

• Notified Steam Followers (Around 4,000 at that time)

• Allowed Streaming and Content Creation

• Picked up by a handful of small games press sites

They also excelled at making players feel heard. Every indie game that holds a playtest or beta will say something along the lines of “play an active role in our games development”. There’s nothing wrong with this but the large majority of devs say that then follow up with a simple “thanks for the feedback, you guys rock” and that’s it. Check out what Snowfall did instead:

This a fantastic example of actually getting your players involved in development and making sure they feel heard and appreciated. A nice bonus of this strategy is it leads to engagement from your players as they discuss what they do and don’t agree with on with fellow testers.

Btw believe it or not they actually listened to their players and made the exact changes they asked for such as “bring Audry back” and the “Missing character speech sound”. If you play the demo you’ll immediately recognize why they wanted that sound back, it’s hilariously fun.

Finally its worth pointing out a sneaky marketing tactic around time limited demos or betas inspired by them. Their beta was only supposed to last a single weekend but they extended it to 10 days due to “popular demand”.

This creates FOMO (fear of missing out) and overall gives the impression your game is killing it. It may be a sneaky marketing tactic to internally plan for an “encore” of sorts. Pretend the beta/playtest/demo ends at X date than pleasantly surprise your players that your extending access due to “popular demand” even if in reality the demand was within in expected range. If you try this out let me know how it goes :) . If it backfires, you didn’t read that here.

February 2024: The Storytellers Festival, Debug awards, Yes, Your Grace Mobile Release

This was a smaller spike so I won’t spend too much time here but the following events combined to give a nice spike:

• The Storytellers Festival

• Debug Indie Game Awards

• Yes, Your Grace Mobile Release

  • An interesting note here: They basically created a mock demo on mobile by allowing users to download and play the beginning for free, before blocking the full game behind a one-time in-app purchase.

May 2024: Demo Announcement & Release

Following the same rapid announcement and release strategy as their closed beta, the demo was announced May 7th and dropped on May 9th. I’m curious to know if this works better than announcing a month or week in advance. My assumption is that this rapid announce then drop strategy is probably smarter for AAA studios (looking at you Apex Legends 👀), indie studios wish established audiences from previous games, or new games that are already popular. If you don’t fit in that category it may be smarter to take some time teasing and promoting to build more hype.

Similar to the closed beta, wishlists peaked over the weekend but still gave a nice tail even after the spike dropped. As far as I can find (please correct me in the comments) they didn’t drop their demo next to any events or festivals. However, their fans on Discord and social media happily ate up the news!

One really creative thing they did that anyone making a sequel should borrow from is releasing a recap video. This simultaneously refreshes your returning players and catches up new players who won’t bother playing the first game. A very smart choice to drop next to their first public demo.

July 2024: Hosted Pixelated Adventures

In July Brave At Night hosted their own steam event : Pixelated Adventures. This one truly is an OP marketing strategy.

This event resulted in over 20,000 wishlists gained for Shadowfall! Hosting a curated event on Steam not only brings a lot of attention it also gives you a platform to connect and support other games in the same space. This is truly an everyone wins strategy. Each game involved exposes their audience too each other leading to players in your target audience easily discovering you. Btw if your wondering how you can host one of these events, reach out to Steam! I reached out to them regarding hosting an event and they were very helpful in explaining what they look for when accepting new events. The more you can show why it’s good for Steam and their players the more likely it is to get accepted!

Brave at Night handled this event masterfully.

• The website was clear with helpful links

• They had a notion page early on with helpful info for interested games

• They hosted a Reddit AMA, an art contest, and created a Discord just for the event

• A mailing list at the bottom captured the huge influx of traffic brought in by this event

• Provided a direct line to the organizers for interested creators and journalists

They recruited other indies by posting in the spaces they live in like relevant subreddits and were even shared on the HTMAG Discord!

