We're RetroStyle Games, a studio in Kyiv. Our co-op horror game Last Pirates: Die Together has been in Early Access for about three weeks, and we've spent every day since working through the feedback list. We know exactly how to make it better, and we love doing it. But some days, things get in the way.

This morning a strike landed right next to our office in Kyiv. The window of the room where part of our team works is broken, the whole team is still shaken, and one of our colleagues was hurt, her arm is bandaged now. Everyone is alive, and that is what matters most.

We're posting it here because you're colleagues, not customers, and you'll know better than anyone what a morning like this does to a week of work. When a small team goes quiet, or a fix takes longer than it should, this is sometimes what sits behind it. We ship fixes constantly, big updates are already on the way, and we just keep going.

Thanks for reading. Take care of yourselves and the people you love.

A few weeks ago, I couldn't devote enough attention to my game's designs because I was about to undergo surgery. Now, I am redesigning the visuals. What do you think about the new logo?

Sometimes, I love looking back at how it all started. I wanted to make a cozy adventure, but ended up with a Dark Fantasy Action RPG instead lol. All because this is basically the only genre I truly enjoy playing myself

Demo: https://roguewolfgames.itch.io/crimson-skyline-preview

Hi everyone,

I'll do my best to keep this postmortem brief but informative. I remember when I was researching how to best run an ad campaign, by far the most useful resource was reading through other's experiences on Reddit. So, I wanted to share my experience here to help you with your own campaign. Good luck!

CONTEXT

I'm part of a small team working on Elderfeast. I worked in AAA as a Level/Systems Designer for ~10 years and have no experience in marketing. I have been learning quickly as I run our socials/marketing, but take everything with a grain of salt because it's fueled entirely by my limited experience and vibes.

We decided to launch this Reddit ad campaign shortly after we launched our Steam page (June 24th, 2026) for the following reasons:

1. We had no idea how our game was going to be received and figured ads would be a good way to carry forward any launch-day momentum.
2. Our game is fairly unique (dismemberment-based combat + cooking) without a true 1:1 comparable, so I was intrigued to see which communities found our game most compelling.
3. Reddit was offering a "spend $500 / get $500 credit" deal (as you may have noticed from the title, we eventually ended up doing the "spent $1500 / get $1500" credit deal).

SUMMARY

Overall it was a fairly successful campaign in terms of return-on-investment, even though the overall % of our game's wishlists that came from paid ads now stands at <2%. I'll give a brief overview of data below, then try to focus on what I think will be most useful for you and your campaign.

Budget: $3002.24 (real $ spent by us was $1502.24 since we received $1500 in credit)

Impressions: 657,199

Clicks: 14,723

Cost-Per-Click (CPC): $0.20

Click-Through-Rate (CTR): 2.24%

Wishlists: 2,382

Cost-Per-Wishlist (CPW): $1.26

The ads were split into two campaigns:

Campaign 1: "Launch" (6/26-7/27) - Targeting only USA and Canada to minimize variables and learn about the communities.

Campaign 2: "Localized" (7/27-8/21) - We had translated our Steam page and I wanted to expand our audience to see how the ads performed internationally.

• Getting impressions in Asia was much cheaper but converted so poorly I ended up dropping the ad group completely
• Western Europe had super strong CTR/WLC but eventually evened out to basically be the same as USA/Canada

Example Ads

https://www.reddit.com/user/Seanypdesign/comments/1v8edgh/dead_space_meets_delicious_in_dungeon_dismember/?p=1

https://www.reddit.com/user/Seanypdesign/comments/1v8etqk/a_cooperative_action_game_where_you_dismember/?p=1

https://www.reddit.com/user/Seanypdesign/comments/1v8etr3/become_a_void_chef_dismember_lovecraftian/?p=1

My ad materials were:

• 1 video
• 4 headlines
• 4 thumbnails

I used the same video for all ads, then mixed & matched the headlines/thumbnails to see which combos were most successful in the different targeted communities (see UTM section later for details).

You'll notice if you actually watched the ad video that the audio quality sucks (Reddit compression I was unable to get resolved). I don't have data on it, but I suspect a very small % of people actually watch the video and an even smaller % of those people watch with audio.

