zukalous

On Monday the team at V Rising announced that they had sold over 2.5 Million Copies: When the game launched to early access, they sold 1 million units within its first week. At one point 150,645 players were simultaneously playing the game on Steam.  They launched with over 300,000 wishlists Continue Reading

Occasionally I am posting a mid-week all about some really cool things that indies are doing that are having real, tangible results. I hope it is inspiring and show you that there are things you can be doing to move your game forward. Twitter Trends Success On Monday I wrote Continue Reading

Many people think going viral is a random bolt of lightning that strikes some lucky individual. It is the lottery. It is magic. It is random! But in today’s blog I will walk you through the methodical campaign that Joe Henson used on twitter to make a 2-year-old game “go Continue Reading

This is my game on Steam that I launched back in 2019. Look at it! it has 221 Very Positive Reviews (88% of them are!). But Steam doesn’t give it any visibility. It has been stuck at 200-ish reviews for a year! Celeste is a similar enough game that I Continue Reading

I had a shocking realization this week: one of the reasons streamers decide whether or not to cover your game is based on how good or bad your Steam capsule is. Let me explain … In the book The Youtube Formula, streaming guru Derral Eves teaches aspiring youtubers the following: Continue Reading

Three times a year Steam throws an official Steam Next Fest where any game that is unreleased can participate. You can view the June 2022 Next Fest page here. As with the previous Next Festivals, I put out the call to all developers who participated to share their data with Continue Reading

Festivals, a mid-sized streamer playing your game, or a major article in PC Gamer can all earn your game around 1000 wishlists. It’s great when it happens! But you can’t count on those coming through. You are dependent on someone else. You have to convince each one of those gatekeepers Continue Reading

In today’s blog I want to show you how a few indies found an interesting way to get past the typical “first game funk” and actually launch a game quickly and make some real, sustainable money from it.  I want to introduce you to the “fast follow.”  Sometimes a game Continue Reading

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

I talk to a lot of indie game developers through my game marketing discord, I consult, I review funding pitch documents, I do lots of Q&As, and one weird thing that I see a lot of indies do is say they are making a “casual” game. I hear the pitch Continue Reading