In the years I have spent studying Steam, the biggest revelation I have had is that you should not hold back. You cannot “overexpose” your game. People do not get tired of you. Wishlists don’t get old.

The reason a game does not do well is NOT because too many people heard about, or got tired of hearing about you. The biggest issue is that you did not tell enough people or give your game to enough content creators. 

Indies are so small that the limiting factor is not how carefully they revealed information, but how fun their game is and how many people they told about their game. 

I often see Reddit threads where well meaning but naive redditors will yell at a dev “Do Not release your demo and contact content creators too early, you will over-expose you.”

Here is an actual thread I blacked out the name of the redditor because, they mean well, but I don’t want to make fun of them:

Luckily the dev who was receiving that incorrect advice ignored it. 

That is ByeByeOcean and is the solo creator of Coal LLC, a mining roguelike that blew up to 1770 CCU just one week after the launch of Silksong. YES, they launched 7 days after Silk Song and they didn’t die.

The game was made in one year of full time work.

In today’s blog I am going to show you why you should not hold back your demo and you should not worry that if a content creator plays your demo early, you have used up your one shot at success.

TL;DR: Get that demo out as soon as you have a good demo (not a bad one). Do not delay content creator outreach because you are afraid that you have one shot or people will get tired of your game. 

Reason #1 to not hold back: Indie game visibility is SLOW 

The Fear: “If expose too much of my game too early, everyone will have heard about it already and won’t be excited for my launch.“

The core truth every indie dev must learn is that indie game marketing builds slowly over time. You do not have a bull horn loud enough to talk to everyone. I have seen multi-millionaire developers talk about their game to other indie game devs who had never heard of that game. We indies are too small to even make waves within our own industry.

As an indie dev you must forget everything you learned about marketing by following the release of AAA games.

AAA game marketing can shadow drop, they can have a super bowl ad. They create content embargos. They have the brand recognition, the money, the labor force to quickly ramp up hype and get a game from 0 to 1000000000 wishlists in no time. That is their power. 

Indie game developers cannot do that. They have no audience. They have to slowly build recognition from the ground up. 

The trajectory of Coal LLC is typical for a successful indie game that has no previous audience. Look at this graph of cumulative wishlists. The steeper the curve the faster they are earning wishlists every day. As you can see every week the game has a higher velocity than the previous:

Indies always think they can shadow drop, go viral, get a burst of hype. NO indies cannot do that no matter how much they think they can. 

Indie game marketing is SLOOOOOOOW. It is like an Ion thruster that gradually accelerates to its top speed over years.

Per wikipedia “An ion drive would require two days to accelerate a car to highway speed in vacuum” But they are so efficient with their fuel that in the long run it is great.

Reason #2 to not hold back: If content creators like your game they will play it over and over

The Fear: “If I reach out to content creators early with my demo (way before launch) and they play it, then never EVER play it again. They won’t play it when I need them to at launch.”

This was basically the advice from this poor naive redditor:

The Reality: Well, first off, the Steam player base prefers long replayable games that have tons of content.

But in actuality if you have a game that has *THE MAGIC*, content creators will want to play it over and over again.   

One of the indicators I use to see if a game has a good chance at succeeding is, are content creators so excited about the game they play it over and over.

Specifically, I want to call out what Splattercat said about Terminus Survivors the second time he played it. (Emphasis mine)

We are CHECKING BACK IN … on Terminus in my opinion this is one of the more promising Zombie Survival Games … with this game and he’s been PATCHING PRETTY MUCH WEEKLY since the game came out adding content bug fixing and moving things around and making the game more robust THAT MEANS that I WANT TO COVER IT AGAIN so we’re gonna play the game.

Ironically, Splattercat was MORE LIKELY to replay this game because the developer shared it early and was constantly patching it. 

Here is what Splattercat said in his THIRD replay of the game

it grabbed me in a way that a lot didn’t and so having spent a bunch of time streaming and playing this game it’s been a good seven eight I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG it’s been honestly I DON’T CHECK ANY OF THIS STUFF before I hit the record button it’s been a while since we covered the game THEY’VE ADDED A BUNCH OF NEW MECHANICS so today we’re going to be taking a look at terminus

Splattercat

The upside of having a content creator play your game OVER AND OVER is so great, that there is a huge opportunity cost if you wait until launch to push for the game.

