Starfield Launched on September 6th, 2023. It will arguably be one of the biggest launches this year.

I have written about how I think Indies over-emphasize their release date and are overly cautious when it comes to launching along side a AAA release. In today’s blog I want to look at Chillquarium a game that did well despite launching on the SAME DAY as Starfield.

I want to show you that it is not a fool’s errand to launch during a big release

The tiny Chillquarium

Release date: September 6, 2023 (DAY OF Starfield)

Chillquarium is an adorably cute pixelart incremental game where you manage a fish tank. It launched on the SAME DAY as Starfield. Look at it, September 6th!

Chillquarium was developed by one person named Ben Reber over a 21 month period as a part-time passion project. 

This is the story of how one brave developer turned his weaker-than-typical wishlist numbers into success by launching against the biggest game of the year. 

I reached out to the developer of the game Ben to ask him how he did what he did. 

Low numbers leading into launch

“Leading into launch week I had about 5,200 wishlists (A most wishlisted rank of #2334). Among these, about 1,300 came from NextFest and the rest were almost exclusively from Reddit. I signed up for a bunch of festivals but didn’t get into any of them, and made about 2 dozen TikToks but none got more than 3,000 views.“

Ben Reber

So why on earth did developer Ben launch on Starfield day? 

I looked at the SteamDB release calendar and tried to pick a day that didn’t have many titles launching, which was September 6th – Starfield full launch day. It seems like enough games were scared away from Starfield that release volume was significantly lower on Steam.

I figured my game wasn’t quite big enough to make it under normal circumstances, so I may as well take the risk. The way I described it is I’m not gunning for first place in the public eye, just trying to have a seat on the bus

Ben Reber

Ben got the idea for this strategy from my blog post about how you shouldn’t be afraid to launch along side a AAA game. For that blog post I created this meme

And that strategy worked!

Here is Chillquarium and Starfield, basically the only two games releasing that day.

5000 wishlists and a most wishlisted rank of #2334 is usually not enough to get onto Popular Upcoming, however when everyone else was too scared to launch against Starfield, the field was cleared and the Steam algorithm is looking for ANY game to put there. 

So what happened at launch?

I got onto Popular Upcoming roughly 30 hours before release. This resulted in 1,900 wishlists in a single day, which was mind blowing, almost 6x more than the most I’d gotten in a single day at the time. I pressed the launch button at noon on Wednesday and asked people on my Discord server, then 350 strong, to leave a positive review so I could reach the 10 review threshold as fast as possible. I wound up on New and Trending ~20 minutes after launch, and stayed there for a full week.

Ben Reber

What Popular Upcoming Does to your Wishlist Count:

The algorithm for New and Trending works like this: If you reach some mysterious sales and concurrent player thresholds (don’t ask what the number is, it is a Valve secret), the Steam algorithm puts your game on New and Trending. Your game stays on the list until more games appear on the list which bumps the older ones off. So because every developer except for Ben was scared of Starfield, Chillquarium had fewer games to bump him off the New & Trending list. For more detailed analysis of New & Trending check Simon Carless’s blog post about it.

Look at this screenshot! It is just Chillquarium and Starfield hanging out next to each other. New & Trending provided Chillquarium 750,000 impressions and 40,000 page visits (click thru 2.5%).

Note that New & Trending is basically a First In First Out (FIFO) stack where the newest game pops off the oldest game. This screenshot does not mean that Chillquarium is ranked higher than Starfield. It just means Starfield released a couple hours before Chillquarium so is further down the list.

Discovery Queue Help

Ben provided me the following traffic charts. The front page got him 150,000 total visits, but even that was dwarfed by the discovery queue, which granted 300,000 so far and is still providing 10k/day for the time being.

The light green line is the discovery queue. It is such a potent force for getting visibility for your game. Read more about how the discovery queue works with my blog post about it. 

