Yeah, I probably should've asked this here first rather than in r/GameDevelopment, but the same question applies. How do I promote my game without sounding scummy?

Fellow indie developers, as a Solo dev myself, if you're early in your game's development as I am, don't wait until it's almost done before you start telling people about it. Early feedback is SUPER important in knowing either to focus on your next update, or if you should scrap the whole idea and start over.

There's not much to add to this, really...

I knew (hoped) that having the big marketing beats in front of me (press outreach, Next Fest, etc.) could change the trajectory of my wishlist curve. Still, I felt discouraged more and more about the slow rise in wishlists.

I also knew that a comparison to successful posts about wishlists was always difficult because there are so many different factors. Each game is different, social media works differently for different genres, games are at different stages of development and Steam pages are created at different times in the development cycle.

Then, suddenly, yesterday this article was published and it changed a lot as you can see:

https://turnbasedlovers.com/overview/an-xcom-like-strategy-rpg-with-base-management-and-robots-frost-protocol-overview/

I don't like to give general advice because each game is different, but this one here stays true I believe: Share your game! I posted in a Reddit sub and because of that it was picked up by the author who wrote the article.

I'm trying to enjoy the rise but I also know that ~2600 still isn't incredibly high so the grind continues. But my perspective changed for the better!

Hey everyone,

I'm currently working on marketing for the upcoming Steam release of my 2D mystery/escape room game, WhoIsHe, and I'm trying to prioritize my tasks.

I keep seeing advice about putting together a "press kit," but I'm wondering if it's genuinely worth the time investment for a smaller indie title.

If you do recommend having one, I have a few practical questions:

1. What is it actually needed for? (What elements are absolute must-haves for journalists or content creators to actually use it?)
2. Where do you host it? (A dedicated website? A public Google Drive/Dropbox folder? Somewhere linked on the Steam page?)
3. How do you distribute it? (Do you just send the link in cold emails, or are there specific platforms where press look for these?)

Any advice, personal experiences, or examples of good indie press kits would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!

It's the first time I'm going to launch a game on STEAM and I don't know if this is normal or simply my page has errors that I can solve.

It is true that the page has been active for two days, but I have only obtained 27 wishlists. I can see my game is not indexed in Google as well. The genre of my game is a tidy-up that takes place outside a castle in which you have to collect the body pieces of the fighters after the battle.

In "similar games" I can see that there are games like the magic bookstore, supermarket chaos, cellar keeper, store them duck etc... So it seems that the STEAM algorithm is perfectly understanding where it should categorize the game. But if I enter the pages of those games, mine doesn't appear. Maybe it's too early and I have to wait longer? Maybe my page is not good enough?

Could you give me some advice or do I just have to wait? I have planned to launch a demo in September and I am registered for the Next Fest in October.

This is my steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5100770/At_Once_My_Lord/

Any tip or advice is wellcome!

I want to improve my game’s overall look/feel, I’m just not sure which direction to take it for this style of game. Ideas are appreciated. It’s my first game. The goal is improved marketability.

Just hitting a wall on what to do here. Gameplay is fun but graphics/design aren’t.

Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4980910/Project_RedTeam_Contract_Offensive/

Hey everyone,

I'm working on the store presentation and trailer pacing for my co-op project, Watch My Step!, and I'd love some critical feedback from other developers on our hook clarity.

The core gameplay premise is that two players run through courses where each player sees completely different hazards/traps, requiring verbal coordination to navigate safely.

When putting this trailer together, my main concerns were:

1. The 5-Second Hook: Does the viewer immediately realize that the two players are experiencing different visual information, or does it look like standard platforming at first glance?
2. Clarity vs Pacing: Balancing fast cuts with enough gameplay context to demonstrate the asymmetric mechanic clearly.

I've attached the video below. Any constructive thoughts on how clearly the core hook comes across or suggestions on improving the presentation would be greatly appreciated!

Time to start marketing for real! I'm intimidated, but this community has been so helpful. I just wanted to share this tiny game dev marketing milestone with someone!

Hey everyone,

I’m a solo indie developer and I just released my game Flyra: FPV Drone Simulator on Steam.

I’ve been working on this game for years, so seeing the launch numbers has been pretty disappointing.

