u/cenkerc

Let's say I have two games, both with fewer than 1,000 wishlists, and one of them is even below 200.

At this point, marketing feels like a classic indie dev situation: it takes a huge amount of time, I don't really have a budget for it, and the results aren't really there.

So is it actually worth releasing the game on Steam?

From what I understand, Steam's algorithm heavily considers how a game performs around release, especially sales and player activity. With such a small wishlist count, it feels like the game is almost guaranteed to have a weak launch and basically die on release.

On the other hand, delaying the release just to keep marketing for months doesn't seem very productive either, especially when I could spend that time working on the next project.

I'm also planning to continue updating the game after release, so it's not like development would completely stop.

Would you release it anyway and move on to the next project, or keep trying to build wishlists before launching?

I'd especially like to hear from other indie developers who have released games with very low wishlist numbers.

Edit: Thanks everyone for the replies. I really appreciate all the different perspectives. Sorry if I couldn't respond to everyone.

I loved KeeperRL, not too much complex colony sim. Do you know games like it?

But must be not tiny pixels like Odd Realm or Song of Syx

It is an incremental voxel mining game and you have minion army

You can play demo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4580790/Mine_Mage_Minion/

AI Disclosure: Every model and texture made by me

I don't want to offend anyone, I'm just trying to understand the terminology.

Bevy is called "Bevy Engine", but from my understanding it feels more like a game framework rather than a traditional game engine like Godot, Unity, or Unreal.

For example, if I use Raylib, I can call my project a custom engine because Raylib mainly provides low-level rendering/window/input features and I build most systems myself.

But with Bevy I'm not sure where the line is. If I use Bevy's renderer and ECS, but write my own physics system, voxel terrain system, etc., would that still be considered "using Bevy Engine" or could it be considered a custom engine built on top of Bevy?

Where do people usually draw the line between a framework, an engine, and a custom engine?

[Edit] Thanks for all the responses cleared things up for me

Platform(s): PC (Steam or itch.io, not 100% sure)

Genre: Indie, possibly roguelike/RPG

Estimated year played/released: Unsure — could be anywhere from the last several years

Graphics/art style: 2D, very rough hand-drawn/doodle look, almost like it was drawn in MS Paint. Mostly black and white, with only a handful of colored accents.

Details I remember:

• The game's whole hook was its ring equipment system.
• You could equip a huge number of rings — not just 1 or 2.
• Specifically, you could place rings on individual finger joints/knuckles (phalanges), not just one ring per finger. The equipment screen showed a drawn hand with tons of small ring slots running up each finger.
• This ring system was the main thing people talked about — it went semi-viral because of how absurdly many rings you could stack on one hand.

Other details: It is NOT "Pluto" (a 2026 roguelike deckbuilder with a similar finger-based magic system) — I already know about that one and it's a different game.

Is there an app for old device? It is android 7.1.2 old tablet