Once his game got off “New & Trending” the streamers continued to play Chillquarium. Each spike in the following chart corresponds to streamer coverage. Note how the DQ spikes 1 day after the views spike. That is just the DQ picking up after an influx of YouTube traffic.

Total sales

Within the first week after launch, Chillquarium gathered 33,000 lifetime wishlist additions minus deletions, and about 5,000 purchases and activations, which is about a 15 percent conversion rate. Most sales didn’t come from wishlist activations, instead they come from people just buying the game outright. In the first week the game sold just past 20,000 copies.

As of October 22nd, total copies sold is just shy of 35,000. Wishlist activations and gifts make up about 8,500 of that.

“My Discord server has ballooned from 300 members to nearly 2,000 since release”

Ben Reber

Reddit Marketing

In the run up to release, Ben used Reddit as his main top of funnel visibility channel. 

My number one piece of advice for promoting on Reddit is to find good niche subreddits to post in. These subreddits (<250k users, roughly speaking) aren’t big enough to have a single viral post that winds up on the front page and gets you thousands of wishlists, but they do have other benefits: Lower post volume means they are less weary of ‘promotional material’, so you’re much less likely to get a post removed. I only ever had two posts taken down, in r/gaming and r/aquariums (600k members).

Ben Reber

What subreddits worked for him?

  • r/shrimptank –  post about adding shrimp to an aquarium game is exciting — they’re not used to seeing games and are happy to be represented and give you feedback.
  • r/incremental_games
  • r/gachagaming
  • r/aquarium

Why it is ok to release against a big AAA release

The reason people say not to go up against the AAA games is because the influencers will be so preoccupied with playing and talking about that BIG AAA GAME that they won’t have time for your pathetic little game. Here is a post from an influencer summing up that sentiment:

There are 4 reasons why this is not exactly correct

Reason 1: The press doesn’t really cover indie games and when they do it doesn’t matter much

In my experience, a really good press article will get you maybe 1000 wishlists tops. But more typically it is 500 wishlists and even as low as 150 wishlists. 

Chillquarium’s appearance on New & Trending yielded 750,000 impressions and 40,000 page visits (click thru 2.5%). 

No article from the press can pull in those numbers. 

Therefore, if you have two choices: 

Option A) picking a normal non-AAA day when you maybe get more press coverage but have more competition with other indie releases for Popular Upcoming and New & Trending

Option B) A day when you might not get any press coverage but have a high likelihood of getting on Popular Upcoming and New & Trending because there is only one other competitor (that AAA game)

Visibility from Steam dwarfs everything, so I would still opt for any action where Steam visibility is maximized. 

But again, let me emphasize that the press RARELY covers small indies.

Reason 2: The big indie streamers didn’t play Starfield

Streamers are huge. They really help you get wishlists and sales. People assumed that the entire streamer-verse would be playing Starfield, but that just wasn’t true.

Below I listed 6 streamers that have proven to help small indies get a measurable boost in sales and wishlists when they play your game. I then went and searched how many times each one of them played Starfield. Results below:

Next I looked at just the streamers who played Chillquarium:

As you can see there is not much overlap between Starfield and indie game streamers who will play your game. I know it seems like everyone is talking about Starfield, but the games market is enormous. Even a huge release like Starfield is a tiny drop in the ocean of games everyone is playing on any given day. 

Reason 3: All other developers are too scared

I know it sounds like I am exaggerating but I have proof that everyone but Ben was too scared of Starfield.

Simon Carless and his crew over at Game Discover Co built a tool that looks at every Steam game release and uses a soup of numbers to try and quantify how much “Hype” a game has leading into and upon release. The higher the number, the more hype a game has. You can read about his hype score works here and to get full access to the numbers I am about to reference, you need to subscribe to Game Discover Co Plus here. I subscribe, it is a good service.

So anyway, leading into release, Starfield had a hypescore of 143,629 

For comparison, Cities: Skylines II has a hype score of 54,302

Chillquarium had a hype score of 186

Since every game has a hype score, we can look at the sum of every game launching every week and determine how many “BIG GAMES” are launching. 

