In my community and in my consulting practice I have had the privilege to watch a few developers launch wildly successful games. Marketing these best seller games feel different. Every day these games get hundreds, even thousands, of wishlists without doing much at all. These developers can post on Reddit Continue Reading
Done with Twitter? You should start a blog instead
I guess twitter is dying. Maybe? I have seen a lot of people post “good bye” tweets that are basically “I am done here! Follow me on Instagram, Mastodon, and Tumblr where I will now be posting” These goodbye tweets remind me of the inscriptions we leave in the back Continue Reading
How to get covered by IGN
If you make a game trailer, the best thing that can possibly happen to you is to have the IGN youtube channel do an exclusive reveal of it. It will get seen by hundreds of thousands of very passionate gamers.IGN is basically the Johnny Carson of video games. If you Continue Reading
Steam Next Fest October 2022: How did games perform
Gut level, how did this festival perform compared to past ones? Here are some basic stats Number of Games Games surveyed Average Wishlists Wishlists earned70th percentile Wishlists earned Median Wishlists earned 30th percentile Median Impressions Median Views 2020 ?? 61 4046 1,870 520 176 1,519,697 4,748 2021 696 42 3,752 Continue Reading
What is a good median play time for a demo? [Benchmark]
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