Finally they had two tactics that anyone can replicate, not just the ones hosting the event. 1. An updated demo 2. UGC

Brave at Night announced an updated demo next to their participation in the Pixelated Festival. This is a great way to bring back returning players (making them more likely to purchase on release) and show that your listening to their feedback! If you know of specific complaints in the last build that you improved in this demo make sure to highlight those in your announcement

UGC stands for User Generated Content. It’s a catch all phrase for anytime your community, customers, players, etc create content about your product. In my last blog I mentioned how the Tiny Glade Twitter account went crazy reposting the creations that their players made in their game. They had over 600 tweets in June! The Brave at Night twitter account did a very similar thing, except since they were hosts of the Pixelated Adventures event, any games posting about the event were essentially UGC for them. They retweeted tons of other studios talking about their participation in the festival leading to even more visibility and garnering lots of good will.

If you read the above chart carefully you’ll notice they actually had 2 days with negative wishlist numbers. August 3rd: -1,214, August 4th: -168. So what gives? Why are they getting negative numbers while killing it during their own event. It actually has nothing to do with the Pixelated Adventures event and everything to do with other large steam sales in August such as the Steam Fighting Games Fest and Tower Defense Fest. During large sales like this players purge their wishlists. It’s a completely normal phenomenon that happens to every game on Steam no matter the quality, so don’t sweat it.

August 2024: Tiny Teams & Delay Announcement

The final spike overlaps with the Tiny Teams festival that is still happening at the time of writing. Other updates in August include:

• Offering an exclusive build to games press at Gamescom

  • Smart move!

• Won the Indie Cup Europe Rising Star Award!

• Delayed the release of their game to Q1 2025

  • These things happen and they’ve handled it well. The general vibe I can see from their audience was that they were happy to wait if it meant they get a better more complete game.

Target Audience

I recently posted on Reddit asking indie devs what marketing challenges they had and what they wanted to learn about. A common answer was learning how to better identify and target their audience. This is definitely deserving of it’s own post but for now i’ll try to touch on this for each game we cover. So onto Yes Your Grace, Snowfall!

A red flag that you may not know who or how to talk to your target audience is if you aren’t able to sufficiently explain what your game is in one or two sentences. A common strategy for this is to consider your positioning next to other games. In a recent Push to Talk blog post, Ryan highlighted how Aggro Crab described Another Crab’s Treasure as “Dark Souls meets Spongebob Squarepants”. It only takes one peak at their Steam trailer to see how accurate that is. This is a perfect example of understanding your positioning.

Much like how Aggro Crab described Another Crab's Treasure in relatable, clever phrases, Brave at Night consistently described Yes, Your Grace: Snowfall as a blend of rich storytelling and strategic gameplay, deeply rooted in medieval/slavic mythology. This clarity in messaging helped players immediately understand the game’s essence, making it easier for them to know if they’re interested and recommend it to others.

Once you can identify that short descriptor you can use that as your compass on where to find your target audience. Brave at Night knows that their game appeals to fans of narrative-driven, strategy-based games with a medieval theme. Have a browse through their Twitter or Steam page updates to see how they leaned into this niche.

Published to Publisher

Brave At Night started out as a 4 man crew that had their first game partially funded by Kickstarter and published by No More Robots. They have since grown to 8 people and their first game has gone from 1.4 million (USD) in gross revenue in March 2020 to just just shy of 4 million in August 2024. Not bad for an indie team! 🤘

You might be wondering how a tiny indie studio became a publisher? Me too! Thankfully, Game World Observer already asked them:

Game Developer: Ultimately, the game was published by Brave at Night. A lot of devs I talked to say how they always carefully study a publisher’s portfolio before signing with them. Brave at Night had previously published zero games. In fact, they are a development studio, whose only game Yes, Your Grace was published by No More Robots. How did you hook up with them? Were you concerned about the lack of the publishing experience on their part?

We had our demo, and were out looking for a small or medium-sized publisher that wanted to publish a small niche game. We needed money to cover half of the production cost. One day, I retweeted Yes, Your Grace, as I thought it looked like my kind of game, and when I checked my inbox, Brave At Night had contacted me! Their game is similar to Mind Scanners and seeing how well it was received, I thought, hey let’s try this publisher. The good thing about Mind Scanners being their first published title is that we didn’t need to worry about them focusing on other titles and forgetting about us, something I’ve heard can happen with bigger publishers. It turned out to be the best collaboration, and they have done a great job in marketing Mind Scanners at a low cost.

