Tower Dominion’s 5-Month Blitz: How a Short Pre-Release Campaign Paid Off
A case study that challenges how long you actually need to market your game
Can a five-month marketing campaign be enough for a game launch? Tower Dominion, a roguelike tower defense, just proved that it can.
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!
All data in this blog are estimates taken from Gamalytic.com & GameDiscover.co