r/gamemarketing

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2 months ago Cloudflare cut me and a bunch of co-worker friends. Haven't found a job, so spending 40hrs a week on finishing my Strategy game as a solo dev. Not expecting to magically become a professional developer that can pay my bills, but this is my start!

I spent over a year on Elemental Lands.

Part 4x-lite building and card battler, with decisions outside the combat impacting depth and strategy to connect together the map decisions to the battles.

Sooo... here it is, on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4593190/Elemental\_Lands/

​Battlefield Objectives: Kill the guardian to gain battle buffs to turn a loss to a win!

Card Combat: 2 ways to fight. Battle the enemies with a spell deck that you pair with the party of heroes (each with their own abilitiy) for battlefield combos.

​Territory Conquest: Siege elemental factions expand across a grid/map. Strategically pick your battles (ie. not just a linear level to level progession).

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p.s. I really appreciate the support and you taking a look!

Disclaimer: coding debug AI assisted usage in development. All artwork is hand drawn (non-AI)

I published my Steam page about a month ago, but the game barely got a dozen wishlists.

I submitted the game to a trade show with an alpha version, and the feedback seemed encouraging. Any suggestions?

I launched the Steam page for my first incremental game, One More Shake, about a month ago and I'm currently at 31 wishlists.

Most of them came from Reddit, especially posts in communities related to incremental games. Shorts/Reels haven't really converted so far.

My playtest launches on September 5th, so I'm trying to figure out what I should focus on during these last two weeks. Is the biggest issue my Steam page, the game itself, or simply not getting enough people to see it?

Any feedback on the store page or marketing strategy would be appreciated.

And if the game actually looks interesting to you, a wishlist genuinely helps: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4933650/One\_More\_Shake/

Finally, I’ve put together a short teaser for the Official Demo Trailer of Undercover Love: Where Shadows Meet. A dark visual novel mixing crime, mystery, mafia drama, and slow-burn romance, and I wanted to share it with you all. ❤️

Undercover Love: Where Shadows Meet is coming to PC, with a free demo available now on Steam. https://store.steampowered.com/app/4713130/Undercover_Love__Where_Shadows_Meet/

Play as Alex, a former police officer who enters the mafia underworld to find her sister’s killer, only to cross paths with one of its most feared leaders. Make choices that shape relationships, uncover different parts of the mystery, and influence your ending.

Note: The game features two separate love-interest options. Choosing Emily gives you a fully GL romance. ❤️

You can watch the full demo trailer on YouTube here: YT Link

Embark on expeditions across mysterious islands, choose your path, battle dangerous creatures, and combine powerful perks to create a new build every run.

Wishlist on Steam!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3856950/Bridgelands/

My original trailer listed all the features within the game but it didn't seem to give people a good enough understanding on the game. I completely changed my trailer to reflect that my game is all about the gameplay and vibe. Did I go too far?

Hey everyone,
A few weeks ago I posted here asking for advice about a publisher who reached out to me for my first Steam game. I got some really helpful responses, so I wanted to follow up.
After reviewing the contract, I decided to decline the offer and self-publish.
The exit terms were too one-sided: indefinite contract, expensive buyout clauses, and getting my own game back was nearly impossible if I ever wanted to leave. The deal looked good on the surface but the fine print told a different story.

So here I am, going solo. I just published the demo for my game Dark Workshop Simulator on Steam. I’m a solo developer and this is my first project.

If you’re curious, I’d love for you to check out the demo and let me know what you think. And if you like what you see, a wishlist would mean the world to me.
Thanks to everyone who helped me navigate that publisher decision. This community is solid.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4730290/Dark_Workshop_Simulator/

Hello,

I am making an arpg/incrmental game hybrid game called "Starspire Hunters". You could think of it as Maplestory meets Runescape meets Shelldiver.

Steam Page

My steam page has over 5000 impressions, 2000 views, but I have only been able to walk away with about 45 wishlists (about 2% of views). What could I improve here to, hopefully, convert more views to wishlists?

I plan on revamping my page down the road with improved visuals, description, and capsule art to try to bring more interest, but I would love some feedback and advice before I do so to help guide me to maximize retention.

What stops you from wishlisting? Is the presentation not good enough? Is the premise not interesting or clear enough? Does the game not look fun to you? I would love to hear first impressions and how you'd think it would improve going forward.

I do have an itch.io demo that seems to be well liked. I have gotten a lot of good feedback on what works about the game - plenty of people have really liked it, but I know that might not translate well to a Steam page.

It was a struggle to get a general idea of what letters should look like. At first, I thought of making them in the form of trees, but that was just not practical. So I landed on this style.

