Feel Confident marketing your game
Here is the wishlist graph for We Harvest Shadows where solo developer David Wehle managed to earn over 220,000 wishlists using a trailer, a demo, and some clever marketing: How did he do it? OVER ANALYSIS WARNING: I am including the conversion rate here because I want to remind people Continue Reading
The Steam algorithm is tied to promotion: the more external traffic you bring to Steam, the more confident the algorithm is that you have an interesting game and will promote it. Last week I recapped my survey of the developers who participated in the October 2024 Steam Next Fest. In Continue Reading
An entirely new Steam Next Fest This year Valve fundamentally changed how developers manage their demos and how they are given visibility within the algorithm (I wrote about these changes here): Also you should totally check out similar analysis from another data cruncher Adam Sharman here. I think these changes Continue Reading
At the start of 2024 I decided that every Quarter I would check in to see what games are doing well, how many games are releasing, and what it says about finding success on Steam. I also take a moment to single out games that have earned more than 1000 Continue Reading
Which matters more: The game or the marketing? Popular gamedev YouTube personality Jonas Tyroller recently released a video where he argued that the most important factor in your game’s success is whether the game is “good” and that “marketing” is not as important. His argument is that if you have Continue Reading
I hear this all the time from indie developers “I love the game making part of being a game developer, but absolutely suck at the marketing part because I have crippling social anxiety.” Somewhere around the social media boom of the 2010s people started concluding that social media = marketing. Continue Reading
How would you like over 3,000,000 impressions on your game every day for 2 weeks? The developers of Eden Crafters managed to get this for the launch of their prologue using “One Weird Trick (TM)”: they launched during the Steam Summer Sale. Typically everyone advises against doing any big promotional Continue Reading
Terminus: Zombie Survivors recently emerged from Early Access (EA) to 1.0. Look at this review chart for the game. When Terminus had its original EA launch in April of 2021, it didn’t look like it would be a hit. The game only had 15 reviews in its first month and Continue Reading
On August 12, Jeffrey “Chimeric” Nielson launched the 1.0 version of the top down SHMUP roguelite Nova Drift. Over 10 years of development with 5 years in EA, the game has sold nearly 400,000 copies on Steam alone. Even more than 400K when you factor in itch, gog, humble, streamer Continue Reading
As I wrote in my last blog post, Valve will remove all URLs that are embedded in your game’s Steam page. Valve’s aim is to declutter Steam pages that are no longer about the game itself. For the most part, this is a very good, proactive move. It keeps Steam Continue Reading