Here are September’s releases 

September 2023 by weekCumulative Hype Score of all games launching that weekNote
Week 1162,100The week Starfield and Chillquarium launched
Week 227,200Another very slow week. People were THAT scared of Starfield.
Week 3248,500Notable launches: Party Animals, Payday 3, Lies of P, Mortal Kombat 1
Week 449,400Another low week. Everyone was like week 3 is the safe bet, week 4 is too far.

Now Week 1 seems crazy! 162,100! But, if you remove Starfield’s hype score of 143,629, that week had a cumulative hype score of only 18,471.

Other than Starfield, that score is SO low. No other significant games were launching. 

The only week with a lower cumulative hype score was 2800 and that was during the Steam Winter Sale when NO games launch because the storewide sales takes over the front page of Steam. 

If we look at non-storewide sales weeks, there is only one other week that was lower and that was the first week of June for some reason with a hype score of 18,100. I think everyone was on vacation.

The games industry was so scared of Starfield that everyone skipped Week 2 in September too so it had an abnormally low score of 27,200.

In short, nobody else was launching a game the two weeks after Starfield except for a bunch of developers who were either too clueless or too crazy-smart to get intimidated by it.

Remember, Popular Upcoming and New & Trending have 12 slots. You don’t need to be the number 1 game to appear on there, just among the top 12.

Side Note: Week 3 has a cumulative hype of 248,500. It is so high because Party Animals, Payday 3, Lies of P, Mortal Kombat 1 were all launching that week. I have a feeling all of those games saw Starfield and decided to shift 2 weeks later and ironically found themselves in a MUCH more competitive week than if they just stuck to September Week 1. 

Reason 4: Steam is huge

I don’t think most people appreciate how ungodly large the gaming industry is. On any given day there are almost 10,000,000 concurrent players on Steam who are actively playing a game.

Here is the lifetime Concurrent Player count for Starfield. The most played day was Sunday September 10th when 330,723 players were running it on Steam.

On SteamDB you can see the total number of active Steam players who actually are playing any game.

On Sunday September 10th there were 9,785,353 people playing a game that day. Here is what that looks like:

On September 10th, 96.6% of people were NOT playing Starfield. I bet some of those people would play your game. In fact, 1373 players (or .0145% of Steam) were playing Chillquarium and that game did just fine for the developer.

My advice about the most important lesson: 

As it is currently configured, the biggest factor that determines whether you will get onto Popular Upcoming or New & Trending is not the size of the other games you are releasing against, but the total number of them. Those 2 front-page widgets are sorted by release date, NOT total wishlists. 

I have seen developers who have games with 100,000 wishlists going into launch and they never appear on Popular Upcoming because there were so many other games launching that week that there wasn’t room for them on the list. 

So, look at the Steamdb release calendar, ignore which big games are launching, and instead focus on how MANY games are launching that week that have follower counts greater than 700 (because they are likely to clog up the Popular Upcoming List).

You can do whatever you want, but if you are launching a game and wishlists are a bit weak, it might make sense to swim against the current and launch the same week as a AAA launch. As I showed, most games get scared off by them leaving the field clear.

That said, don’t expect your chart placement to automatically sell as many copies as Chillquarium; the game is a VERY good game. Major streamers such as Blitz and DangerouslyFunny played the game MULTIPLE times to their millions of subscribers. Very few games are good enough for that privilege. 

Also Chillquarium is a clicker / incremental game which typically have relatively HUGE concurrent player counts because the game is designed to be left open and let the numbers roll up. Median playtimes for these games are very high and the Steam algorithm rewards them for that. Incremental games are a very viable genre.

In summary, let’s reread my favorite quote from Ben.

I figured my game wasn’t quite big enough to make it under normal circumstances, so I may as well take the risk. The way I described it is I’m not gunning for first place in the public eye, just trying to have a seat on the bus.

Ben Reber

What a great attitude!