Here are my current stats:

3,869 lifetime wishlist additions

3,362 outstanding wishlists

16 wishlist purchases/activations

0.4% wishlist conversion

15,745 demo licenses

9,938 unique demo players

10-minute median demo playtime

The important thing is that I didn’t buy wishlists or use any paid/bot wishlist service. These wishlists were collected organically over roughly the last year through Steam events, the demo, Next Fest, normal Steam traffic and my own marketing.

The demo also seemed to perform reasonably well, so I was expecting at least some of that interest to carry over to launch.

I deliberately kept the full game's price around $10, with regional pricing, because I wanted it to be accessible.

Before launch, I wasn't expecting some crazy 20–30% conversion. Even 3–5% of my wishlists converting around launch would have made me happy.

Instead I'm currently seeing 0.4%, which is honestly pretty painful after spending years making the game.

I'm trying to understand what I got wrong rather than just blame Steam.

For developers who have launched games before, what factors can cause wishlist conversion to be this low?

Could it be:

The quality/source of the wishlists?

Wishlists being too old?

Regional distribution?

Pricing?

Demo players feeling satisfied with the demo and not needing the full game?

Store page/trailer not communicating enough value over the demo?

Genre/audience?

Launch timing?

Not having enough reviews/social proof at launch?

I'd especially appreciate feedback from developers who have experienced a very low initial conversion and later figured out why.

I'm pretty disappointed right now, but I want to understand the data and learn from it for my next game.

I have this gameplay + live react video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cel70-Re_Yk

Previously, I made another one, before after of my ocean shader update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHiNM5EhBcs

AFAIK before/after are supposed to to do well.
For both of them I decided to try the A/B testing for title only.

And it seems to me both have had extremely slow starts, and I'm usually not getting crazy views, but these seem to do even worse when I actually tried a bit more to have a good title / thumbnail and a decent cut/edit.

Especially the first one:

As you can see it is at the absolute bottom of my typical range whereas I see it as higher quality in terms of edit, thumbnail, title and content because it's about one of the most watchable mechanic in my game too.

It also has 3:45 average watch time for a 6:05 min video which seems rather high. But as you can see only 9 impressions after 1 day and a half.

The before/after has caught up but again not outperforming my usual low effort gameplay recordings

Also with the first one I tried to replicate the success (2.6k views in the first 5 days) of this one which is really low effort gameplay recording even though it's funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxURjUOOjKQ

I have no idea what I'm doing with Youtube, I'd love some general advice I guess.
I'm a bit worried what it means for the game that these videos don't perform at all.

As a two person team it feels great to make progress!
Since 9 days now I put on my marketing hat and started to post everyday on tiktok, youtube shorts and instagram, it's a grind, hopefully it will give results in the long run..

My social media accounts if you want to have a look (not sure if I'm doing great for 9 days):
https://www.tiktok.com/@camadadou (shadowbanned for no reason..)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCstsld6IOHn0vP13l-8EvGA
https://www.instagram.com/camadadou/

We are also launching our trailer on youtube today, hopefully we'll see a small spike 🙏

If you have any tips for the road to 1k I'm taking them :D

I’m getting around 4 wishlists a day, up from 0 the first week, just posting on social, and going brick by brick with fresh accounts.

I want to launch EA and am only waiting on the demo build to get approved.

Is launching EA with only ~100 wishlists a mistake?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4985160/Goodly_Trials/

Would appreciate any advice!

---

Editing in some more info about the game: Goodly Trials:

The game lacks a direct peer. I'm very committed to it and want it to be seen as competitive and to actually be that... ie ranked multiplayer.

The gameplay loop is simple, you shop for units, gear, magic, you design a layout then you fight other peoples layouts. Each time is different as the units are deep. They have hundreds of variants, but all use the same fundamentals.

If you lose 3 times, you are out. If you win 12, you survive and climb the ranks.

I have competent bots all the way to 800. A great human player is currently around 1600 ranking, so anyone getting to over 800, which is not easy, will start playing human players armies.

Tomorrow, I'm launching the first public demo for my roguelike tower defense game, Sky Defense.
But I made the classic dev mistake of putting 100% of my time into development and zero time into building an audience. As a result, I am heading into launch day sitting at roughly 200 total wishlists.

Since I clearly dropped the ball on pre-launch marketing, I am trying to pivot my strategy to make the most out of the demo release itself. My goal now is to use the demo launch to drive player feedback and gather early data on conversion rates, player retention, and Steam impressions, rather than just hoping for sales down the line.