Imagine if any of these developers I list above held their game from creators until the very end of their marketing rollout, they would miss out on literally millions of views. 

Reason #3 to not hold back: Content creators cascade

The Fear: I need to keep my game secret from creators until the month before my full release because I don’t want to use up my one shot early. I need all of them to play it at launch.

The reality: Getting all content creators to play on the same day right at launch is like herding cats. Content creators are a bit cautious about playing a “bad game” that doesn’t perform well for them SO they wait to see how a game performs by watching other content creators. 

If one youtuber sees another one do well with a game, they will play it.

When the demo for Dome Keeper launched in February 10th, 2022, a cascade of Streamers played Dome Keeper after Retromation found it. Here are the Streamers who found and picked up the demo up in sequential order: 

This is what the game’s wishlist chart looked like over the first month of the demo going live. Each of those labeled peaks are a different mega youtuber playing it. See how it “rolls” from one creator to the next bet with several weeks between them.

If you go dark and only contact content creators in the weeks before launch, the cascade takes too long and you miss the momentum in time for the actual launch. 

Reason #4 to not hold back: One influencer won’t change your world

The fear: “All I need is just that one big streamer <INSERT POPULAR STREAMER NAME> to play my game at launch and it will change my life. It will make me a millionaire! So I must be very careful when I reach out so I don’t blow my one shot.”

The reality: Don’t freak out. There is no 1 streamer that will change everything with 1 stream. Instead, it takes many many streamers playing the game multiple times to actually get enough wishlists to do well in the algorithm.

This happened to Dome Keeper which I wrote about here. Dome Keeper is one of those amazing games that can generate a million dollars in revenue in its launch month. But even Dome Keeper didn’t go viral from a single stream.

Look at that wishlist chart for content creators. Notice that the highest spike is only 3,000 wishlists high. In a single day that is great, but it isn’t super ultra mega viral. You just cannot time all your content creators to hit at the same time to give you all the equivalent of 100,000 in a single launch week. That graph is an amazing accomplishment, but notice it’s over a whole month. The total wishlists earned that month was 40,000. 

I recently wrote about Parcel Simulator which had a successful launch. One of the key inflection points was when the demo launched and Real Civil Engineer played it. He is one of THE LARGEST indie-friendly youtubers but even though he has 2.67 MILLION subscribers, the developer estimated that the video generated only about 7000 wishlists. 

7000 is good! But it isn’t overnight millionaire good. 

The wishlists your game collected function like a rechargeable battery that slowly absorbs the excitement energy from several smaller youtuber “sparks” over long periods of time. Then when the launch email is sent to all of your wishlisters on the day it is released, it is like discharging a battery in one gigantic zap. The combined energy of all those sparks is way more powerful.

Reason #5 to not hold back: The Youtube algorithm is SLOW

The fear: I need to time all content creators to play the game on the day of launch so I get those sales. 

The reality: Most views from a hit youtube video are distributed over weeks and weeks. Youtube is not instant virality. The Youtube algorithm slowly increases the number of people who see a video over time if it is performing well. It is testing, expanding, testing, expanding.

Baron Von Games is a content creator with over 2.6 Million subscribers. He played the game Microcivilization on his channel which got 487,000 total views. 

He shared this image of his Youtube data. Baron annotated this graph with how many days it took to reach each view plateau. 

Although half the views came in the first 9 days, it still took another 55 days to reach the other half of the viewers. Ideally you have content creators play your demo months and months before you launch so Youtube can squeeze every bit of visibility out of the video.

If you wait to do your content creator outreach too late, you don’t get to maximize the views. You only get the first spike and have to wait weeks for the real views to come in.

By the way, Baron Von Games actually played Coal LLC on launch day and that video has a long time to go before it reaches its full potential

Reason #6 to not hold back: Content creators are for wishlists not sales

The fear: If I reach out to content creators too early I will only get wishlists. I want sales not wishlists. So I should do the bulk of my outreach at launch. Wishlists get old anyway.

The reality: I don’t have hard core data on this, but my theory (based on a ton of case studies) is that content creators lead to wishlists, not sales. Very few games are exciting enough that the moment players see it played on Youtube, they buy it. 

