Intro In a previous blog post, I introduced you to the Discovery Queue (DQ). DQ is a very important widget which is how top tier games get lots of traffic (Read that post here.) In short, if you drive a TON of traffic from outside of Steam (like youtube, twitter, Continue Reading
14 Reasons why every indie game developer should make at least one horror game
Look, indie game development is hard. Really, really hard. We get 0 visibility and they are very hard to make. So I am making a plea to all indie game developers who want to do this full time, please please please make at least 1 horror game. I know! I Continue Reading
The missing middle in game development
What is the Missing Middle? Other than he is my total hero, and he was born and he was raised in my hometown, I wanted to interview John Romero to try and solve the modern indie game development paradox. The paradox goes like this… When John Romero was making games Continue Reading
John Romero on his book Doom Guy and developing games at a small scale
I think the biggest reason so many indie games “fail” is that teams enter into making huge, overly ambitious projects that take years to release before they are ready. Indie teams do not spend enough time making smaller (and less profitable) games first before transitioning to multi-year projects. I know Continue Reading
Early Access Tips Part 3
This is my 3rd and Final Early access data deep dive where I look at the games that have had an early access release on Steam. Here is part 1 where I wondered how many games participate in EA and part 2 where I estimated how well you will do Continue Reading
Three inspiring marketing success stories
Indie game development is hard and at times it seems like nothing works or everything that used to work no longer does any more. In today’s post I wanted to show off 3 games and 3 marketing campaigns that achieved huge successes in terms of wishlists or sales. Best of Continue Reading
Killing the myths behind Steam’s visibility
Steam has been rolling out a new presentation trying to dispel some more myths that people keep spouting about visibility, wishlists, sales, and “the algorithm.” They actually posted the new presentation slides here which you can read and download here. I heard the presentation and I wanted to provide some Continue Reading
What is the Discovery Queue?
How games get real visibility One of the negative side effects about my writing about amazing success is that developers who are just starting out can see games getting 100s of wishlists a day (that is not hyperbole) while they are stuck getting 1-3 per day. To a new developer Continue Reading
Estimating Early Access success
A couple weeks ago I presented a very high level look at Early access. What I found was that for some games it was actually better to release in Early Access (and go full 1.0) that it was to just launch in full you can read the full analysis here. Continue Reading
Frequently asked questions about Steam Next Fest
I just left a Zoom call for Valve’s 3-times-a-year pre-Next-Fest Q&A. It is a great service Valve does to support developers before before the big show (Next Fest starts in October 9th) and I would recommend you attend them if you can. I have been to just about every one Continue Reading