Cross Platform

Yes, Your Grace is available on PC, Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and even mobile. It seems likely Brave At Night will take the same route and release on as many platforms as possible. Its obvious being on more platforms is more potential customers and visibility, but in most cases it does take significant resources that you may not have. Brave at Night managed this by

1. Focusing on developing for PC, while third parties ported their game to other platforms

2. Releasing in waves instead of all at once.

   1. PC (Steam and GOG): Released on March 2020

   2. Xbox One: Released on June 2020

   3. Nintendo Switch: Released on June 2020

   4. PlayStation 4: Released on January 2021

   5. Mobile (iOS and Android): Released on February 2024

This allowed Brave at Night to focus their resources on developing Yes, Your Grace, Snowfall after the release of their first game, while also getting a nice marketing beat during every release increasing sales of their first game and creating more future customers for their sequel.

Final Thoughts

The story of Yes, Your Grace: Snowfall is a refreshing departure from the idea that success in the gaming industry requires a massive budget or viral fame. Brave at Night’s ability to maintain momentum through smart use of festivals, timely announcements, and community involvement highlights the importance of aligning your marketing strategy with your game’s design and audience.

See you next week!

Recommended Readings

What Steam’s big demo update means for your marketing strategy: Chris from HTMAG wrote a great article that should help you find your footing with the new Demo rules.

Go-To-Market Breakdown: Another Crab's Treasure: An awesome break down of an indie game we can all learn from!

Game Development is Series of Rolling the Dice: A highly enjoyable read as a DnD fan with some helpful insights into game development and marketing!

Steam Updates

Changes Coming to Steam Store Page Written Descriptions: Big update from valve on what your allowed to have in your store page descriptions. A must read if you have a store page. The main take aways:

• No links to other websites

• No embedded imagery that mimics Steam store UI or buttons

• No images, links, or widgets pointing to other games on Steam

Update to User Reviews: New Helpfulness System: Updates on how user reviews are sorted.

Steam Added a “Trending Free” Tab

Introduction

Promoting your indie game can be pretty intimidating. Between the massive resources of AAA studios and the thousands of games released every year it’s easy to feel like your humble indie game has no chance of being noticed. Yet, Tiny Glade, a charming castle-building sandbox game developed by only 2 full time devs (and 2 part time), has managed to achieve what many indie developers can only dream of – over 1 million wishlists on Steam without spending a dime on paid marketing. So how did they do it? Well Ana, one of the two devs, wrote up a super informative Twitter thread on how they managed to gather 257,387 wishlists only 3 months after announcing Tiny Glade. I highly recommend giving it a read when you have time. She kicked off the thread by stating “I'm NOT a marketing expert or anything like that so I'm simply going to share what we did, to hopefully provide a useful data point for others” and ended with “I worry that it reads that one thing neatly led to another. It's easy to reconstruct a tidy story post-factum, but in reality it was a combo of an iterative process AND factors outside of our control”. This thread perfectly encapsulates why I love indie game development. You can clearly tell that Ana is just a fellow indie dev who somehow nailed this whole marketing thing and is eager to help others. That thread was written in early 2023, but spoiler alert they’re still killing it in the marketing department. In this blog post, we’ll do a deep dive into the marketing strategies behind Tiny Glade’s rise to indie stardom so that you can apply them to your own game. If 2 devs with no budget or marketing expertise can do it, you can too! ❤️🎮

“When starting as indies, the scariest thought was that we'd pour thousands of hours of love & hard work into a game no one would know about.” - Ana

Tiny Glades Humble Beginnings

Anastasia Opara (Ana) and Tomasz Stachowiak both worked at Embark studios while specializing in real time rendering and procedural generation. It should come as no surprise that those two skills would later become the backbone of Tiny Glade. Before Tiny Glade was a full fledged game it began as a hobby project for Ana to learn real-time rendering. Ana regularly took to twitter to show off WIP updates of her project.

A few viral tweets later combined with some encouraging from Tomasz and the idea to turn their hobby project into a game began to take shape.