For example, I often see posts like this on Reddit. 

Basically the dev gets thousands of views and no sales. 

Instead, my experience tells me that the funnel from content creators to sales goes like this in the mind of the player

  • Content creator #1 plays it: Shopper: “I am aware but uninterested”
  • Content creator #2 plays it: Shopper: “Oooh, interesting,I am wishlisting it.”
  • Demo is now available email goes out: Shopper “Oh ya I remember this game”
  • Release date trailer:Shopper:  “Great! It is coming out in a few days!”
  • Email: A game you wishlisted is now released at 20% off. Shopper “Cool I will buy it!”

Content creators are for generating wishlists, Steam widgets and the emails are what actually convert to sales. That doesn’t mean content creators are useless. That just means they are one link in a bigger chain.

And no, those wishlists don’t get old. Here is the conversion cohort chart for Zero Sievert that I wrote about back here.

Notice how the highest converting month was the month that Splattercat played the game for a second time! That is 6-months before launch. The 3rd highest month was the first time Splattercat played the game 1 YEAR before the game released.

Also, notice how Splattercat played it in November and again in June. Seeeeeee, Reason #2 is real; content creators often play games multiple times (but only if they like them).

Reason #7 to not hold back:  You don’t get to pick when and who covers you

The fear: Well, I am going to be strategic. I am going to avoid early coverage so that I can use it later when I really need it at launch

The reality: Content creator coverage is not an on demand potion in an RPG. You don’t get to choose when you use it. You can’t save it for later. You don’t get to decide.

We indies are so small we are at the mercy of the winds and currents of the market.

Content creators often have a backlog of games they are going to play. Even if they are interested in your game they will schedule it for the end of their current queue. Whenever that is.

Unless you are the hottest release out there, you cannot dictate the time they cover it. Instead, you must treat it like fishing. Your demo is the baited hook. You gotta throw it in the lake and hold it there as long as you can because the more time it is in the water, the more chances a random fish (a content creator) will find and bite it (play your game on stream).

We are at the mercy of content creators stumbling upon us and have to maximize the possibility space. You do not get to choose when and how, so you must increase the chances. 

The successful devs behind Crashlands 2 argued this from their own experience in a recent podcast:

Key quote

If it were true, the rationale here would be to say that if you could get the same wish list from a particular user now versus in the future that you should try to get it in the future instead right now. But, you don’t have control over that. You don’t have control over when a person’s going to see a post that you put up when they’re going to see anything right when they decide to wish list it, when they see it on Steam. You don’t have any control over that. You can try to get people to see stuff and you can try to get it in front of them a bunch of times. And what we have found is even via our most effective means of communicating with people, which is our newsletter, that our conversion of our newsletter recipients to wishlisters is like a flat thing. Every time we send a newsletter roughly the same number of people end up wishlisting the game. And so if we try to do all of that like later on then we’re going to try to do it all the month before launch, we were just going to miss a tenth as many people wish list in the game. Because the best thing to do is get stuff in front of people as many times as possible so that they have a chance to not only see it because almost anywhere you show people stuff, you’re crowded out by other stuff too.

Adam Coster

We indies cannot overexpose our game. Don’t hold back.

Reason #8 to not hold back:  Velocity builds slowly 

The fear: I don’t want early coverage. I want to save all my hype for the final push at the end of launch.

The reality: Hype doesn’t suddenly appear. Instead it is slowly ramped up over time and over lots and lots of content creators playing your game.

One of the mysteries I still don’t fully understand about the Steam algorithm is how the organic, non-promotion wishlist velocity of a game works. 

Some games earn 300 wishlists a day regardless of whether they post to social media that day or get covered by a content creator. 

Some games get a wishlist spike when they are in a festival or covered by a streamer, and then the very next day, the momentum falls and they are back down to 10 wishlists a day. 

Other than *THE MAGIC*, I don’t know what causes some games to have that higher resting wishlist rate. 

But usually velocity looks like this from Coal LLC. 

I asked the developer how he slowly built this hype up over 10 months. Here is what he said. Notice how it is constant work, with many small wins over time built brick by brick. Also see the reasons in brackets I call out.

I emailed like 30 or so creators whose emails I found almost immediately after launching – I think I was just searching for who played Wall World/Domekeeper at the time.

