Feel Confident marketing your game
GDC is right around the corner. If you are going, or any other in-person game convention, business cards are part of every new encounter with a fellow attendee. There is this cool trick you can do where you print business cards with a unique steam key on them so that Continue Reading
A lot of my post-mortems are for games that have HUGE launches where they sell 100,000 copies in their first week. It is a fantastic result but many more indies would be happy just earning a sustainable middle-class income that allows them to make more games. Is that possible? Does Continue Reading
Pal world is the most-played non-valve game on Steam right now (526,000 players) Why? Developer Pocketpair found a perfectly unmet desire in the marketplace: Pokemon… but with Guns. Now any time a game hits it big people immediately try to think they might be able to replicate that success. Continue Reading
TikTok has proven to be a potent source of wishlists (read case studies of going viral on TikTok here and some TikTok tips here). However, this week I have a new TikTok strategy to potentially earn thousands of wishlists: leveraging TikTok influencers. The team behind cozy room decorator game Momento, Continue Reading
The following video from Valve is a must view if you are releasing a game on Steam. “Wishlists. Do they have an impact on your visibility on Steam? No! With a big asterisks” Erik Peterson A lot of indies watched this lecture and a few have taken this statement pretty Continue Reading
Every January I pull data from all the games that launched in the previous year to benchmark what happened to track trends and better understand what might happen in the next year. Well I am doing that again. * Correction* 1/26/2023 IMPORTANT CORRECTION. I published this blog post on 1/25/2023 Continue Reading
Now that 2023 it is time for our annual tradition of looking at how many games were released on Steam and then saying OH MY GOD THERE WERE 1,212,315,756,687 games released last year. Indie games are over. This is the end. Time to get a real job. If you would Continue Reading
Hi Happy 2024. This blog is really just me documenting what I am thinking and studying in the Steam marketplace. As they say, the best way to learn something is to teach it. So today I want to look back and see what I learned. How much did I write Continue Reading
Polish publisher and developer PlayWay wisely realized that nobody actually knows which game is going to be a best seller or why, so, their business model is centered on quickly creating a bunch of Steam pages for half-baked game concepts. Then they only spend resources developing the ones that get Continue Reading
Here is a situation: you are a parent who knows how to make video games. You have a young child and you make a little computer game for them. And they love it! It is educational in nature, safe for kids, and they are excited to hang out with you. Continue Reading