u/Zombutcher_Game

Our game is called Zombutcher, it's a stealth-action and simulation game where you run a butcher shop by day… and hunt humans by night.

Manage your monster meat business, process bodies, satisfy strange customers, and sneak through a Louisiana town after dark while avoiding patrols. Upgrade your shop, tools, and even your own zombie body by swapping limbs to gain new abilities.

We’re really excited to finally open the doors of the shop and let everyone experience the full game on June 11th

We launched the Steam page for our game ZOMBUTCHER on October 2nd. Right now the game sits at around 8200 wishlists, with most of the audience coming from the US, Western Europe, and surprisingly - Japan.

At the beginning, there was no "big plan". It was more about constantly testing ideas: which posts worked, which platforms provided any response, and where we could get the first visibillity.

I am going to use [number] for our milestones, our wishlist graph can be found here - https://imgur.com/a/6lZg0FF
[1] The first wishlists were from the team and friends - we shared that we launched our page and they supported us with their wishlists.
[2] Then there was the first serious jump - an article which we posted in one of our local gaming web-site. Article was about our unsuccessful experience with the publisher at the very beginning of development. The post went viral and gave the page its first significant boost.

After that, there was a rather long period of almost no growth. On some days, the game received 2-3 wishlists, and sometimes there were small spikes after posts on Reddit. At this stage, it became clear how hard it is to handle marketing alone and how unstable organic reach is without major news events.

[3] The next big jump happened after signing with the publisher - Loopr Partners. They came from the PR field, so the main focus was on media outreach: publications in the media, contacts with YouTubers, and a trailer on IGN's second channel. This gave the game its first real international reach and took us far beyond the local community - we were very surprised by the increase from Japan in particular.

[4] The most powerful source of wishlists turned out to be the Steam Next Fest. Before the festival, we were worried that we hadn't gathered enough wishlists before it, but in the end, the festival gave more than 2x the total number. At the same time, playtests helped a lot: we conducted the first one at the dawn of development to test basic hypotheses about the game, and the second and third ones were done with the publisher.

[5] After the festival, videos from medium-sized YouTubers and ads on Reddit gave a good result. But the most interesting conclusion came later.

[6] We tried for a long time to convince the publisher to work on TikTok. Initially, the focus was more on classic PR and advertising, and short videos were seen as something secondary. At some point, TikTok finally started to be managed properly - using fresh footage, hooks in the videos, and good quality editing. And it was then that steady growth began.

Another important aspect is maintaining internal social media for already interested players. Telegram and Discord are our main channels for communicating with the "internal community". They help not only to gather an audience but also to maintain constant activity around the project and collect useful feedback.

The main conclusion over these months is that indie game marketing is rarely built around one big success and one channel. Usually, it's a set of small hypotheses, constant testing, and attempts to understand where your audience actually is. And sometimes one well-received TikTok can be more beneficial than a week of classic advertising.

Hope this little article was useful for you. Sorry if it reads a bit too much like a report sometimes. Would love to hear how other indie teams handled marketing during development!

One of the craftable products in Zombutcher will be ground meat - here's how the process looks. What do you think?

We added new armed NPCs to our game - Zombutcher.
There are two types of them: soldiers in chemical protection gear and military police soldiers. They will gradually appear in the world depending on the player's actions: if your butchery suspicion level will be too high, you've killed to much civillians and so on.

What do you think?

Hey! We're working on a small indie game called Zombutcher and wanted to share a quick dev snapshot. In our world, if you go too long without eating brains, you don't just look like a zombie - you start becoming one in every sense.

You get stronger. You lose parts of your humanity. You can literally rip off your own arm and use it as a weapon. NPCs start avoiding you. And yeah… you slowly start making those weird zombie sounds instead of talking normally.

It's not just a "curse meter" - it actually changes how you play and how the world reacts to you.
Here's a shot from our basement area where things are already getting a bit out of hand 🧟‍♂️