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u/svbrand

r/BabaIsYou r/gamedev r/chilegames r/SteamNextFestDemos r/chile r/IndieDev r/playtesters r/DestroyMyGame r/puzzlevideogames
▲ 2 r/gamedev

Marketing a silly puzzler on Steam, pros and cons

We are making a cute silly puzzler called Bulbo's Belief System, a puzzle platformer, one of the no no genres of Steam.

Why are we making the game? Because we won a judge's choise at a game jam with it (Bigmode Game Jam '25). People that tried the original prototype asked for us to continue it. We love the concept.

What's the challenge? This kind of games don't usually sell, so we are not getting organic traffic that games from other popular genres get. Getting a publisher and financing for something

What are the opportunities? It's a game made by a really small team (1.7 humans in average). The art style is very unique. The game is refered as a Baba Like (for Baba is You), a somewhat unexplored space in gaming, even though Baba is You was like a huge success. The game is inexpensive to make, so to have success we don't need a million units sold.

Pros:

We got into nice curated showcases:

- Expo EVA November 2025,

- Latin American Games Showcase in December 2025,

(here we got to 4.5k wishlists)

- Thinky Direct and Cerebral Puzzle Showcase May 2026 and

- Latin American Games Showcase June 2026.

(Here we ended up with 12.2k wishlists)

We launched a demo June 2025 that has gotten us really nice coverage by many small streamers and we got an amazing video by Icely Puzzles in September 2025 (It currently has 139k views).

Cons:

We entered Steam Next Fest with 12.200 wishlists, we came out with about 12.880. Not a good showing, How To Market A Game predicted we would get from 1.7k wishlists to 10k or be an outlier. We were an outlier. A bad outlier.

We don't get much organic traffic from Steam.

Tags are insufficient to really connect our game with other games that are really like us.

Conclusions

We believe in our product, as we got amazing comments from those that have tried it, we are happy with our current amount of wishlists. We don't expect our product to be a huge hit, but we have been looking opportunities to improve the promotion of the game and we are hopeful that Steam changes in ways that the game can receive more exposure on their platform, because the demo has gotten 44 positive reviews and we feel that this doesn't feed the algorithm. Tags could be expanded to be more expressive of our strange game. Finally we are hopeful that the game might get some nominations to festivals :).

We know we got ourselves into a low performance genre, but we are happy with it's current performance. Not impressed, not dissapointed, but still happy. We are also very gratefull of all the new spaces created by festivals and promotion events on Steam.

What are your experiences? Any recommendations?

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u/svbrand — 5 hours ago
▲ 9 r/SteamNextFestDemos+1 crossposts

Steam Next Fest: An insight from June 2026 version participant

This June's Steam Next Fest felt to us like being somewhat outside the room. We were invited, but we weren't really there. Was it our fault? Was it just a feeling? Are we going to the wrong party?

Our game is called Bulbo's Belief System, it's a puzzle game and it entered Steam Next Fest with exactly 11.258 wishlists, coming out of a strong Summer Game Fest campaign that actually brought us over 6 thousand new wishlists. We were happy, hopeful, prepared to be amazed at Steam Next Fest, but we were also cautious. Our projections for Steam Next Fest? 660 wishlists. Our results 682.

Then... why are we feeling left out? We were projecting on the belief that the game was gonna be somewhat hidden, as it is a puzzle game. We were hoping we were wrong, yet, that seems to be exactly what happened. Our indicators were as follows: Usually Steam gives us really bad internal traffic, even when we have big spikes of external traffic. Positive reviews on our demo seem to be ignored by Steam, or maybe they are not enough. There are not enough tags to actually describe our game and what kind of games are like it. It has been called a Baba Like, and we agree, yet it shares very few tags with that amazing game.

The big question we are asked by other developers is "what's your click through rate, maybe people is not clicking", but we had a very normal click through rate compared to other games in the event, we just had very low impressions by the event.

I feel that during the first two days our game was not being showed in the puzzle platformers list, because of how our tags were prioritized, but what was really strange was seeing the charts of top demos and stuff and seeing that having 40 positive reviews accounted for very little.

In the end, for now, we can only theorize that the "low" median time of the demo (23 minutes), it being a linear puzzle game and the game being visually really strange were the main factors keeping people away from the game.

Still, this presents a very strange dilemma, as those are the reasons the game is loved in showcases and have let us come so far. I just get a little sad seeing that I came all the way here with my strange puzzle platformer and feel that the party was just not for our kind. Hopefully I am mistaken and in the future I'll learn what I did wrong and actually improve in the last stretch of marketing or in my future games.

And yes, even though we got what we thought we would get, we were dreaming of getting a lot more and many prediction system's like Chris Zukowski's had as thinking that maybe we would get 2.5k or even 5k wishlists.

If you participated in this Steam Next Fest, please, leave me your opinions and experience, I'd love to read all about them.

In a positive ending we are very happy of seeing people saying they loved the game and that even some, consider it on of their highlights of Steam Next Fest, I think it is true that every game has its fans.

u/svbrand — 11 days ago