r/gameDevMarketing

Back in 2023, we entered steam Next Fest with an early demo that was honestly much closer to a tech demo than a polished game.

Now we’re releasing our indie puzzle game Lost in Cheese on May 21, and our biggest marketing mistake was getting visibility too early.

We entered Steam Next fest with almost no wishlist, a very rough steam page and a demo that was not polished.

The surprising part: it actually got traction.

• ~16,000 demo downloads
• Steam featured the game in one of their Next Fest videos

At the time, this felt huge.

But it converted very poorly into long-term momentum.

Looking back, I think we made several mistakes:

• The game wasn’t polished enough
• The Steam page/hook wasn’t clear enough
• The core gameplay and direction still changed a lot afterward
• We got attention before people had a reason to really care
• Resulting in a wishlist boost but it quickly resulted in a LOT of deleted wishlists.

Since then, we’ve spent a long time rebuilding, scaling the project down, polishing the visuals/music/vibe, and clarifying what the game actually is: a relaxing 3D sokoban-style puzzle game about a box-shaped cat pushing cheese blocks.

Now we’re close to launch (May 21), sitting at less than 1k wishlists.

A few other marketing observations from our journey:

• Reddit/Bluesky posts gave roughly ~1 wishlist/post from other devs.
• YouTube Shorts surprisingly performed better for us (200–1700 views)
• Trailer got ~1500 views and some wishlists
• Use steam curator and send out keys to matching steam curator before release to get a recommendation - you get to send out 100 keys that way.
• Paid ~$300 for streamer/press outreach, still waiting to evaluate results / still sending out keys .

Big lesson for us:
Visibility is great, but visibility before product readiness can be almost wasted. So if anyone is reading this, our biggest advice would be: Do not use steam as an early testing ground, wasting your one shot at the Steam Next fest, it should really be a late part of your marketing where you have already nailed your hook/steam page and polished a demo.

Hi everyone,

We're currently preparing our co-op game CREWED for the upcoming Steam Next Fest. Right now we're sitting at around 1,700 wishlists, but our daily growth has almost completely plateaued (graph attached).

Here’s what we’ve tried so far:

• Reddit Ads: Gave us a solid sustained bump in late April, but performance dropped heavily over time and eventually stopped converting well.
• Press Outreach: We contacted a lot of gaming press and content sites. One article gave us a huge single-day spike (300+ wishlists), but there was basically no long-tail effect afterward.
• Influencer Outreach: We've recently started talking with TikTok gaming creators. One creator quoted us $1,500 for a sponsored video.

At our current scale, does spending $1,500 on a TikTok creator actually make sense? Has anyone here seen strong wishlist conversions from paid TikTok promotions, especially before Next Fest?

We're trying to figure out whether we should double down on influencers or pivot toward something else entirely before the festival starts.

Would really appreciate hearing real numbers or experiences from other indie devs. Thanks!

Hi everyone. I'm a solo indie dev from Japan, working on my first game.

I launched the Steam page 38 days ago. My latest Steamworks export shows 126 wishlists.

I keep seeing post-mortems and YouTube devlogs where games have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of wishlists before launch. I know those are probably the visible success stories, but I don't have a good sense of what the baseline looks like for a first-time developer with almost no existing audience.

For context, the game is a physics-based 2D score-attack action game. My marketing so far has mostly been a few posts on X, showing the game at a local indie event in Japan, and preparing for Steam Next Fest.

I'm trying to understand how to read this number. Is 126 wishlists after 38 days within the normal range for a first Steam page, or is it usually a sign that something is wrong with the page, genre, positioning, or traffic?

If you do look at the page, is there anything obviously hurting it?

Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4466450/SwingByByBy/

Hi guyss, I just released my first game's demo in Steam, and I heard that the healthy benchmark is 10-15 wishlists per day, and aim for 1000+ wishlists before Steam Next Fest. The good news is I am enrolled for Next Fest, bad news is my wishlists are way below that :( I'm only at ~5 wishlists per day now, I got a good +14 on the first day of my release. Can you take a look at my storepage and see what is you think is bad? Is it confusing? Is it because I used AI to generate the base images? :(

Here's the link to my game's demo page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4725490/Soulwoven_Princess_Demo/?beta=0

Thank you so much!!

We're happy to share that out Steam page is up, our co-op horror game Last Cleanup is online and ready for wish lists. We've been working it for quite some time now and we're glad it's shaping up.

I know it is not much, but even small success is a success! Thank you very much to everyone who rated. Game is a RPG/strategy Dark Lord Simulator, available here without need to download or register: https://adeptus7.itch.io/dominion

Huge thanks to everyone for the support! It’s an incredible source of motivation for me and constantly fuels my passion to keep developing the game.

But I do have one small complaint
I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from many people, but very few suggestions about what you’d actually like to see in the game.

This should be a community-driven game, and it also needs to give YouTubers plenty of opportunities to create fun content around it. That’s why I want us to build it together! 🚀

Since my game is built around absurd comedy and shitpost energy… what kinds of things would YOU want to see in the game?

Let’s gather in the comments!

Steam Page: Doctor Pigeon Simulator

I’m a solo developer currently working on a psychological horror RPG called The Sin Of Fabien.

Yesterday, the trailer for my game was featured on the GameTrailers YouTube channel and also posted on IGN.com. Honestly, it made me really happy. It felt like maybe my game looked interesting enough for people to actually want to share it.