Finding Product Market Fit

They began their journey from hobby project to full fledged game with an important question - would anyone play this? You’d be surprised how many people forget to ask themselves this question before beginning serious game development. If you’re just making a game for the fun of it and don’t care about sales, then by all means chase your passion and make your dream game! However, if you hope to make any money with your game (or just want people to play it), it’s worth figuring out if people will buy/play your game. In fancy marketing terms this is often referred to as product-market fit. Basically you want to make sure there is a market (demand) for the game you’re making and that your game will appeal to the audience in that market.

So how did Tiny Glade find product-market fit? Let’s break it down using the definition i provided above:

• Make sure there is a market for the game you’re making

  • They knew of a similar game, Townscaper, that had massive success proving that their is demand for their type of game.

• Make sure it will appeal to the audience in that market

  • There are only a handful of games like Townscaper, so by providing a new and fresh take on the genre it’s a reasonable conclusion that the same audience would be interested and they would face little competition.

  • At this point in the story the only validation they had of their game was a few viral tweets. Which is fantastic, but Ana wisely recognized that those early tweets were aimed at other devs who appreciated the tech on display. There was no way of knowing if the interest in their project from a tech standpoint would translate into interest to enjoy it as a game. Knowing this Ana focused on making the visuals more apparent that it was a game and began highlighting the game aspect in her tweets over the tech aspects. It wasn’t long after they began seeing engagement on their posts showing interest in their game!

    I had multiple viral tweets, but I didn't know if it was devs impressed with tech, or players seeing it as a game. - Ana

Building a Strong Community Through Early Content and The Power of Feedback

Okay cool so they have a game on their hands that has some verified early interest, that still doesn’t tell us how they got 1 million wishlists. Here’s the backbone of their strategy broken into 4 broad categories:

1. Strategic choices

2. Early and Consistent Updates

3. Community Building and Player Feedback

4. Strategic announcements

Strategic Choices

Finding their niche

Tiny Glade knew their audience thanks to their close association with Townscaper and other similar games that have begun to be earn nicknames like “townscaper-like”, “low stress building games”, and “stress-free city builders”. Check out this great article by PC Gamer for more info on these types games! Now that they had identified their audience they knew Tiny Glade would appeal to players seeking a chill experience where they could enjoy creative freedom without focusing on maximizing points, progressing levels, or other typical game design mechanics.

You know who else enjoys games like this? Cozy gamers! If you’ve never heard of cozy games, they are basically low stress games that are designed to be, well… cozy🧋! These games typically have cute stylized art styles with bright colors, relaxing music, and low stress gameplay.

Tiny glade did an awesome job designing a game that simultaneously appealed to fans of the niche genre of low stress building games and the much bigger niche of cozy games. Many game devs make the mistake of thinking marketing and game development are separate entities. Knowing your target audience and making game design choices that appeal to that audience is just as important as knowing where to find your audience with your marketing. Tiny glade nailed this! The art style, music, and game design all clearly appeal to the aforementioned niches. They also knew where their audience lived. Cozy and visually stunning games typically do very well on TikTok so it should come as no surprise that they had multiple viral TikTok posts.

Defining what their game is not

The devs also used TikTok to test how to talk about their game. A very valuable skill to cultivate if you are a game dev turned overnight marketer. After a few posts on Tiktok Ana mentioned “it showed that the genre was unclear. Many thought it was a tower defense or a management sim. Building+castles is a classic combo for those, so I can totally see why. I had to communicate what kind it is, but most importantly what it is NOT.”

This is one of those it’s not if but when things. From AAA to indie, people will misunderstand your game and often even draw comparisons to other games that you may know is wildly inaccurate as the creator. While working on the marketing for Setback we regularly had people compare us to Overwatch and Valorant, leaving comments like “Overwatch 3?” or “Valorant copy”. Setback was neither a hero shooter like Overwatch or Tactical shooter like Valorant, but that didn’t stop players from comparing Setback to the FPS they were most familiar with.

