r/SteamNextFestDemos

Wishlist here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4730280/Hellsino_Pokerlike/

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.