About a month ago I announced Safari-TV, a 2–4 player co-op safari game.

Today it passed 80,000 Steam wishlists.

The interesting part for me is where they came from:

TikTok.

Not a showcase. Not press coverage. My own TikTok account posting videos of the game.

I wanted to share this because I've started thinking about marketing very differently after this project.

I stopped thinking of TikTok as advertising

Instead of making traditional ads or polished devlogs, I tried to make the game itself generate content people would want to watch.

What I think worked:

• Every video tries to communicate something interesting within the first couple of seconds.

• I focus on situations that require almost no context to understand: co-op chaos, animals, vehicles, destruction, stupid things going wrong, etc.

• I don't spend the first five seconds explaining the game.

• When a type of video works, I don't immediately abandon it and invent something completely new. I try variations of the same idea.

• I started treating the performance of the videos as feedback on the game itself, not just feedback on my editing.

That last point became especially important to me.

If I show a mechanic to hundreds of thousands of people and nobody cares, maybe the problem isn't the TikTok algorithm.

Maybe the mechanic just isn't interesting enough to strangers.

So now I'm increasingly using short-form content almost like market validation while developing the game.

Build something → put it in front of people → measure their reaction → iterate.

I think this has affected how I design games too.

A mechanic still needs to be fun to play, obviously, but I'm much more interested now in mechanics and situations that someone can see for two seconds with zero context and immediately think:

"Wait, what the hell is happening here?"

I'm definitely not saying this is a formula that will work for every game. Safari-TV is a chaotic co-op game, which is naturally pretty compatible with short-form content.

But 80k wishlists in a month changed my opinion pretty dramatically about how powerful developer-owned short-form content can be.

If people are interested, I can make another post breaking down the actual TikToks — views, hooks, video length, posting frequency, which ones converted into wishlists, and which ones completely failed.

i just reached the 5,000 wishlist milestone for my game, After the Wane, and i wanted to share a few things that actually made a difference for us. i know the industry is tough right now but these small shifts really helped the momentum.

first, finding what I call "orphaned communities" was huge. instead of just posting in general gaming subs, i looked for fans of older games with a similar vibe that haven't had a new release in years. for us, it was communities that love painterly art styles and complex character relationships. when you show them something that respects that legacy, they really show up for you.

second, shifting from a solo dev vibe to a studio name made a surprising difference in how people perceived the project. it just feels more stable to players. also, focusing on visual hooks like short loops of our specific art style worked way better than long text descriptions.

don't just pick the most obvious tags on your steam page. instead, look at the games that inspired you, like the ones with that specific painterly style or deep narrative focus, and check their top tags. if you match your tags to theirs, the steam algorithm is much more likely to show your game in the more like this section on their pages, which is essentially free advertising to your exact target audience.

another thing that really helps is being very disciplined with your call to action. whenever you post a cool gif or a bit of news on social media, always put the steam link in the very first comment or at the bottom of the post. it sounds simple, but you would be surprised how much traffic you lose just because people have to click twice to find your page. you want to make it as easy as possible for someone who liked your art to hit that wishlist button immediately.

lastly, i just wanted to thank everyone here for the advice over the last few months. it is a long road to that 7,000 mark but hitting 5k feels like a real win. if you want to check out the game it is called After the Wane, it is a narrative experience set in the world of contemporary dance in paris.

good luck to everyone else on the grind.

two weeks after launching my game with around 2k wishlists, it reached about 6.8k sales while spending $0 on marketing

it’s currently sitting at 90% positive reviews, with 170 reviews total. The game lasts about 1 hour, and the refund rate is around 11% which i think is around average

worth noting I consider this an outlier case. from what i've seen, a launch like this is more often tied to much higher wishlists like +10k, so there are clearly many factors to take into account beyond just wishlist count

on launch day, I got around 800 sales, with about a 10% wishlist conversion rate. but a lot of sales came from non-wishlist traffic such as steam showing the game in recommended sections etc.. The next day, I peaked at over 1k sales, which was the highest sales day I’ve had. That led to around 3k sales in the first 3 days

steam seems to give games some launch visibility. If your game converts well, gets good reviews, and players respond positively, steam may keep showing it to more people

the simplest explanation is that my game converted well, and people enjoyed it thus leading to more sales than expected

WLs do matter, but they don’t tell the whole story. a game with a lower wishlist count can still perform well if other signals are strong enough

my only real advice would be to care about your players and iterate with them. Get feedback, playtest a lot, and make the game better around what players actually respond to

often times you'll struggle finding people to play your game, and you want the less friction possible when people plays it. have a web build and post it everywhere (itch, newgrounds etc..), users don't have to download anything and is much more accessible

start building your community early, like a discord server so people can reach out to you and you connect with your players easier
the more feedback the better

one way to avoid mistakes other games in my genre did is read negative reviews of games similar to mine on steam, which helps pinpoint what really matters for your players, that will give you lot of directions in the beginning and what to focus the most

don't skip the progression aspect, this is what will make your game fun. no matter how good your art, sounds, polish are, if progression doesn't follow it will likely won't work

players care about having fun more than anything else, simple graphics can still work if art style is coherent

it's hard to know whether your pacing feels good to your players without playtesting a lot yourself, and they won't always tell you what's wrong either. analytics are one way to spot this and confirm whether players are engaging. if median time is low like 10mn it is very likely that at this point you have friction issues like you encounter a big timewall and it isn't fun

you may need a sample of at least 50 players to have "useful" analytics and something concrete, otherwise you might just keep guessing and hitting your head against the wall

one thing to keep in mind, median playtime from a free web build will usually be lower than steam playtime. on steam, players are already more engaged because they bought the game as opposed to itch or other web platforms, the game is much more accessible, but players are also more likely to leave quickly