I’ll be honest this regularly drives me crazy as a full time game marketer, and it can be a hard pill to swallow. Inaccurate descriptions and comparisons of your game may sound insane to you as the creator but the reality is that the only thing that matters is the players understanding of your game. So take a page from Tiny Glades book and try to identify what’s causing the confusion, then adjust the game design, marketing, or both to more accurately represent your game. Seeing the confusion over the genre of their game, Tiny Glade updated the one place where everyone is visiting to learn more about their game - their steam page! The description of their game on steam includes the line “There's no management, combat, or wrong answers - just kick back and turn forgotten meadows into lovable dioramas.” A perfect line that clarifies, Tiny Glade is not in fact a tower defense game and that all your suppose to do is relax and build stuff. Tiny Glade’s first viral tiktok (Currently at 9.7M views) was also Ana clarifying what the game is!

Early and Consistent Updates

It’s easy to look at Tiny Glade’s success and think “they just got lucky”. Well your not totally wrong, there absolutely was some luck involved. After all there are plenty of talented devs out there with great games and marketing expertise doing all the right things who do don’t have half the success of Tiny Glade. So how did Tiny Glade “Get Lucky?” I think the answer to this lies in a favorite quote of mine from Roman philosopher Seneca - “Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity."

Tiny Glade consistently posted high quality content about their game from before it was even a game until now. By high quality content I am not referring to the production value, but rather the content created was a good fit for their intended audience. Consider their target audience mentioned above while checking out their Twitter & TikTok to see how they tailored the content to their audience. Returning to the quote from Seneca, you can consider everything in your power “preparation” and things outside of your control as “opportunity”. In Tiny Glade’s case, the research into their target audience and active social media was their form of preparation, while outside factors like their invitation to the Wholesome Snack: Game Awards Edition by wholesome games are the opportunities.

The main take away here is to do as much preparation as possible so that when opportunities come by you don’t miss them. For games this preparation can take many forms but if you do nothing else I would urge every game dev to follow Tiny Glade’s lead in learning your target audience and posting content as early as possible.

Maintain consistent tone and style

Part of what made Tiny Glade’s content so effective was their emphasis on having a consistent tone and style. In marketing terms this would be your “branding”. We live in a digital age where the average user is bombarded with someone trying to sell them something at every turn. This is just my opinion, but I think everyone is a bit exhausted by it at this point. People hate to be marketed to. Even if its a product they may like, they are defensive as soon as they smell a wiff of someone trying to sell them something. However, this is where you get to truly shine as an indie game! Many indie games, Tiny Glade included, are able to successfully market their game by taking the approach of being normal people making their dream game. It’s so common it’s become somewhat of a meme amongst indie game devs. It feels like every week there’s a post in a gaming subreddit about a dev who quit their job to follow their passions and create their dream game. Here’s a great example of this by another very successful up and coming indie game, Lotfia.

Honestly I might stay away from the whole “I quit my full time job to make my dream game” line because its very overused at this point, but the core of the strategy of talking to your audience as a fellow passionate gamer rather than someone trying to sell them a product (your game) is a good one. Tiny Glade mixes this strategy with branding that matches their target audience of Cozy Gamers. Actionably this looks like using lots of emojis, a friendly and personable tone, and little jokes here and there. Really they just made all their copy “cozy”. Check out this small snippet from a recent newsletter below as an example of this. I’d also encourage checking out their twitter and tiktok to see how they keep consistent branding both in their written copy and videos.

Email Newsletter

Having a way to recapture potential customers that are interested in your content is a vital part of any social media strategy. If you go viral on social media and get millions of views but have no way to turn that interest into an intent to purchase, such as a wishlist, then you potentially just lost thousands (or more) customers. This is why you see every indie game dev begging for wishlists as if their life depends on it. Those of you paying attention so far might have stopped at this point and thought, “wait so all those viral social media posts Tiny Glade had before getting a steam page were mostly wasted then? ” Nope! Tiny Glade used a common but horribly underutilized marketing technique by indie game devs - an email newsletter 📨.

Chris from How To Market A Game gave a great talk at GDC on how to best utilize an email list for your game, check it out! Without a Steam Page up to wishlist, having an email newsletter ensured that people interested in their game had a way to stay updated and be notified about Tiny Glade’s release. It’s worth noting that even after 1 million wishlists Tiny Glade regularly uses their newsletter! For the most part they post updates about their game on steam, then duplicate and send the same content through their newsletter. This is a really smart move since users are way more likely to see the newsletter than the steam update even if they are following the steam page.

