Feel Confident marketing your game
Every January, I download a list of all the games that were released in the previous year and filter the list down to the games that earned at least 1000 reviews.Then I do a deep dive, look at their steam page, look at their screenshots, check the tags, and read Continue Reading
It feels like Steam is always changing. Every month there is some “hot new genre” rendering the game you are making completely out of date. But is that actually true? For a sanity check, I bought a 1993 edition of Computer Gaming World magazine just to remind myself of where Continue Reading
It is January so it is time for journalists to look up how many games were released last year and say “Too many games. Steam is oversaturated, <x> number of games released this year and most games got 0 visibility.” Here are the examples from last year So this is Continue Reading
The way I write the HowToMarketAGame blog is that I have this google doc titled “2025 Blog Ideas” and any time I hear about a weird marketing trick, see an interesting game, or see someone complain about something on Reddit I write down a sentence or two so that I Continue Reading
BALL x PIT is my favorite game of 2025. A lot of other people think so too because it is sitting at over 15,000 reviews. I like it because it has that juicy slot machine animation when you get a ball behind a line of enemies, it has that one-more-turn loop, Continue Reading
It has been a rough couple of years in the games industry with layoffs and studio closures. However, from the perspective of a single-I or small team, we are in the middle of a golden age and most developers don’t realize it. (Side note most journalists don’t realize we are Continue Reading
I don’t think I am going to do a big survey of all the games that were in Steam Next Fest this year. I didn’t see anything too different. People showing their numbers in the HTMAG discord conform to what we saw last year. But I always like to look Continue Reading
It’s officially spooky season – I pulled our family’s Halloween decorations out of the garage this past weekend. Our collective need for Halloween and horror is to expose ourselves to our fears (irrational or not) so that we can transcend them and take on the real horrors of the world. Continue Reading
In the years I have spent studying Steam, the biggest revelation I have had is that you should not hold back. You cannot “overexpose” your game. People do not get tired of you. Wishlists don’t get old. The reason a game does not do well is NOT because too many Continue Reading
So big week this week as Hollow Knight: Silksong is releasing tomorrow and it is the #1 most wishlisted game on Steam. Should we scream? Cry? Yell? What is an appropriate level of fear? Here is a chart of the number of games with at least 400 followers released every Continue Reading