The way I write the HowToMarketAGame blog is that I have this google doc titled “2025 Blog Ideas” and any time I hear about a weird marketing trick, see an interesting game, or see someone complain about something on Reddit I write down a sentence or two so that I can go back and research it in depth and turn it into a blog post that you can read. 

Sometimes newer stories come in and I never get a chance to research or flesh out that 1 sentence idea. 

At the end of the year I start a new document called “2026 Blog Ideas” and everything from 2025 is lost forever. FOR.EV.ER. 

Sad. 

So in this post I am going to run through many of the ideas and give a couple sentences with my thoughts. THESE ARE NOT FULLY RESEARCHED IDEAS. Please do not start a company based on these or spend 5 years making a game because you read one of these sentences. Please don’t yell at me saying “but did you consider X or Y because that is survivorship bias” I am telling you, these are half-researched but could be helpful if you research them yourselves. 

If you really are interested in one of these let me know, maybe I will move it to 2026.

Chocolate tier report

Most devs don’t talk about it but when you reach a certain level of sales Valve will send you a box of very expensive chocolates for christmas. Colloquially devs say your game reached “Chocolate-tier.” I love this secret culture stuff of Steam.

Based on my very small sample size, there seems to be 2 chocolate tiers. 

At about ~$900,000 gross revenue you get this smaller box of chocolate that costs €93.00. 

If you reach over $1,000,000 in gross sales the UK and European developers get this box set

North American developers get this box set (Note that with conversion, the European developers get about $30 more chocolate than the North Americans.)

Now if you read this and think “I will stop at nothing and work longer hours to make a game so perfect that I will make chocolate tier” consider that $1,000,000 gross revenue means Valve earned $300,000 from you. That gift chocolate is basically a 0.08% tip on your revenue. 

Instead think of it this way: if you shipped a game, just buy yourself a $245 box of chocolate! Treat yourself. You don’t need to wait for Valve to give you a 0.08% tip. Shipping a game is hard. That alone is worth the box. 

You can just do things.

Please don’t make games about the holidays, they don’t sell.

We watch Christmas movies at Christmas. We watch Horror movies at Halloween. So it makes sense that we might play games that match the holiday! Make a quick and dirty Christmas game, release it in November. Easy money! 

(Data from this article)

NO! Please don’t do that.

If I look at all games released between 2020 through today there has been only 1 holiday-related game that earned over 1000 reviews and it is a horror game:

Christmas Massacre (1000 reviews)

Here are the next best performing Christmas games with reviews 

Gamers just don’t have the same tradition of gathering around and soaking up holiday cheer transmitted via video games. And don’t at me. I know about Christmas NiGHTS. It was a free game sent out as a promotion for Sega Saturn. It is beloved but doesn’t prove this works.

Why don’t holiday themed games sell?

Traditionally, holidays meant you got a Christmas gift of the game you have been looking forward to all year. That is why most AAA games launch just before the holidays. People don’t want to play a janky rapid release game to capture the holiday spirit, they want to play the best game of the year.

Now, I do think if you already have a hit game, it makes sense to release DLC or do a free update patch where you put snow on the main menu or something. That’s fun. 

Just please don’t make a game about Christmas or any other holiday thinking you will get free visibility. 

Midweek Madness Deal 

Image from Steamworks documentation

A midweek madness deal is like a super Daily Deal. More visibility for longer. The tricky part is they are reserved for high earners. How high?

I don’t have permission to share which game gave me this information so you just have to trust me on this one. But this mystery game earned a Midweek Deal from Valve after hitting $800,000 gross revenue in the first 2 months of being on sale.

During the Midweek Madness deal they sold 15,000 units or about $130,000 in a week. Pretty good if you can make it happen. 

Pixelart is too good for platformers

I love pixelart. Every game I have ever made is pixelart. But it is so sad that most pixel artists default to making platformers. WHY!?!

Please pixel artists, your art is being wasted on platformers. Those fans take you for granted. They don’t love you, they don’t deserve you.

Instead your pixel art skills would do so much better if they were used to make crafty-buildy-strategy-simulationy games. Here are a bunch of crafty-buildy pixelart games more deserving of your awesome pixelart skills. 

Note there are a couple low-poly 3D games that have awesome pixel art textures. They count. 