Generally speaking it’s a good idea to include a CTA (Call To Action) in each of your posts if you can do it while avoiding the feeling of being marketed too. If including a CTA in a specific post feels too forced or wrong for some reason as long as you also have that CTA (wishlist/join newsletter) in your bio you’re probably okay. Anyone genuinely interested in your game will be willing to at least check out your profile page. That being said its well researched that any friction (extra actioned needed) introduced leads to more people dropping off in the marketing funnel so always include a CTA when possible!

Content Marketing

A key tactic Tiny Glade has used to sound authentic and avoid people feeling like their being marketed to is content marketing. If you’ve never heard of content marketing it’s essentially creating content that does not explicitly promote a brand or product. The general idea is to provide value in some form, usually through entertainment or education, that serves to gain enough interest or trust overtime to turn people into customers. It’s a very effective modern marketing strategy as it neatly avoids coming across as an annoying sales person. Tiny Glade excels at content marketing. Check out the two posts below. There’s no mention of wishlisting their game or obvious marketing pushes. She’s simply posting about a cute sheep with an umbrella and her mom trying her game.

Subscribe now

Community Building and Player Feedback

Playtesting

The purpose of playtesting is to normally help find bugs, give feedback, etc. Many devs assume it’s better to wait until closer to release to begin playtesting since many of the problems and feedback you will get are well known aspects of the game that are simply not finished yet. Which is true. However, playtesting can also be used as a clever marketing tool for community building! While the feedback you get early on may be expected, you’d be surprised how important early feedback can be in making sure your game is on the right track.

Tiny Glade opened a Discord in early January 2023 shortly after launching their Steam page (Dec 2022). They primarily used Discord to run closed playtests with their own social circle. This allowed them to gather valuable early feedback without putting the game into the publics hands yet.

Finally in July 2023 they opened up the playtest to a handful of people in their community. I included their discord announcement above to highlight the last paragraph. Having a very limited public playtest then slowly scaling it up from there is absolutely the best way to go as a studio with only 2 full time devs. Given they have had quite a few viral posts, if they had announced a public playtest on all their socials and opened the flood gates they could have very easily had “problems of success”. From thousands of people joining the server and spamming irrelevant or inappropriate content to tech issues, a lot could have gone wrong with only 2 people to fight the fires. By making the Discord invite only and managing who had access to the playtest through steam they were able to gradually ramp up their playtesting.

Another fantastic way they used playtesting was to improve and test their Steam Next Fest Demo. If you’re interested in this blog I probably don’t need to inform you how important Steam Next Fest is for indie games. Knowing this Tiny Glade ran two playtests shortly before Steam Next Fest where they uploaded the Demo build to the playtest branch. With this strategy they had their existing community provide valuable feedback on how to improve their demo before thousands of other people had their first experience with Tiny Glade. Many devs (dare I say most) who just launch their demo during Next Fest with no one else having played it then panic when they realize their tutorial was too long, or the game crashed, or people were confused what to do, etc. Save yourself the stress and playtest your demo with others well before you put it live on Steam!

Clever Community Building Tactics

Tiny Glade did a few really clever marketing tactics here I want to highlight:

1. Exclusive Discord link in Demo

2. Demo Build Challenge

The only official way to access the Tiny Glade Discord was to play the demo for at least 10 minutes at which point a Discord button would appear in the main menu. This is a really clever way of making the community feel more exclusive and help make sure you don’t have “dead” Discord members.

Tiny Glade simultaneously found a way to bring their community together and encourage people to play the demo throughout Steam Next Fest by hosting a daily building theme. They would announce the theme on their socials and encourage players to capture and share their creations with an associated hashtag on Twitter. Here’s an example using the #tinywizardtower hashtag.

I am in love with this idea. It did so many things right. If you haven’t played Tiny Glade you should know their in game photo mode is one of the best I’ve seen. You can change the time of day, adjust focus, make things tiny, and tons of other features to take cinematic photos of your castle.

