A good demo is a critical component of your game marketing strategy. If you have a great demo, streamers will want to play it (sometimes repeatedly over months), the festivals you enter will earn you more wishlists, and fans will fall in love with your game and be ready to Continue Reading
6 Interesting lessons from the Dome Keeper Launch
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
How Dome Keeper Achieved A Million Dollar Launch
On September 30th the CEO of Raw Fury tweeted that Dome Keeper (think Dig Dug meets Missile Command) earned $1 million within a day of its launch: It is an amazing success story from a team of only two full time developers. This story was interesting because many first-time indies Continue Reading
Should I translate my steam page and other effects on Steam traffic
A couple weeks ago I reviewed the data I collected from over 100 developers about what a normal, clickthrough and wishlist rate is during the “resting” periods when they are not doing any active promotion. The results of that were as follows: 🥉 0 – 40 wishlist / week🥈 15 Continue Reading
How many wishlists should I have when I launch my game?
“You don’t have to run faster than the bear to get away. You just have to run faster than the guy next to you.” Jim Butcher So, you put your Steam page up nice and early, you have been marketing it and collecting wishlists, and you are almost done making Continue Reading
Benchmarks for selling a game on Steam
I have been doing this Steam thing for a while, and there are 4 possible levels of success your game can have. Here are the gross, lifetime earning tiers: 🥉 Bronze: $0 – $10,000This revenue bucket indicates that the game underperformed by most measures. I mean, if you made the Continue Reading
Benchmark: What is a normal number of wishlist deletes?
You work so hard getting fans to wishlist your game and then you check your numbers and you see a ton of deletes! It is so frustrating. Of course deletes are normal but is your game abnormally off-putting? Are you scaring away your potential fans? In 2021 I collected wishlist Continue Reading
What is a normal click-through rate or wishlist rate on Steam?
So, everyone asks me “what is a normal, organic clickthrough rate?” Here it is: It is complicated. Let me back up, When you are featured in a festival or a streamer is covering your game, your traffic numbers are crazy high. But as soon as that heavy featuring is over, Continue Reading
What happened at PAX West 2022?
Last weekend I attended my first PAX. My favorite thing there was that I finally met so many readers of the blog! If I met you, I had such a good time and thank you for saying “hi.” Now PAX is mostly for fans to be… well… fans. So it Continue Reading
4 Myths about looking at the market to determine what type of game to make.
I write about genre a lot. Genre and quality are the most important things that will determine how well your game does. This graph is in my most popular blog posts all about what genres are popular in 2022 and always causes my twitter engagement to go up when I Continue Reading