Feel Confident marketing your game
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
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
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
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
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
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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
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
Last year I worked with Ichiro Lambe to write a script that scrapes the front page of Steam to record every Game that appears in the Special Offers section on Steam. Ichiro, by the way, is working really hard on solving the visibility issue for indie devs with his company Continue Reading
It may be apocryphal but the U.S. WW2 General Dwight D. Eisenhower is often credited with saying “Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.” After studying Steam long enough I would say “Amateur game devs talk about visibility. Professionals talk Discovery Queue.” I am here to tell you that you aren’t Continue Reading