Feel Confident marketing your game
This is the story of a developer who turned a simple side project into a game that earned more than half-a-million dollars in less than a week. Not only that, he did this after just 2 months of marketing and development. In today’s blog I am going to deconstruct the 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
Success metrics Last month, the developers behind the Deep Rock Galactic Survivor (DRG:S) announced that they sold over 1,000,000 copies of their game since its February Launch. DRG:S is an survivor-like (aka action-roguelike) (aka bullet-heaven) (aka Vampire Survivors-like) spinoff of the mega-popular 2018 co-op FPS: Deep Rock Galactic. Shortly after Continue Reading
Pal world is the most-played non-valve game on Steam right now (526,000 players) Why? Developer Pocketpair found a perfectly unmet desire in the marketplace: Pokemon… but with Guns. Now any time a game hits it big people immediately try to think they might be able to replicate that success. Continue Reading
If you were laid off from your AAA job, are thinking of starting an indie studio, and are struggling to decide what type of game to make, I wrote today’s blog post just for you. In last week’s blog I explained how different the indie game space is from the Continue Reading
What is the Missing Middle? Other than he is my total hero, and he was born and he was raised in my hometown, I wanted to interview John Romero to try and solve the modern indie game development paradox. The paradox goes like this… When John Romero was making games Continue Reading
What is the prologue trick? Here’s how it works This trick has worked for several other games. Soulstone Survivors used this trick to get an estimated 130,000 wishlists ust from launching the prologue before launch. Here is a chart of their wishlist chart over time. You can see that the Continue Reading
Your game’s genre and graphic style is the biggest determinant of your game’s potential success. Marketing decisions such as whether you use twitter or tiktok don’t matter as much as the type of game you make. Game development has thousands of these tiny risky pitfalls that don’t seem like a Continue Reading
Last Friday was the 1 year anniversary of Splattercat playing a little game name Vampire Survivors. The game went viral from there, getting covered by more and more streamers and selling millions of copies and becoming one of the most played games of 2022. Side Note: This genre is so Continue Reading
Earlier this week I wrote a post about how Dome Keeper earned over $1 Million in a couple days. It is a long post but but there were a bunch of interesting findings that just didn’t fit and so I wanted to compile them into their own “bonus content” blog. Continue Reading