Please, no more platformers

Look at this game! Cast n Chill (5652 reviews!) is a idle, management fishing game and it has beautiful pixel art.

Look at Keep Driving. I love this “digitized” pixelart style that was all the rage back in 1993-ish period.

Super Fantasy Kingdom was my second favorite game of the year. I love this look. Top down Pixelart cities with clouds hovering over Link-To-The-Past Trees are my dream scape. 

Here is my game of the year BALL x PIT with its awesome quasai-3D pixelart skeletons. I love that little guy with the crown looking like he is sitting in a Tetromino hottub. That guy is living his best after-life. Best skeletons of the year award.

This is what the mod dashboard looks like for reddit

Richard of Zemore Indie consulting is a moderator for the popular r/indiegames subreddit. He showed me what the mod dashboard looks like. 

This is interesting because a lot of people are frustrated when they post about their game on Reddit and the mods kill it. 

The thing about reddit they always say is try to be a redditor with a game and not a game developer that posts to reddit. 

Basically you should interact with the community you are posting to.

This first image is a person that Richard said they are going to ban. Look, they are flagged as a spammer, has 1 karma point in the community. Most of his contributions are in r/aww, r/drawing, r/photo which accepts anything cute

It is pretty obvious looking at this that the person is just a spammer. 

Reddit mods aren’t dumb.

Richard said the following post is considered a “good contributor” and will not get banned / taken down.

Look you see that the community karma is 433. They have had posts removed but they have participated in other ways. Most of their contributions are in gaming subreddits.

The account is also much older and has much higher karma than the first user.

Again, just try to participate in Reddit. Don’t be a spammer. You can’t fool people, they aren’t robots. They are real people.

Slow build from 6.8% conversion to 13.7%?

This game is neat and had a slow build. 

A lot of people ask me to do more “middle income” games or games that had a “slow build” instead of “viral hit.”

Well here is one: Tower Factory

The game was 16 months of dev time by a solo dev. 

When they launched the game they had a conversion rate of 6.8% in their first month. 

  • They didn’t offer a launch discount (dev still unsure if that was a good or bad decision).
  • The game went on sale for the first time, with a 20% discount during the Winter Sales.
  • Steam offered to feature the game during the sales, which they accepted.
  • Content creators responded much better to the demo compared to the Early Access launch, despite the dev sending only around 60 demo keys versus nearly 300 for the Early Access release.
  • 52,000 copies and a 13.7% conversion rate 1 year later. 
  • Another thing the dev noticed is that every time a big streamer plays the game, it has a noticeable impact on sales. For example, at the beginning of October a youtuber called oPiilZ uploaded a video to his YouTube channel and that generated a bit more than 1,000 sales in 1–2 weeks, mostly from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kazakhstan.

From the developer “My feeling is that if the game had more promotion it could convert quite well, but since I don’t have a publisher or much experience, it’s really hard for me to judge how much money would be worth spending and where, so I end up not doing anything and just keep sending some keys to content creators whenever there’s an update.”

Now how slow is slow?

In the first month Tower Factory earned 329 reviews. 

That is typically the lowest I see, while still eventually reaching “real steam.”

Here is their 1 year wishlist chart. ALMOST reaching 1000 reviews. Will probably do it after the winter sale.

So yes games can slowly build up to “Real Steam” over a 1 year period of time, but still there is usually a starting spike of more than 250 reviews in the first month.

Launch stuff during the holidays because the game industry goes on vacation

Last year, the Cairn marketing team launched their Demo right before the Steam Winter sale. They got the demo onto Trending Free.

Then they stayed on that list and therefore on the front page of Steam for 1.5 months. This is what Lauranne the director of marketing told Simon Carless: 

“We were also at the top of the Steam Free demos page for most of that [Dec 2024-Jan 2025] time, where the Overwhelmingly positive rating was really pushed to players.”

  • Lauranne 

Basically the games industry takes December and January off and doesn’t launch any new games. So there is nothing to bump you off the lists if you get on them. But please, if you do it, don’t make a holiday game.

Simon Carless Wrote a bit about this here.

I wrote about Cairn’s performance in Steam Next Fest.

205 push ups

Someone posted this saucy comic/meme on Reddit.

So I calculated the number of pushups you need to do using vginsights database tool. 

If you read this comic on January 1st 2025, you would have to do 205 pushups this year. I can do that. I am not as buff as that dude in the comic.

