Hello! This is the second installment of case studies about games released by our Moderators. Today we are looking at Parcel Simulator. A surprising number of the HTMAG moderators have gone on to release hit games! Yes yes yes correlation != causation. But, come on, something is rubbing off on these folks for sure.
Parcel Simulator is a steam game that someone described as “Paper Please + shipping simulator: “
Should we call it “Cardboards please?”
Basically the game is a Crafty-buildy game where you simulate running a parcel warehouse but the interesting twist is that most of the mundane work can be optimized away in the late game by using some light automation features.
It was developed by Dan of Dansan Digital a 1-man dev studio based out of the UK.
Check out these stats:
42,000 wishlists at launch (Dan says he “only” got 2k from Popular Upcoming)
10k units sold within 24h
15k units in 48h
50k units sold in the first 2 weeks
Schedule
May 22, 2023 – Steam Coming Soon Page launches
~~LONG Misery of not having a demo~~
August 26, 2024 – Back to School Games Celebration!
July 15, 2024 – Hypetrain Digital’s Automation Games Sale 2024 (earned about 1,000 wishlists)
~~LONG misery of no demo continues~~
Feb 24, 2025 – Demo is launched for the first time
From May 2023 through February 2025 Dan earned 7,000 wishlists mostly from Festivals.
Over essentially 640 days he gained about 11 wishlists per day.
Then Dan launched his demo and wishlists shot up quickly. On average, Parcel Simulator gained over 362 wishlists per day for over 116 days.
When Parcel Simulator launched in June, Dan gathered over 42,000 wishlists.
Demos are critically important for visibility for most games.
So if demos are so good, why did Dan wait almost 2 years before launching it?
Initially the game was just going to be a 3-6 month mini learning project, no Demo planned etc., super basic inspection mechanics. But then when I launched the page and saw some interest (a few hundred wishlists) I thought I’d look into how to do things properly, and so I just watched a bunch of your GDC/etc. talks and saw you raving about demos constantly
It did take longer than I thought for sure! But I think that was me naively making my first game and not realising how much time that last 10% of a demo/game can take! The Demo gave players access to the first 10-20% of the full version of the game, so in terms of difficulty it was just a case of getting the full version of the game super polished and then locking everything beyond the first couple warehouse tiers from players. I didn’t have to develop all of the features in the full release at the point of Demo launch, but polish was certainly important and took a long time to get right.
Dan
Game development is hard! My only advice is to try your best to work as hard as you can to prioritize features that might appear in the demo.
Side note Dan managed to get into two festivals despite not having a demo. You can apply to festivals pre demo, they are just harder to get into and they don’t do as well as if you have a demo.
Steam Next Fest
Dan entered the February 2025 Steam Next Fest (shortly after launching his demo). At the time he had under 10,000 wishlists.
Dan looked at my Steam Next Fest benchmarks and expected that he should have earned about 1500 wishlists from the event. But he way overperformed and got 10,000 wishlists during the event.
I launched the Demo in Feb, just a few days before Steam Next Fest (risky), having already spent a few months doing private playtesting with ~15 people from my Discord. The Demo almost immediately gained some traction, reaching ~300 CCU at the height of SNF. Releasing this close to SNF isn’t the usual strategy, as it’s better to head in with a heavily tested Demo. But, I had enough polish that I got by, and I believe the YT launch interest from YouTube etc. helped push my Demo further within SNF.
Dan
I think Dan overperformed during SNF because the demo launch got a lot of traction with streamers. Should everyone do this then? I still don’t think so. You should release your demo months before SNF because if your demo falls flat or has a game breaking bug, you can greatly underperform in SNF.
So you should calculate the risk of the launching your demo right before Steam Next Fest based on how confident you are that your code has been tested and playtested by naive users.
How Dan got Real Civil Engineer to cover his game
Real Civil Engineer (RCE) can send a tidal wave of support towards your game. RCE turned Beltmatic from a hidden gem, to an actual gem (I wrote about Beltmatics success here)
How did Dan get RCE to play Parcel Simulator? He just emailed him and asked him if he would like to play it.
I used the Wanderbots email format suggestion which is shared around in HTMAG a lot for the basis of my emails to all creators. Short, bullet points, and some nice screenshots of the game.
I have heard that sometimes RCE asks for money to play your game.
I have heard that sometimes people email RCE and he ignores your email (it didn’t go to spam I assure you.)
Basically, if your game is interesting, if it is deep, if RCE thinks it will help his channel, he will play it for free.
The secret to getting coverage is to make a good game that is interesting (please, if you were considering making a bad game, reconsider that decision).
Dan estimates that RCE’s coverage added 7k wishlists to Parcel’s total.
That is great, but it isn’t a one way ticket to quitting your job. RCE’s wishlist boost is essentially enough to clear the threshold for featuring in Popular Upcoming. But that isn’t enough to have a hit game.