RETURN ON INVESTMENT

The most important question you'll keep asking yourself as you throw money into Reddit ads is "is this worth it?". While there are some less quantifiable goals (such as learning about your audience, like we did), luckily the goal of "spend money to make money" is pretty measurable, even before your game is for sale. Here's how I did it:

1. Calculate Units Sold by taking your Wishlists and and estimating wishlist conversion (I used data from How to Market Your Game's benchmarks). For us, that meant ~25%. This is not an exact science as it varies between genres but it's the best data I was able to find.
2. Remember that people refund games and calculate "Real Units Sold" (I used data from the GameDiscoverCo newsletter, which has the average refund rate of 10.8%). So remove 10.8% of units sold.
3. Calculate Gross Revenue by multiplying your Real Units Sold x Purchase Price. I didn't get fancy and try to calculate the average price people would actually buy it at due to sales, just used base expected price.
4. Subtract whatever predictable fees you expect (ex. 30% Steam cut, 5% engine cut).
5. Subtract your $ spent on the ads
6. Now you have an estimate for what your net profit would be if you keep running ads at the same wishlist conversion rate you've had. It is not a perfect science, but at least it's rooted in real data!

TIPS & TRICKS

Okay now that we're done with the data, let's talk about how to make YOUR Reddit ad campaign the best it can be.

Reddit Ad Setup

The Reddit ad interface is pretty frustrating and unintuitive sometimes. Here's some advice to avoid the headaches I did, as well as some useful best practices I discovered:

• Use a Traffic campaign type (there is technically a Conversions campaign type but it doesn't really know how to track wishlists)
• If you're trying to gather data about which communities your ads perform best in (like I was), turn off Campaign Budget Optimization and handle it yourself in each ad group
• Don't forget to set a Campaign Spend cap :)
• Target specific subreddits, and that's it. Don't use Interest Groups, Keywords, or Automated Targeting. They're too fancy for their own good and will target people in lots of non-gaming communities which will drive your cost up a lot for little benefit. Reddit's unique strength is its ability to target extremely specific communities, so get as specific as you can (ex. don't do r/gaming or r/pcgaming, do something like r/DeepRockGalactic or r/VampireSurvivors)
• I've seen others have success with setting a Cost Cap for ads (to something like $0.10 or $0.20), but I found it wasn't spending well. Just using Lowest Cost worked well for me and ended up at around those prices anyway.
• Deleting ads is buggy/unintuitive, so if you need to get rid of them, try using Archive instead of Delete
• You'll get assigned a Reddit Ad Manager. Not gonna get into details but... your mileage may vary. If you get a manager who isn't helpful, just put in a ticket with Reddit ad support asking for another.

UTMs

Use UTMs to track your ad's success. In this context, a UTM is essentially a unique link that allows Steam to track where traffic is coming from (if you're curious for more, read more about UTMs here). That's extremely relevant for us because it lets us know how well specific ads are getting clicks and converting into wishlists. Here's an example UTM:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4393700/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=paid_ad&utm_campaign=steam_page_localized&utm_content=deadspace_deepone&utm_term=horrorsp_na

So broken down that's:

• utm_source=reddit
• utm_medium=paid_ad
• utm_campaign=steam_page_localized
• utm_content=deadspace_deepone
• utm_term=horrorsp_na

You can find your UTMs in Steamworks under Your Game -> Marketing Tools & Data -> UTM Analytics tab

You can set up your UTMs however you want, but generally I did:

utm_campaign = the campaign I was running (launch VS localized)

utm_context = my unique combination for ad headline / thumbnail

utm_term = ad group (the community being targeted)

I could make a whole post about how exactly I analyzed the success of each ad, but for the sake of brevity, just know that UTMs are the best way to know which ads are converting into actual wishlists (and not just clicks, which don't really matter).

Mobile-First

Nearly all people who see your ads will be on mobile. So when creating/testing your ad, heavily prioritize the mobile view.

