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u/FaceoffAtFrostHollow

▲ 2 r/gamedev

Looking for definitive information on "Post as Coming Soon..." for your Steam demo

From what I understand, once Steam approves your demo and store page - irrespective of if you want the demo to live on the main page and not do a separate one- you get this "Post as Coming Soon...*" button.

Two things I believe are true:

  1. This is only if you have a separate page for your demo. So if you haven't opted into a separate page, nothing happens?
  2. If you click that button and DO have a separate page for your demo, you'll get a visibility spike for ~2 weeks. (Is it 2 weeks or could it be more?)

First and foremost, can I get clarification if those things are true?

Additionally, I had a thought around this- let's say I ultimately do *not* want a separate page for my demo. I only want the big green button when I'm ready for the demo to go live. My demo goes live in 1 month.

Can't I just click the button and temporarily choose a separate page for the demo, drive a lot of inbound knowing that 'coming soon' only helps to surface you and you're only going to accumulate wishlists and visibility for a few weeks.. but then opt to not use the separate page and stick with just the green button? Like if someone searches for the demo once its live, it'll bring them to the main page but I will have already gotten the visibility from temporarily choosing the other route?

Apologies if this is confusing.

reddit.com
u/FaceoffAtFrostHollow — 12 days ago
▲ 11 r/office+3 crossposts

Corp’s wellness division gives you a MORALE BREAK minigame on your second promotion. play too long and they start draining your credits

u/FaceoffAtFrostHollow — 12 days ago
▲ 1 r/IndieGameDevs

It takes ~5 days for Steam to approve a demo build but that build doesn't necessarily have to be the one that goes live when you hit the publish button. From what I understand, you can keep pushing updates and the approval happens just one time.

So with that being said, is there any downside to getting a demo build approved even if you intend to have it go live weeks from now with a more polished version?

reddit.com
u/FaceoffAtFrostHollow — 15 days ago
▲ 13 r/SoloDevelopment

Though I’m happy with 800 wishlists, it’s by no means a huge success for one month. That being said, here’s some things that may be helpful for other folks:

-Reddit Paid Ads: At the beginning I floundered quite a bit with ads that were producing like a .2-.4 CTR. I eventually settled on running $5 ads and testing different market and sub combos and creatives until I found one that was above 1.5%. After doing some refinement, it started producing a CTR of 3-4% a day. I scaled the budget to $15/a day, and the UTM analytics showed that it was producing 15-22 wishlists a day.

My recommendation here is to test creatives and market at small budgets until you have a winning creative that doesn’t drop CTR massively over a few days and then scale up the budget and see if the UTM is showing actual conversion (and that you don’t have a page problem)

-TikTok Ads: for me, a waste of time. Huge volume of inbound, very little conversion. Not sure if people not being on Steam logged in on mobile or having the app is the issue or even though I targeted gamers it still gave me other demographics and audiences.

On Reddit organic -

Your mileage will vary on game dev subs. What I found interesting is if you can engage with what I’ll call “adjacent” subs- ones that are thematically tied to your game. In my case it’s cyberpunk, anti work, workreform etc

First and foremost you HAVE to be respectful in their sub. Check their rules for self promotion and actually engage the community. Mods may vary as to what they allow and don’t.

If you can get a post to stay and have a good conversation with that sub, you may get 10-30k view posts with a ton of shares, of which some may convert to wishlists.

I don’t have UTM data on this, but thought it was worth sharing.

Edit: my winning creative on Reddit was an emotional hook, about 15 characters long and a devlog with captions. It still produces a 3% CTR with 50ish clicks for about 15-20 wishlists a today which feels like a really good ROI even if a fraction convert

Also I should mention I am relentlessly posting across socials- a combo of devlog, meme-y, silly. I find the things featuring me speaking with captions do better than raw footage

RAYD on Steam

u/FaceoffAtFrostHollow — 17 days ago