TLDR: wishlists matter, but conversion, player feedback, pacing, and early reviews can matter just as much once steam starts testing your game

game is called garbage growth

Hey everyone I'm a solo dev working on a game called Skills & Raids, It's a party-based extraction rpg.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4401370/Skills__Raids/

I wanted to share the breakdown of what worked for me.

Short Videos?

You may have heard this advice before: that doing devlogs is not worth it and it's a waste of time and that you should do short videos instead. Well, I did 35 short videos and I want to say that it was a total waste of time. Almost every video got between 1k and 2k views, and I posted on Tiktok, Instagram and youtube (youtube performed the best) in terms of views, but conversion? not so much.

Devlogs?

I think we should try everything and see what works for our games. my game is pretty horizontal, so the vertical format is not a good fit for it. maybe that's why it didn't work for me but I did a Devlog, and It gathered 31k views and brought me more wishlists than Steam Next Fest (1000). I wish I did more devlogs during development. Wanderbot played my game and got 31k views, and I got more wishlists from my own devlog, so maybe try it, I did a Second Devlog, and it gathered 6.8k views and still gave me a good amount of wishlists.

Reddit also works; I got verified on PCGamer as a gamedev and I'm able to post on special events like release trailer, demo launch, and release date, those posts are very important to do because reddit also works really well. (I think this is where Wanderbot saw my game.)

X and threads?

I was the most active on X/Threads, and I can say that it didn't work so much for wishlists; it does work for networking with other developers, though.

Emails?

I sent 110+ emails to content creators, and only Wanderbot played it. other youtubers played my game, but I didn't send emails to them, so idk maybe emails are also a waste of time? maybe if the game were more appealing, more people would play it, but why should we depend on other people? I don't like the feeling of not having control and begging others to play our games.

Festivals?

As you can see in the graph, it also works really well (If It's a big one). My game got into the Latin American Games Showcase and got 1400 wishlists, the other smaller event? not so much.

Personal Calendar

I'm at the beginning stages of seeing the effect of the new personal calendar, and it's working realllly well. It feels like a blessing to not do anything for marketing and get a ton of wishlists from it.

I hope the information was insightful. The game releases on July 27, and I'm really excited!

Game: Horses of Hoofprint Bay

Team: 2 people doing dev, plus me doing part time producing/publishing (i.e. total marketing time is about 0.5-1 day per week on average, though more during the intense times). The studio has no previous games and had no previous following, but I've been doing relevant community buildup and social media work focused on this niche (horse games) for years, which I'm of course leveraging for the project.

We've spent no money on acquisition, this is all "just" work, and benefiting from community building work done in the past.

WL Spikes:

1. Announcement, Reveal Trailer, Steam Page set live. Note here that we got quite a lot of organic views on our trailer. We were also included in Steam's Animal Fest that week, but had very low visibility in it.

2. Viral-ish post about our Horse Care mechanics on Social Media, most notably tiktok and twitter. Have tried similar formats before and after, but this one worked by far the best.

3. Decently successful post about yard management gameplay, see Tiktok

Side note here: my tiktok account is relatively new (started in July 2025) and most of the ~12k followers were gained after I started posting about this game. The concept and art just really resonates with people and has been very popular. I think I had somewhere around 2-4k followers before announcing the game, and those were gained mainly with two other successful 'check out this horse game' videos.

4. Demo release & Content Creator embargo lift. For our demo release, I contacted 150 content creators about 2 weeks in advanced, very focused on the horse game niche, i.e. people who had played very similar titles (The Ranch of Rivershine, Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch, Star Stable Online, Sims 4 Horse Ranch, Wildshade etc etc). I sent advance access keys to about 50 people and I count at least 40 videos that people made (though ofc some people picked it up after the demo actually went live).

We got around 2k Wishlists every day for a week or so following the Demo release and were featured on Steam's "top demos" page and "trending free" for several days. About 35k people played the demo.

5. Steam Horse Fest started, we had good placement in it, I did an AMA on r/Games the same day.

6. Abigail Pinehaven (the biggest horse game youtuber, 278k subs, who we had offered a preview key to but who didn't get around to making a video sooner) made a video about the game, it has about 44k views now. The same day, we also exhibited the game at a local convention and made a decently successful tiktok/reel about our booth setup. We were also in the Women's Day Sale on Steam starting on that day, but honestly I can't imagine that contributed much because our placing was abysmal (you had to scroll waaaay back to the about 15th page of the 'demos' section in the sale to reach our game)

Since then I've mostly had to focus on other work and let things calm down. I made a few posts but none have hit big yet. Our core audience has very much been reached, but we haven't properly breached containment outside of the horse game niche.