This is why you MUST get your Steam Page and demo up ASAP market your game for months and months and months. You cannot shadow-drop your game and hope that you will go viral or get influencers to boost your launch. One streamer playing your game is NOT enough. You need many many many streamers to cover you. It is impossible to get them to play your game on the same launch day. Content creators find and play your game slowly over months. Only big AAA companies can create a big campaign that spans content creators.
RCE coverage helps because it gets other streamers to cover your game, it can also trigger some Steam algorithms like Discovery Queue. It is just one part of a long campaign.
Dan pulled the demo
So the demo clearly worked in getting the game visibility, but Dan made the decision to pull it before launch:
I didn’t have time to maintain a Demo version of the game that was up to date at launch, so I decided it would be OK to simply remove it. The Demo was also super generous as-is with a high average play time, so it felt sensible to take that down as it had done its job of gathering wishlists for me
Dan
Launch
Dan’s launch was amazing. He quickly got into New & Trending. He got into the Top Sellers charts (here is a screenshot).
At launch Dan reached out to content creators. His best performing result was from Let’s Game It Out which resulted in over 2.3 million views
Dan says he contacted the channel through their provided email once before launch and then again a couple weeks after. The content creator never responded saying “I will play it!” just one lucky day the video went live and at the start the creator said he is playing a version provided free by the developer.
Dan also used Keymailer’s $25/month plan. Dan set it up so that he had to manually approve key requests to prevent spammers with fake accounts taking freebies. The service was most useful for handling inbound requests which he got the most Keymailer traction. For instance, he noticed that when a Czech creator played the game, there was a spike in wishlists from that region.
Valve featured the game on the Home Page Carousel and in short order 3,600 concurrent players were enjoying the game. Nearly 100M impressions and 1.5M page visits during his launch discount period.
Launching during Summer Sale = good?
Dan launched Parcel simulator 6 days before Steam Summer Sale and then asked Valve if he could also participate in the Summer Sale. Usually you can’t do a Steam sale within 30 days of your launch. Unless you ask for it. So always ask for it using the support tool.
By doing that, Parcel Simulator was on sale from June 20th through July 10th. That is 20 days of discounts available only if you launch during this window.
Yes, he launched during the Summer Sale. I can hear Reddit already…
“BUT BUT BUT launching a new game hurts your visibility and sales potential because Steam shoppers are too busy spending their money on bigger and better games that are priced at insane discounts.”
NOPE!
Steam shoppers are crazy and will spend money on any game that looks interesting. Parcel Simulator is interesting.
Also there is this one weird trick where every other indie game developer is too scared to launch during a Steam Sale so the popular upcoming and new and trending charts are frozen solid for weeks. Once you are on those widgets, you are there for a LONG time.
I am working on a deep dive blog on this topic but look at this. Parcel Simulator spent all of Steam Summer Sale pinned to the front page of Steam.
This is the Popular New Release chart at the start of the summer sale:
Here it is at the end of the summer sale. Parcel Simulator was there the whole time.
Here is Parcel Simulator’s daily wishlist actions from Launch day until the end of the Summer sale. The initial launch spike never dropped because of the front page featuring on New & Trending.
If your game has the goods to get onto New & Trending, it is probably a good idea to prioritize your launch to the start of the Seasonal Sales.
Game Launch Discovery Queue
The discovery queue is an incredibly underrated driver of launch sales and not enough indies obsess about it.
Amazingly, the Gnomes and Parcel Simulator Discovery Queue path are almost identical.
In fact if I add up the total number of visits from the Discovery Queue for days 1-9 of both games they are within 1772 visits of each other.
Gnome Total DQ visits: 323660
Parcel Total DQ visits: 321888
What does that mean?
Gnomes launched with 14,000 wishlists
Parcel Simulator with 42,000 wishlists.
Both got the same visibility from the DQ.
Both games made it to “real steam.”
But Parcel Simulator has out-earned Gnomes by quite a bit.
The conclusion?
I think DQ can indicate that your game is on the path to “Real Steam” but the DQ is not a great indicator for long tail sales. The longer term growth depends on word-of-mouth, and continued Streamer coverage.
Why didn’t Dan do Early Access? It is a crafty buildy game!
Launch momentum is super important to me as an indie with no marketing spend, and the best way to do that is to skip EA so you can get into New & Trending. EA seems to work super super well for a lot of games in my genre, however I’ve also seen many a game that launches into EA, doesn’t do well, and then that leaves the developers “stuck” supporting a game that isn’t doing as well as they might have hoped. I didn’t want that risk so I decided to skip!
Dan
Dan’s explanation is exactly why I don’t recommend EA for most developers, especially first time developers:
“[a poor EA launch] leaves the developers “stuck” supporting a game that isn’t doing as well as they might have hoped.”
Summary
So what did we learn?
Crafty-buildy-SIMULATION-y games are BIG! People love them!
Make a demo, it really does supercharge your marketing
Maybe launch during a Seasonal Sale (it doesn’t seem to hurt sales)
DQ is still mysterious and isn’t a final indicator of long term success.
Watch out for EA, unless you are really ready for it.