Side note: 10 Roguelike deckbuilders hit 1000 reviews (my unofficial barometer of success). Giving games a 4.87% success rate. 

Here are how many push ups you would have to do for other genres in 2025. I put % of games that hit 1000 reviews in parens

  • 69 push-ups for Open World Survival Craft (20%)
  • 115 push-ups for Job Simulator (34.7%)
  • —-> 205 pushups for Roguelike-Deckbuilder (4.87%)
  • 270 push-ups for Metroidvania (4%)
  • 388 push-ups for City Builder (6.4%)
  • 504 push-ups for Tower Defense (2.57%)
  • 936 push-ups for Idle (2.88%)
  • 947 push-ups for Puzzle Platformers (1.47%)
  • 1365 push-ups for 3D Platformer (1.46%)

I don’t know why people always pick on Roguelike Deckbuilders specifically as being over-saturated. People are just trying their best. 

To get real gains, why isn’t that buff dude doing a pushup for every Puzzle Platformer? 

BTW I didn’t add “Horror” or “RPG” to this chart because for this chart I am just doing a quick and sloppy 1 tag analysis per genre and those 2 genres are notorious for their tags being applied to every time of game. To get an accurate count of actual horror games you have to do stuff like “horror” + “ dark” + “blood”. Too much work, I am just doing an end of the year round up here.

Don’t tell writers that you fed their blog into ChatGPT

Weirdly people message me excitedly to say “I fed your blog into chat gpt and asked it how to market my game!”

I think they are proud to tell me that. 

But look at it from my point of view, I am hand-typing every blog (typos and all) and I want to make a fun unique experience for you. I am like a chef composing an excellent curated meal for you. 

When you throw my words into chat gpt it is the equivalent of throwing the fancy meal I made for you into a blender and then chugging the slop that comes out.

I am not your dad, I don’t care that you did that. I am not actually anti AI in this regard. I know people will do it. But don’t tell me about it. As the culture changes, so must the etiquette. Please be aware that writers don’t want to hear that you took a blender to their words. We like the words we put together in that order. 

Besides the etiquette of telling us, chat gpt is still really bad at summarizing my advice. I found you can lead ChatGPT to answer the question based on how you ask it. 

Like if I say “I am very nervous about announcing my game too early, what does Chris Zukowski say I should do” 

You get this. Chat GPT likes to make you feel good by lying. All of this advice is terrible. The Steam algorithm does not care about “conversion ratios.” You do not get one “first impression.” All of this is wrong. So so wrong.  

Please folks. Humans are still cool. Please read and research stuff written by real humans. AI seems cool but usually leads you down the wrong path confidently.

Black Background games

Working on your first game? Aren’t good at art? Want to make a deep deep crafty-buildy-game? You should make it have a black background. 

The great great grandfather of all of this is of course Rogue and his son Nethack.

But the grand father for current indies is Dwarf Fortress

Currently, a game with basic pixelart (usually 1 color per sprite) looks hardcore and signals to players “This game is so hard core that the dev doesn’t have time to make art, they spent all their resources on the deep meta-game.”

Screenshot for He Is Coming. Look, each sprite is only 1 color! Amazing!

My advice is if you are thinking “I am going to make this deep open world, rogue like, systematic survival game and I need to hire a team of artists and get 1 million dollars in funding.”

Instead, make a black background pixelart version of the game, see if it works, then make the sequel the full 3D version.

I should make a steam curator page for this, but those always suck. So here is my list of games I have seen that pull this off:

Reviews at the time I wrote this in parenthesis. Year released in brackets.

I am not saying black backgrounds are a guarantee for success (there are many games in this list that underperformed) but what you should take away is that you can have a hit despite having very simplistic art. Most of these games are deep crafty buildy games (with the exception of Baba Is You). Basically look at black background games as a way to save money and get games out faster. BUT they should be deeeeeeep.

The other benefit is you have my permission to do a pixelart ALL-CAP capsule:

But hiring an artist makes it look even better. I love this capsule:

BTW this 1985 “capsule” for Rogue goes so hard

Thank you for reading my blog this year

I really appreciate you reading this. Thank you if you bought my course. 

Youtube still sucks so I am so glad you spent the time reading this. You are cool.

If any of these stories interested you let me know, I might do a deeper dive.