Steam page - https://store.steampowered.com/app/4867910/Red_Lake/

Hello guys! We’re currently working on our next YouTube thumbnail. Which one would you click on first? 😁​

Please let us know in the comment : 1, 2 or 3 :)

Check out our steampage here : https://store.steampowered.com/app/4111300/MegaGum/

First game, first Steam page, solo dev with a producer/partner, working around a full-time job in Perth, Australia. Cozy creature-sanctuary game. I'll put my actual numbers up first:

Where I'm sitting:

• 411 wishlists total
• ~190 of those came from roughly everything else I've done: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, Reddit, X, 2 months of it
• 220 came from a single AUTOMATON article
• No demo yet. Page has been up for 2 months. 12 languages localised on the steam page.

So, one Japanese outlet outperformed my entire cross-platform social campaign. That reframed a lot for me and it's why I'm asking rather than guessing.

What I'm trying to decide: target release is April 2027, ~4 months of dev left. But an April launch puts Wholesome Direct (June), the June Next Fest, Wholesome Games Celebration (Aug) and PAX Aus (Oct) all after release. I'm weighing pushing to Sept/Oct 2027 purely to stack those events, without adding scope.

The questions I actually want answered - real numbers if you can:

1. Japanese press. If you got covered by Denfaminicogamer, 4Gamer, Game*Spark, or Indie Freaks - what did it return in wishlists? Did JP streamers follow on their own afterwards, and how long was the lag? Did you pitch in Japanese or English?
2. Wholesome Direct / Wholesome Games Celebration. What did an appearance actually deliver? I keep hearing it's the biggest cozy beat available and I have no idea whether that means 2,000 wishlists or 20,000. Also - how competitive is selection, and how finished did your build need to be?
3. Demo launch. What was your daily wishlist rate in the month before your demo went live, and in the month after? I'm trying to build a realistic model instead of extrapolating off Parcel Simulator's outlier numbers.
4. Next Fest timing. Anyone regret using theirs too early? Specifically: did anyone do Next Fest, launch 2 months later, and wish they'd waited to stack it with a bigger beat?
5. PAX Aus / Aus Indie Showcase. Any Australian devs got numbers on what a booth or Showcase selection returned? $25 entry for a free booth looks like the best ROI in the country on paper, which usually means I'm missing something.
6. The general shape of it. Has anyone deliberately delayed a launch 4–6 months for marketing calendar reasons and regretted it? I'm aware "just a bit more time" is how first games die.

Finally, I'll put up my steam page as reference for what media outlets would be best to approach for me game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4813510/Sanctuary_of_Small_Things/

I've been spending a slightly unreasonable amount of development time lately on something that started with: "The ground needs grass."

This is Icon: Voidfall, the RTS I've been building for about three months now, and one of the things I've really wanted to improve is how much the battlefield itself reacts to what's happening on it.

So naturally, adding grass escalated.

The grass is procedurally generated across the playable NavMesh and GPU instanced rather than being placed as authored objects. It reacts to units moving through it, clears underneath structures, dies around the spreading Malignance used by the Arafel faction, responds to wind and lighting, and eventually regrows when temporary damage to the environment disappears.

Then I added Twisters.

They're neutral environmental actors that wander the NavMesh and physically affect the match. They'll tear paths through the grass, damage structures, pick up smaller units, throw larger ones around, uproot resource trees, scatter their logs, and leave temporary scars through Malignance.

Wildlife and neutral Kobolds will actually recognize one approaching and attempt to get the hell out of its way.

There's also a match mutator called Tempest that turns these things loose during normal games.

And because apparently none of this had become complicated enough yet, I added fire.

Fire spreads through the grass with an intentionally irregular front, chars the ground behind it, produces smoke, can ignite units caught in its path, temporarily sets structures and trees visually ablaze, and eventually burns itself out. The grass then slowly grows back into the scar.

The fun part for me has been trying to do all of this without turning environmental simulation into the most expensive system in an RTS that's already expected to handle hundreds of units.

A lot of what you're seeing here is shader driven, bounded, pooled, or represented through compact world-space data rather than trying to simulate every individual blade of grass or particle as an object.

There are still plenty of rough edges, and fire in particular is currently offline-only while I work out the host-authoritative world-event path it needs for multiplayer.

But this is getting much closer to what I want the world of Voidfall to feel like.

The battlefield isn't just scenery underneath the RTS anymore. It's slowly becoming another participant in the match.

Anyway, here's roughly four minutes of me abusing the environment in the name of game development.

Happy to get into the technical weeds on any of it if anyone is interested.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4982990/Nova_Survivors/