They made it incredibly easy (and very satisfying) to take a gorgeous photo and share it on social media. The daily prompts also helped improve the gameplay for many people! Some of us are naturally creative, but if your anything like me you may end up staring at the blank canvas of the empty glade and become paralyzed by the endless possibilities you could create. By having a prompt it not only gives you a sense of direction but you can also search the hashtag and see what others have built for inspiration. Genius! Finally throughout next fest they reposted hundreds of peoples creations. Seriously, the Tiny Glade Twitter account had 643 Tweets in June! Thanks to the clever idea to simply post a build idea every day they had thousands of Tweets about their game putting a massive amount of eyes on Tiny Glade while barely lifting a finger.

Time Limited Demo vs Open Access

There are strong arguments on both sides for leaving your demo up or limiting it to be enjoyed for a specific time. The unfulfilling, but true answer as to which is better is that it depends on your game. In short if you suspect players may get their fill of your game from your demo, its probably best to limit it. On the other hand if you think your demo is designed in a way that will leave players begging for more than it might be good to leave it up. This topic is deserving of it’s own post in the future, but for now i’ll leave you with some words Tomasz posted in the Tiny Glade Discord explaining why they choose to limit their Demo to a specific time period.

Strategic Announcements = Maximum Exposure

If your you’re reading this than it’s likely your Youtube algorithm has thrown announcement trailers for new games your way. Another likely fact is that most of those trailers you see recommended to you have tens of thousands of views. Seeing this and expecting that your announcement or reveal trailer will automatically get the same result is a great example of survivorship bias. The sad reality is that there is a big possibility that you publish your trailer with stars in your eyes only to reach a few a hundred views (or less 🥹) over a few days. This is especially true if you have no existing audience. This is also true for Tiktok or any other social media you plan on making your announcement. For many indie game devs their announcement strategy largely revolves around simply posting a series of trailers and teasers expecting to make a big splash. Which can happen… if your lucky. Instead take a page from Tiny Glade’s book and have a multifaceted approach. You’ve probably heard the common investment advice of “not putting all your eggs in one basket”. Same thing here, don’t pull all your announcement eggs in the social media basket. Here’s what Tiny Glade did:

1. Exclusive trailer reveal with Wholesome Snack that was costreamed by IGN

2. Cross promotion with a game that has a similar audience

3. Email Newsletter Announcement

4. Games Press

5. Social Media Announcement

The exclusive trailer with Wholesome Snack: The Game Awards Edition was a fantastic way to officially announce Tiny Glade as it instantly brought their game right in front of their target audience! The devs also reached out to to all the major gaming press outlets which lead to PCGamer, Rock Paper Shotgun, and GameSpot covering the announcement. It will significantly boost your chances of having your trailer highlighted by game award shows if you choose one relevant to your target audience and are willing to exclusively announce their first. Although with that being said Tiny Glade was fortunate enough to have Wholesome Snack reach out to them!

Tiny Glade did a cross promotion with Frozen District and Stray Fawn Studio. Stray Fawn Studio included Tiny Glade’s banner on their Steam Page while Frozen District gave them a shout out. Cross promotions are always a great idea and a fantastic way to garner some good will with other indie game devs and players. AAA games often have cross promos that include new in game skins and gameplay changes (Check out the Final Fantasy/ Apex Legends Collaboration), but for indie games a simple shoutout is often plenty and highly appreciated.

Naturally when it came time to announce their game Tiny Glade posted the trailer on their socials and a more detailed announcement to their newsletter subscribers. This is kind of the default announcement strategy but thanks to Tiny Glade’s earlier marketing efforts it was super effective!

Finally, let me stay it again for those in the back, START MARKETING EARLY! Wholesome snack reached out to Tiny Glade because they already had a great social following and they knew it would be great for their audience. All 5 of the announcement strategies mentioned above would have been less effective had they not already had a base following.

