Wishlist Wednesday Post: I just concluded a major survey where I asked as many game developers as I could to submit their wishlist history so that I could analyze it for trends for what ACTUALLY works when marketing your game. My findings were presented as part of GDC 2021 which Continue Reading

Hey Steam Next Fest is in progress! It started on Wednesday and continues until June 22nd. Festivals such as this one are one of the best ways to earn wishlists when marketing your game. So it is super important to get it right. And one of the most critical components Continue Reading

This is another post in my continuing series of benchmarks while you are marketing your game. On Steam you can create a page for your game before it goes on sale. It is referred to as a “coming soon” page. This preview page is a great way to collect wishlists Continue Reading

This is the story of how one indie dev left his demo up indefinitely and lucked out in getting a major streamer to cover his game yielding over 1800 wishlists.  The rise of virtual festivals has incentivized indies to create free totally public demos. Overall these online festivals are super Continue Reading

Valve just posted their monthly feature of the top selling Steam games. Click to see the list for February and March. I always like looking at the capsules for the top selling games because they set the visual style for all other capsules on Steam. Familiarity sells on Steam and Continue Reading

Last week Valve held a virtual conference on their new site called Steamworks Events (if you have a Steamworks account you can log in and watch the replays). There were 4 main talks (which were recorded) and then a series of breakout sessions (which were not recorded). It seemed the Continue Reading

UPDATE: This blog post was written several years ago but is still correct! You do need a steam page right now. To answer additional questions people ask me about it, I wrote an updated 2025 article about when you need a Steam page (TL;DR now). Read the 2025 post: what Continue Reading

Steam provides tons of stats and performance metrics – more than any other platform. But as much as they do, you could never actually close the loop on whether people were wishlisting your game. So for instance if you were doing a big marketing push and hired streamers, were sending Continue Reading

Last week, three Valve employees who work directly on Steam did a Q&A about the current state of the platform. The event was hosted on the Game Production Community Discord server. The event was organized by Juney Dijkstra who is a Portfolio Manager at Paradox Interactive. You should follow here. Continue Reading

Last week it was leaked that Microsoft is in negotiations to buy Discord for a reported 10 Billion Dollars.  Discord is one of the best mid-funnel marketing channels that we game makers have to directly contact people who have heard about our game but are still on the fence and Continue Reading