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

Twitter recently acquired Revue – a service that allows you to run an email list for free. Is it any good? For the last month, I tried it out. I migrated my list over to Revue and sent 3 of my weekly newsletters from it instead of through my typical Continue Reading

Valve held its third Steam festival at the start of February 2021. You can see it here. As with all festivals I tracked down as many devs as I could to share with me their game’s performance during the festival. How many wishlists, how many impressions how many visits. The Continue Reading

There is no hyperbole that I can offer when I say that Valheim is a success. You can read stories like this one for that kind of info However, I can offer you a deconstruction of their marketing efforts to help you learn how to get 1/10th of their success. Continue Reading