Feel Confident marketing your game
I think the biggest reason so many indie games “fail” is that teams enter into making huge, overly ambitious projects that take years to release before they are ready. Indie teams do not spend enough time making smaller (and less profitable) games first before transitioning to multi-year projects. I know Continue Reading
This is my 3rd and Final Early access data deep dive where I look at the games that have had an early access release on Steam. Here is part 1 where I wondered how many games participate in EA and part 2 where I estimated how well you will do Continue Reading
Indie game development is hard and at times it seems like nothing works or everything that used to work no longer does any more. In today’s post I wanted to show off 3 games and 3 marketing campaigns that achieved huge successes in terms of wishlists or sales. Best of Continue Reading
Steam has been rolling out a new presentation trying to dispel some more myths that people keep spouting about visibility, wishlists, sales, and “the algorithm.” They actually posted the new presentation slides here which you can read and download here. I heard the presentation and I wanted to provide some Continue Reading
How games get real visibility One of the negative side effects about my writing about amazing success is that developers who are just starting out can see games getting 100s of wishlists a day (that is not hyperbole) while they are stuck getting 1-3 per day. To a new developer Continue Reading
A couple weeks ago I presented a very high level look at Early access. What I found was that for some games it was actually better to release in Early Access (and go full 1.0) that it was to just launch in full you can read the full analysis here. Continue Reading
I just left a Zoom call for Valve’s 3-times-a-year pre-Next-Fest Q&A. It is a great service Valve does to support developers before before the big show (Next Fest starts in October 9th) and I would recommend you attend them if you can. I have been to just about every one Continue Reading
So everyone knows the CanYouPetTheDog twitter account. However, from multiple developers, I have heard that getting tweeted by them doesn’t really move wishlist numbers (well not enough to justify the hours it takes to add the code and art assets necessary for a pet-able dog). However, recently, multiple developers have Continue Reading
This post is Part 1 of my series of articles looking Early Access. To read part 2 all about Estimating EA success based on your EA launch numbers, click here. People always ask me, should I do Early Access? For first time developers, I almost always said no. Just release Continue Reading
In January of this year (2023) I did a little thought experiment: “how many games each year got at least 1000 reviews?” The Steam algorithm is basically a giant filter. When a game launches Steam looks at early sales and if it likes what it sees, the algorithm determines that Continue Reading