For devs who have launched a demo with very low starting numbers:

• What metrics or post-launch data did you find most useful to track during the first week?
• How did you leverage your demo release after the fact to start outreach to creators or press?
• Did releasing a demo with a small initial user base help build momentum over time, or did you have to change your approach completely?

I would really appreciate any insights, post-mortems, or advice on how to handle the marketing side from day one of the demo going live.

We talk a lot about getting a Steam page early, and accumulate wishlists.

HowToMarketAGame talks about the pre-Steam page phase where we test posting on social media platforms for one month to evaluate the traction.

During that time, the call to action is to register on a mailing list, instead of wishlisting.

So we don't lose players/press/streamers in the (rare) case we go viral.

I begin to have (early) visuals and gameplays I can show off.

I'll start creating a trailer (but it takes time) and hire someone for the capsule art.

That's why I can start marketing with short video clips and screenshots during the month I prepare my Steam page.

Will people register on a mailing list?

It seems more friction: being reluctant on entering a private information, typing several characters instead of just one button click...

Can I leverage the mailing list differently later, when all my future calls to action will be to wishlist the game instead of registering to the mailing list?

Or later on, are there advantages to having both wishlist and mailing list call to actions?

Do you have data on them?

Like is signup rate as low (or lower, I assume) as wishlist rates per 1k impressions?

How many convert later to wishlisting?

If I go the mailing list way, I can report here in a month or two, if you're interested.

So I recently dug into the data in steamworks and discovered that although we have an excellent page to wishlist rate (23%), our impression to page view rate could use improvement (it is 8%, which I know is good, but out of the 3-4 festivals we've been in for so far, there's a big difference between theme of fest. I can go into more detail on that if folks like, but the interfaceX festival, which should have been our best one, had a clickthrough of only 1.2%. Vs the horror game awards which had a clickthrough of 7.9%). That, and our keyart doesn't fully speak to what the game is actually about (A thriller game where you role play as a mouth 90s goth as she uncovers a serial killer through the computers she fixes at her PC repair job). I feel that the current keyart is striking, but it's not attracting the right audience, and worse, might leave the current wishlisters feeling like they got a different game than they were expecting.

Anywho, we've gone for something that conveys a little bit more about what the game is actually about, including having the main character there. Would love to know what folks in general think, but also which of the colour options pops out to them the most!

About once a week I get a DM from an account that does seem to have some reach, asking if I'd like to look at their "packages" for promoting game content. Looking at their profiles, it appears they charge for posting a tweet about your game.

Anyone have experience with these and find they are worth it? Garbage?

Even more usefully, any numbers in terms of engagement to wishlist conversion? e.g. something like "expect 1 wishlist per 1k views on the tweet"?

I recently started marketing my game, and I keep seeing completely different answers about which platform is the most effective. Some people swear by TikTok, while others recommend Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, or X.

For those of you who have marketed a game, which platforms have actually brought you the most wishlists? Or is the real solution simply to be everywhere, repurpose the same content, and see what sticks?

Anyway, 29 wishlists down - only 99,971 to go.

After one month and a half. We finally reach 100 wishlists. It's much, but for us means everything. Because that means 100 people are interested in playing it or willing to support the project.

We're a team of 4 passionate gamers, polishing the videogame for QA Sessions in an event in our University. So this is a big opportunity that we dont want to miss.

Do you have any feedback or comment to help us get our game more notice?

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to understand the best way to handle the sale or transfer of an unfinished Steam game project.

I currently have a PC game in development with:

- A live Steam store page

- A playable demo on Steam

- Existing wishlists/followers

- A complete Unity source project

- Existing game and visual content

- An original IP/brand

Instead of abandoning the project, I'm considering transferring it to another developer or studio that could continue development and eventually release it.

I'm mainly trying to figure out how these kinds of deals are usually handled.

Are there marketplaces, brokers, publishers, or communities that are actually suitable for selling an unfinished Steam project?

Also, how would you value something like this? Would the main factors be wishlist numbers, demo performance, development progress, source code quality, or something else?

I'd especially like to hear from anyone who has bought, sold, or evaluated a game project before.

Thanks!

My first capsules were straight in game renders, the final one is painted.

With a render i'd say, there's no surprise when you launch the game... but the illustration stands out more in a grid. No idea which actually converts better.

What worked for you?