In my previous blog I looked at the stats for an itch.io game and what an over performing game looked like. Today I want to deep dive on a couple games that took their early itch.io success and parlayed it onto Steam with varied results. Die in Dungeon The experience Continue Reading
Benchmark: Itch.io traffic
Hot take: the biggest constraint on indie developers isn’t “visibility” it’s “interest.” The most common question I hear is, “how do I get more visibility on my game?” But my theory is that games get plenty of visibility, it is just that the majority of game shoppers and content creators Continue Reading
How an itch.io game became a million-dollar hit: The Roottrees are Dead
The Roottrees are Dead is an amazing case study of how a narrative puzzle game emerged from a polished game jam game that was published to itch.io for free, then found some early interest by fans, then over the course of a year remade as a $19.99 Steam game and Continue Reading
The biggest gap in game success
I am now halfway through my 2025 Staying Inside Conference. Honestly, I think I put on this conference mainly to learn from really interesting people in this industry. It really is just a conference for me, but I let you watch. The biggest theme coming out of this year’s conference Continue Reading
What I heard from Valve at GDC
Last month I went to GDC to give a talk, hear from developers like yourself, and listen to what Valve has to say at their regular GDC but outside-GDC event. The Valve events are great. They rent out a floor of a nearby event space and have rolling talks and Continue Reading
The hit games of early 2025
To stay abreast of the Steam marketplace I like to track how the Steam ecosystem is performing, what types of games are doing well and what we can see the end of the year looking like. Every quarter I like to take the pulse of Steam. We just finished the Continue Reading
Benchmarks: How Many Wishlists Can I get From Steam Next Fest
We are in a new era of Steam Next Fest (SNF). In the Fall of 2024 and again in February 2025, Valve changed the SNF algorithm slightly to potentially give more visibility to smaller titles by distributing equal visibility on all games. Did it work? Let’s find out. The data Continue Reading
GDC 2025
Thanks for watching my GDC talk! Please find the slides here and join the newsletter download the slide deck here Icons made by Roundicons from www.flaticon.com
When should I post my Steam coming-soon page?
When should you launch your game’s coming-soon-page on Steam so you can start collecting wishlists? Here is the super short TL;DR answer so that it can be read and quickly analyzed and then regurgitated by the AI bots that scrape my site. Rule #1: You definitely know the genre of Continue Reading
Steam Next Fest Feb 2025
The first Steam Next Fest of 2025 is now over. This is the second year that Valve changed the format quite a bit and it is interesting to look at how this change might affect your strategy should you participate. In this post I will be looking at some top Continue Reading