Three times a year Steam throws an official Steam Next Fest where any game that is unreleased can participate. You can view the June 2022 Next Fest page here. As with the previous Next Festivals, I put out the call to all developers who participated to share their data with Continue Reading
Using mailing lists to gain thousands of wishlists
Festivals, a mid-sized streamer playing your game, or a major article in PC Gamer can all earn your game around 1000 wishlists. It’s great when it happens! But you can’t count on those coming through. You are dependent on someone else. You have to convince each one of those gatekeepers Continue Reading
One way to actually make money on your first game
In today’s blog I want to show you how a few indies found an interesting way to get past the typical “first game funk” and actually launch a game quickly and make some real, sustainable money from it. I want to introduce you to the “fast follow.” Sometimes a game Continue Reading
20 Minutes Till Dawn’s half-million-dollar week
This is the story of a developer who turned a simple side project into a game that earned more than half-a-million dollars in less than a week. Not only that, he did this after just 2 months of marketing and development. In today’s blog I am going to deconstruct the Continue Reading
10 reasons you should stop targeting casual gamers
I talk to a lot of indie game developers through my game marketing discord, I consult, I review funding pitch documents, I do lots of Q&As, and one weird thing that I see a lot of indies do is say they are making a “casual” game. I hear the pitch Continue Reading
More evidence of which genres Steam shoppers love to play
I recently wrote a blog about what genres sell well on Steam. It centered on some basic research I did where I looked at the total number of games released per genre graphed against the median income of them. This was the result: The findings were that the top sellers Continue Reading
Other indie developers are not your competition
A couple weeks ago I posted an interview with developer Dylan Gedig about the incredible success behind his game Peglin. But looking backward, the game’s success didn’t always seem like such a sure thing. 2 years before the launch of Peglin, a very high quality game that combined Rogue-lite mechanics Continue Reading
How Ravenous Devils made a killing and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars
Last week I looked at the incredibly amazing launch of Peglin which earned over 1 million dollars in 1 week. This week I am taking a look at Ravenous Devils which also did very well earning almost $200,000 gross in its first two weeks. But first the numbers: Launch Date: Continue Reading
How Peglin Made $1,049,413 in 1 week.
Let’s just cut to the chase: In 1 week the small team at Red Nexus Games (2 coders, an artist, and a musician) sold 80204 units of their self-published game Peglin on Steam at $17.99 each. Before Steam’s cut that is $1,049,413. Here are the details for their first week Continue Reading
Elon Musk bought Twitter?! What should indie game developers do now?
Let’s talk about what is happening at Twitter… Elon Musk is buying it and taking it private. For many indie game developers, marketing is synonymous with Twitter. So this change in ownership might seem Earth shattering! What will I do with my following? Should I move them to TikTok? How Continue Reading