To make this happen, I emailed a lot of YouTubers, content creators, and gaming pages. Most of them never replied, but GameTrailers did. It wasn’t shared on IGN’s YouTube channel though — I guess the game isn’t big enough for that yet 😅

I also wanted to give a small piece of advice to other indie developers:

I didn’t keep my emails short or generic. I wrote a longer but attention-grabbing title, added a proper introduction explaining the game, and included a Press Kit that I specially prepared for it. I tried to give the feeling that “I actually put effort into this for you.” I think approaching people this way feels much more sincere and professional.

GameTrailers video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J17frhH-0rE

I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts about the game. If anyone has questions, I’d be happy to answer them. I’m completely open to criticism and negative feedback as well 🙂

Hello everyone,

It has been more than a month since my Steam page went live, and the numbers keep growing, but I am not sure if they are growing fast enough.

I already passed the 100 wishlist milestone, and I really feel excited about it. Since this is my first game, I am basically doing and learning everything at the same time.

Right now the game has:

- 127 wishlist additions

- 17 wishlist deletions

- 110 current outstanding wishlists

- 1,608 free demo licenses claimed

- 388 lifetime unique demo users

- 26 minutes average playtime

- 15 minutes median playtime

My demo takes around 30 minutes to complete, and 31% of measured users already played it for more than 30 minutes. Since it is an idle/incremental game, I believe people can judge it pretty fast. Maybe 5 minutes is already enough to understand if the game is their cup of tea or not.

The average playtime is also very close to the full play length of the demo, so that part feels promising to me, but I do not have enough experience to judge the numbers properly.

The part that confuses me most is the free licenses. 1,608 free licenses were claimed, but Steam shows 388 lifetime unique demo users. I do not know if this is normal for Steam demos or if it means something important.

What would you guys say?

Are these numbers good, bad, or too early to judge?

If anybody wonders, here is the demo page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4695400/Blacksmith_Idle_Demo/

We're Ivory Echo Media, and I want to answer any questions you have.

We’ll write music for games, film, animations, indie projects, etc

Your Story, Our Echo!

Wanted to chime in with another entirely average wishlist journey for a first time (solo) dev. No I did not get 10k in a week with zero marketing, no I did not randomly get promoted by taylor swift, no I did not have a video go viral from earth to andromeda.

One obvious takeaway is that organic discoverability is nil. I imagine you need to be in the tens of thousands of WL range at the least to get significant store visibility. The spike you see in the middle is me posting over the course of a day in subs like r/automationgames and r/basebuildinggames. I've done basically zero promotion besides that.

Two, needed to back out of june next fest. Everything I've read online is telling me to save next fest as my last and best prelaunch marketing beat.

Other takeaways are less clear. I concluded that my game, an automation game that I wanted to make using drone based logistics, did not fit genre expectations well enough. So I spent this week adding conveyor belts. I THOUGHT I could push my game as a TD game but I got zero interest, just downvotes, in r/towerdefense.

Next steps after overhauling gameplay and some more visual polish is another trailer and another round of posting. I aim to cut a shorter trailer, I've been told the current one is too long (and I agree). If I'm confident enough about it I aim to make an actual website and press kit at this point and email a couple of indie trailer channels. I don't feel ready to approach big sites like IGN, but I'll try my luck after making more eye catching content (fancy visual effects, big scary enemies).

As for content creators my gut feeling is that it's pointless pre demo release. My game doesn't have a unique tiktok friendly gimmick. Which tbh does get me thinking, for my next game after this I should make something with such a gimmick, it's not like I don't have any such ideas. Also for the next game I should wait much longer before launching my steam page as I basically wasted the initial visibility boost from a new page. Being early, as you can see, is doing me no favors.

tldr: you don't learn if you don't fuck up

Steam page here

It is small horror game, where you are working at research station. You have to keep the radar running unless you will be terminated, literally. I wanted to make job horror game. I will be glad if you give me some feedback, so i can improve my next project.

I think I've been doing pretty good, page has been live like 12 days.
I'm releasing on May 29th.

I have hundreds of games on my wishlist. I get emails all the time for sales. I can't remember the last time I bought one. I'm not really a great example because I'm not the gamer I once was...

But

The way I see things, many of those games that I wishlisted, I would have bought in that moment. I care about a game I'm looking at while I'm looking at it and then the second look typically doesn't carry the same interest.

So, store page->release is a super short runway, on purpose. Assuming You Only Look Once, I have zero chance to make a sale if there's no buy button.

Which one is more suitable and appealing for a clicker game?

Hi everyone!

I’ve made a new trailer for my game Xenolocus, and I’d like to share the atmosphere I’m trying to create.

The game takes place on the lower levels of a base where something has clearly gone wrong.

Contact with the armory is lost, no one is responding, and everything around feels tense and abandoned.

You’ll have to fight your way through xenos, keep an eye on the motion tracker, and gather ammunition

while a giant xenos soldier sweeps everything in its path.

Hidden in the dark rooms of the laboratory are many mysteries

waiting to be uncovered - the megacorporation’s military experiments and the secrets of an ancient alien civilization.

What do you think about the game’s atmosphere?

I’m currently working toward a demo, so I’ll be sharing more soon.

I've been "going to make this game" for years. Couldn't code. Didn't know what bash was. Couldn't open my own terminal.

Talk is cheap. Until 30 days ago, making games wasn't.

>My BFF Claude changed all of that...

60k lines I didn't write but can read. 5 factions, 62 races, 87 abilities, real multiplayer over Steam. Builds on Mac, Windows, Linux, Steam Deck. Early Access June 1.

I'm not a developer. I'm a guy who finally stopped finding reasons not to start.

Sad. True. Don't care.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4684510/ARB_Alien_Races_Battle/