Spent 2 months preparing for a Steam Fest and gained 100 wishlists. Is this normal?
Hey everyone,
Our deckbuilder game Crystal Calamity just participated Steam Deckbuilder Fest, and honestly… the results hit our team pretty hard.
For the two months leading up to the fest, our team worked nonstop without taking a single day off just to finish our first public demo in time.
The demo includes:
- 3 very distinct playable characters (each with ~60 unique cards)
- 2 bosses
- 6 elites
- dozens of enemies
We know it’s not perfect yet — we’re still lacking enough events and relic variety, and balance definitely needs work — but we genuinely felt confident about the demo because it already shows the core identity and potential of the game.
Unfortunately, the festival results were far below our expectations.
After all that work, we gained only around 100 wishlists, most of which came from posts we made ourselves on social media.
Some numbers:
- Peak concurrent demo players: 6
- Lifetime unique users: 196
- Median playtime: 10 minutes (and that includes our own internal testing…)
What confused us even more is that some other unreleased games in the same fest didn’t seem to gain much visibility either. Even strong-looking titles near the top of the Popular Upcoming list — like Black Jacket — didn’t appear to see huge growth in followers or demo players (based on SteamDB data).
Right now morale inside the team is pretty low.
We’re a small indie team with no publisher and no funding. The core members have literally been developing together out of my apartment for the past three years. We were really hoping this festival would finally bring visibility, player feedback, or at least some signal that we’re moving in the right direction.
Originally we planned to take a break after the fest, but the outcome makes it hard to rest — it almost feels wrong to slow down when the results look like this. So we’re still pushing at full development pace, not really sure what the right move is.
I’d really like to ask other devs here:
- How did your game perform during Steam festivals?
- What’s a normal wishlist gain for an event like this?
- Are these festivals mainly beneficial for already-released or well-known games (like Slay the Spire or Vampire Crawlers), rather than smaller upcoming titles?
If anyone happened to try our demo, we’d also deeply appreciate any feedback or honest criticism.
Thanks for reading — we genuinely want to learn what we should do next.