Got nothing back from anyone. [Reason #8]

Entered Steam Feb Next Fest. 

The day after Steam Next Fest ended, Olexa played my game and I got 1,000 wishlists in like 2 days (after I emailed him almost 2 months prior in January). [Reason #4]

A couple other content creators who I didn’t reach out to also played it after this. [Reason #3]

Demo was still pretty rough at this stage. Was working on improving it. Even though the next version wasn’t ready I still sent out a second batch of emails in this time, which led to Orbital Potato also playing the rough version. Demo median play time was 1 hour 9 mins or so at this stage. 

Finally updated the demo to it’s current version on May 8th. It was MUCH more playable/interesting for content creators, but still took a lot of time before another content creator picked it up after emailing everyone. But eventually Angry Tom played it (20th May), then Blitz (5th June).  [Reason #3]

Things went CRAZY when DangerouslyFunny played it (I never emailed him), he ended up doing 3 videos on it (once every two weeks – you can see the bumps in the graph) 28th June, 6th July, 28th July…  [Reason #2]

Having a popular content creator making multiple videos on my game unprompted was what started to get me pretty excited (plus I’d just made it onto popular upcoming list at this point). [Reason #10]

One YouTuber that was actually really big for me, was a relatively new youtuber called Morequis. His videos on my game are his most popular videos by a big margin, so he just kept making more and more and it found almost a new audience. I think that’s what kept my wishlist rate pretty high for the last couple weeks before launch [Reason #2] [Reason #9]

-ByeByeOcean

Reason #9 to not hold back: Content creators give you motivation

When strangers find and enjoy your demo publicly, it is a huge boost of confidence to your development. Low motivation? Watch them enjoying your game. 

Also watching them play helps you understand what you need to fix before release. 

Here is ByeByeOcean again on what it was like when they started playing Coal LLC

It was almost exactly one year working on the game full time, I started in September 2024. Originally I was going to release some version of the original demo after Steam Next Fest in February to move on to the next project. When the content creators started to make videos, it made me push to keep improving the game. Still had lots more ideas to implement in Coal LLC but wanted to just get the game out the door earlier rather than later because it was my first game.

  • ByeByeOcean

Reason #10 to not hold back: You can escape coverage limbo

Content creators are busy and even if they like your game, sometimes some other game jumps the line and pushes you back.

Here is an excellent Wanderbots blog about this where he calls it Coverage Limbo.

The simplest answer is that coverage limbo is almost entirely a direct result of how over-saturated the games market is at the moment. I’d say prior to 2018 it was still possible for creators to cover every major release, or at least every release in their specific niche. But now there are just so many games that no one has any room to breathe outside of extremely rare lulls or regularly scheduled market disturbances like the Steam seasonal sales.

If you do an initial outreach about your demo.

Then patch the demo

Then reach out again, you have a second chance to get out of Limbo.

Summary

So what can we learn from all this?

  1. Make a good game (don’t make a bad one).
  2. You should post your Steam page and announce your game once you have the core fundamentals locked in (here is a blog post on what I consider the minimum requirements).
  3. Don’t make a demo that has bugs and looks unprofessional. YES Do a playtest and a beta because you don’t want to ship a demo that is an unfinished bag of bugs.
  4. BUT DON’T delay too long waiting for the game to be PERFECT. 
  5. Don’t delay outreach because you are afraid you will “use up” your one chance at getting a content creator to play your game. Don’t let fear be the reason you don’t start your marketing.

Every game is different so I can’t give you a bulletproof checklist of when your demo is ready. Most of knowing “when it is ready for the public” you understand after releasing a lot of games. It is a learned skill that only comes from experience. 

You should also get advice from trusted game developers who are there to support you. Let them play your demo and tell you whether it is ready for prime time.

My recommendation though is that you should bias towards releasing your demo and outreach to content creators before you are 100% comfortable with it. You should err on the side of releasing it too early. It isn’t the end of the world if you release the demo and a single content creator says it sucks. Keep patching, keep reaching out to more influencers.

If your game underperforms, it is not because you launched the demo before it was ready and you blew your one shot at a first impression. There are infinite content creators out there, they are always trying new games and checking in on games that didn’t work the first time.