10 Actionable Tiny Glade Inspired Marketing Strategies

Okay enough about Tiny Glade and their insane success. Tiny Glade is awesome and deserve all the praise in the world but what about your game? How can we make sure that your game is such a massive success that i’m writing about it next. Here’s 10 Tiny Glade inspired strategies to consider for your own game:

1. Research Your Target Audience

   1. Knowing your audience is vital. If you haven’t done it yet I would absolutely start with this step before any of the ones below! Here’s a few things to look for when finding your target audience:

      1. What other games do they play?

         1. Which ones did good or bad and why

      2. Where do they live?

         1. Tiktok? Youtube? Reddit? Facebook groups?

      3. What tone works best for them?

         1. Tiny Glade = Warm, Friendly, Chill

         2. Call of Duty = Badass, Bold, Competitive

         3. Baldur’s Gate 3 = Epic, Adventurous, Proudly Nerdy

      4. What content from other games did they engage the most with?

2. Start Marketing Early and Build Anticipation

   1. Begin sharing your game's development process on social media platforms as early as possible. Remember Tiny Glade started before they had a store page or even a name! Engage with your audience by sharing updates, behind-the-scenes content, and sneak peeks to build anticipation and create a loyal following well before the official launch and announcement.

3. Maintain a consistent tone

   1. Figure out the tone that fits your game and stick with it!

4. Create an Email Newsletter

   1. Develop an email newsletter to capture and retain the interest of potential players. Use the newsletter to provide regular updates, exclusive content, and announcements. Encourage social media followers to sign up for the newsletter to ensure they stay informed about your game.

5. Grow a Community on Discord

   1. Create a dedicated Discord server for your game to foster a community of fans and followers. Use Discord to host playtests, share development progress, and gather feedback through playtests. Your Discord community should feel valued and involved in the game's development process.

6. Conduct Early and Regular Playtesting

   1. Start playtesting your game early with a small group of trusted players or friends before gradually expand playtesting to include more community members. Use the feedback to make iterative improvements to the game and involve your community.

      1. Don’t forget to playtest your demo before officially launching it on Steam!

7. Utilize Cross-Promotions with Other Indie Games

   1. Partner with other indie developers to cross-promote each other’s games. This can include shoutouts on social media, featuring game banners on each other's Steam pages, or collaborative content. Cross-promotions help expand your reach and introduce your game to new relevant audiences.

8. Host Themed Events and Challenges (especially during festivals)

   1. Organize themed events or challenges within your game and encourage players to participate and share their creations on social media. This not only increases engagement but also generates user-generated content that can further promote your game.

9. Strategically Plan Your Announcements

   1. Have a plan for your announcements that consists of more than simply posting on social media and hoping for the best. Seek out relevant communities that may be interested in an exclusive announcement of your game.

      1. If your not able to find a popular niche gaming community like wholesomesnack that fits your game I guarantee there are creators and influencers that specialize in covering games in your genre. Reach out to them as well!

10. Secure Press and Media Coverage

    1. Reach out to gaming news outlets and influencers for coverage and endorsements. Create press kits with detailed information about your game, high-quality assets, and contact details.

    2. The most important factor in deciding if they will cover your game is if they think it will interest their audience. You can do this by having a popular social media, proving people are interested in your game, or in the case of content creators, by elaborating on why your game would appeal to their unique audience.

Recommended Readings New and Old

New

The Great Steam Demo Update: Announcement from Steam with some significant updates on Steam Demos!

Hooded Horse CEO hits back at claims that Manor Lords slipped up in early access: It’s not too often you get hot tea 🍵 gossip like this in the gaming world but here it is. I was lucky enough to actually see this live play out live on LinkedIn before all the resulting articles came out.

A small games manifesto: An interesting article on how small indie games are the answer to sustainable success in the gaming industry.

A twitter thread covering 10 great marketing tools for indie games!

Go-To-Market Breakdown: Another Crab's Treasure: An awesome article from the push to talk blog detailing Another Crab’s Treasure’s marketing.

Old

How To Market A Game: Benchmarks: How many wishlists are normal? How many reviews should I have? Some valuable numbers here from Chris who has lots of data to determine what “normal” numbers look for indie games!

That’s All Folks

Getting a million wishlists is an absolutely insane accomplishment. I hope this article helps your own game get the attention it deserves! I’ll be back next week with a new deep dive breaking down the marketing of another successful indie game. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss it!

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