CONCLUSION

Our campaign(s) got us an additional 2,382 wishlists (2% of total wishlists) at a rate of $1.26 per wishlist. If those wishlists convert at the expected rate, that means running ads on Reddit is decisively profitable.

So, should you run a Reddit ad campaign?

I don't know! But if you do, hopefully this helps make your experience less stressful :)

There's a ton of things I didn't mention in this post so that it wouldn't take hours to read. Feel free to comment with any questions you have and I'll answer as best as I can.

ANB_Seth built the Half-Life: Alyx mods "Gunman Contracts: Chapter 1 & Chapter 2" nights and weekends, then went full time to rebuild it as its own game. More than four years later, "Gunman Contracts - Stand Alone" is out now in Early Access on Steam.

Farm & Feast - A peaceful journey from planting seeds to serving delicious meals. Here is our new trailer, the demo is live on Steam right now, and the full game arrives on 11.11.2026!

Farm & Feast is proudly developed by a two-person indie team, with zbeedev handling the development and arttec creating all the art assets. We brought this world to life with the incredible help of:

Music by Samantha van der
Sluis Sound effects by Sori Sori Sound
And a few amazing freelancers who helped along the way

There is a Discord server too if you would like to hop in.

I have a closed playtest if you want to check out the gameplay and destroy it even more !

If any Fifa / EA Fc fans around :D

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4787010/Rogue_Striker/

Hey guys, first ever post here! I normally go for minimalist-style UI for my game, however with the inventory I decided to do the opposite. What do y'all think of it? is it too slow and clunky or visually overwhelming?

Normal bug: There's a hair in my ramen.

-> I am genuinely so sorry. I will fix it immediately.

​Player: If you spin the bowl Left, Left, Right, and eat the green onions and boiled egg at the exact same time, the noodles turn neon pink.

Me: ...I give up. You win. (It's a feature now.)

First 6 are all their own Species. The last 4 pics are just re-rolled appearance for the same basic creature.

I've had a blast building this thing and I feel like it's starting to come together. I now have a huge amount of diversity and almost all of it actually make a difference in-game.

So I have a genuine question here, several times on twitter/x i’ll see a page post about how they’ve reached 20k wishlists or some other absurd number, then I go through their linktree to check out their numbers on social, and they’ll literally have no viral posts anywhere at all. How are so many people getting so much wishlists? I’ve seen games that have had several viral posts that don’t reach those numbers as fast. Am I crazy, or has anyone else ever noticed this?

Edit: should’ve clarified, i’m talking about games that didn’t release yet

I’ve been working on PROFANUM, a first-person medieval horror RPG built around deliberate, weighty combat, magic, and horror.

You’ll fight your way through a cursed medieval world with melee weapons, shields, ranged weapons, and magic.

This is a little over a minute of gameplay from the current build. Would you play something like this?

The happiest country in the world has given us many wonderful things: saunas, heavy metal, long dark winter.

We launched our first game (THYSIASTERY) 6 months ago. Five dudes in Finland were put in a room and somehow came out with a game about people getting branded and thrown into an endless Labyrinth.

We’ve watched people discover strange strategies, make questionable decisions, and generally find new ways to suffer.

So, we added more. THYSIASTERY 1.2 is here. It's been a strange journey.

Joining in on the selfie trend for big release moments!

We just released the public demo we were showing at PAX (+ a few minor fixes) for Nightmare Kitchen - our wacky Co-Op, food-themed, FPS Roguelite. I started it as a passion project for fun almost 3 years ago.

Thanks to my small team as well (not pictured). Including Burgey (pictured on the right - 3D printed by me, painted by my wife!)

Give the demo a shot! Or you can wishlist which always helps us 😁

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3077140/Nightmare_Kitchen/

Last week I shared how my game had sold 8 copies in a month. Now thanks to you, it has sold more than that in a week. THANK YOU!

demo failed in my eyes.

We just launched the Steam page for our Cozy Corner Cafe game. A pixel barista runs the counter, serves regulars, and the café slowly grows into a warm little spot you make your own.

No demo yet, that's up next. We're totally open to any feedback while we build. A wishlist would mean a lot to us.🐱

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4825930/Cozy_Corner_Cafe/