zukalous

Festival Planning Currently the number one way to get visibility and wishlists for your Steam game are online, virtual events (aka festivals) that Steam has given prominent featuring. They are the best way (and probably easiest) way to get your game seen by hundreds of thousands of potential buyers. In Continue Reading

This is an actual photo of my office and all of the gear that it takes to pull off this blog and my associated videos and talks. So I thought because today is CYBER MONDAY and the holiday season I would deconstruct what is in my office and what tools Continue Reading

Last week Valve Did 2 Q&As. One at DevGAMM (where I also gave a talk) and one at Indie X. Alden Kroll, Kaci Aitchison, and Tom Giardino all represented Valve this time. Here are the questions, their answers, and my commentary. This is not a direct transcription of their quotes Continue Reading

Reddit is hard. You have to get the tone just right otherwise people call you out for self-promo. You also rarely get more than a title and a description to talk about your game. And just having a cool game is not enough – you need a GIF that has Continue Reading

The most important thing in marketing your game is actually having a good game. All the promotion (tweeting, streaming, festivals) in the world is worthless if every single person who plays your game is so bored that they switch away or are so frustrated they immediately delete your game from Continue Reading

In the past couple of months a couple of big social media sites have changed their terms or introduced suspicious paid plans and it has caught content creators off guard. For instance, last week Twitch introduced a new “Boost” program where streamers can pay to get more viewers to see Continue Reading

On the first of October 2021, solo-developer-studio Two Star games posted an announcement trailer for their horror game Choo-Choo Charles (CCC) The trailer, the corresponding tweet, and the tiktok video went thermo-nuclear and Choo-Choo Charles earned over 85,000 wishlists and becoming the #131 most wishlisted upcoming game on Steam by Continue Reading

I decided to change how I cover the 3-times-a-year Steam Festival and provide some analysis and results while the festival is still going on!  If you want to watch a fully voiced virtually-in-person analysis of the Steam festival, I uploaded a 30 minute video to Game Marketing Ideas (Click here Continue Reading

The Steam audience is savvier than you. They are more intense and more opinionated too. I have seen many indies surprised when their game gets called out with bad reviews for what seem like trivial nits. But they aren’t trivial. These are features Steam players expects and if you are Continue Reading

It is really hard to get anyone to actually buy anything, much less take an action like joining your mailing list or discord. It is even more difficult when you are offering a game that is different, or a bit avant garde. The reason is they don’t know if what Continue Reading