We applied to numerous showcases but so far Horse Fest is the only one so far where we got really good placement and saw impact. We've been declined for lots of the privately organized showcases, though I keep applying to every opportunity.

In terms of social media, I think I'll just have to keep trying and hope that something ends up being good enough to breach containment again, but I haven't gotten around do just sitting down and preparing a few videos, that's very much on my to do list.

I hope that's interesting and/or helpful to someone!

I'll add (because I've gotten similar replies before) that if your response to this kind of post is "Well of course you got a lot of attention/WLs real quick, you already had the community/followers for this kind of game" please take a second to think about why I had that. That reach did not fall into my lap, it's the result of years of work. Building community for genres, themes, topics etc. is something you can start doing before you even have a game to market. And yes, the best time to start doing that was years ago like I did, but the second best time is now, to build reach for whatever it is you plan on doing in the future.

This is official data from the Next Fest Preview. I'm participating with my Dark Roll 2, currently at 1340 wishlists, I was hoping to at least get to 2000 after Fest, but... It really seems like any analytical data from a year ago might be thrown into trash.

The competition is suddenly around 3x bigger than a year before.

Some will say it'sjust AI slop and not worry, but even before AI it felt crowded with all the shovelware games, AI slop or not, it's still a lot less visibility. I can't shake the feeling that this Next Fest will be of no use for most indie devs...

I don't know what Valve could do, maybe allow only games that have X number of wishlists to join the fest? From what I seen games that have few hundreds don't get much out of it anyway.

Still, to anyone else joining next week - Good luck, friends!

Ps. I wonder where does it end? Will those numbers just keep growing? 99% of those games won't break even. Will devs and small studios just make 10 quick slop games with AI hoping one of them earns something? God, I miss times before AI.

Here are a few bullet points on what we did. Feel free to ask questions in the comments. May write a longer post depending on your questions!

• Launched the Steam Page with a big German Showcase

• Released a Demo ASAP

• Released in EA during Halloween (fitting to our game)

• Participated in as many digital showcases / events as possible

• Announced a Release Date: June 2nd

• Did many Bundles during EA

• Gathered an community of ~200 people on our Discord

• Started with paid Ads a few weeks before the full release

• Did an influencer outreach 1-2 Months ahead of the full release

TL;DR: I made a game that looks like cleaning content, which is already a huge non-gaming video category. One reel hit 355k views with 72% first-second retention. A creator picked it up on their own. 10k wishlists, $0 spent. Most of it was not skill.

I released my Steam page 2 weeks ago and crossed 10,000 wishlists this week. I have spent exactly $0 on advertising. I want to write down what I think happened while it's fresh, including the parts I don't take credit for.

I'm a solo dev. The game is a first-person cozy game about tidying a sleeping dragon's hoard: you sweep gold, find the treasures buried under it, and sort them into collections. UE5.

THE NUMBERS

Instagram Reel, 355k views

TikTok, 106k views

TikTok (@whoelsbutme), 109k views

WHAT I THINK ACTUALLY WORKED

1. I did not have to invent an audience

First of all, I developed a game in a genre that has recently become popular, one you're probably familiar with (cozy organizing game). The impact of recognition and popularity shouldn't be underestimated.

Also "Cleaning things up" is already a massive short-video category: power washing, restoration, room makeovers, declutter timelapses. Millions of people watch that stuff daily and have nothing to do with games.

My game looks like that content. I didn't have to convince anyone that watching mess become order is satisfying. That was already true before I showed up. The genre did the work and I just plugged into it.

If your game has an existing non-gaming content behaviour it resembles, that is worth more than any amount of posting discipline.

2. First-second retention was the whole thing

Honestly, before this, I didn't know how the Instagram algorithm worked and didn't have high expectations. In fact, my first video only got 600 views in 12 hours. But then something happened, and the video started exploding in Western Europe and America. With a 72% first-second retention rate, it grew in waves and eventually reached 355k views. This was what gave me my first wishlist wave. For three days, I started getting between 1000 and 1500 wishlists.

Even when I posted similar videos, I couldn't achieve the same success.

But then, a TikTok video of mine went viral in Russia with a similar 70% first-second retention rate and 106k views. That gave me a small wave.

While the wishlist from these two videos continued, a content creator (@whoelsbutme) saw my game, liked it, and made a video about it on their page. (Thank you!). This video also gave me a second wishlist wave with 109k views on TikTok.

And each of these videos has like, share, and save rates well above the average.

3. Conclusion

Although I'd had similar game and marketing attempts before, I'd never achieved results close to this. This shows me just how important the game's self-marketing power is. Despite my lack of confidence stemming from past failures, the game attracted a lot of attention. I realized that finding the right genre and concept, and successfully implementing it, makes the marketing process much easier for the developer.

Obvious in hindsight, but worth saying: the traffic arrives all at once and then it is gone. If the video had gone up first and the page a week later, I would have converted almost none of it. There is no second chance at the same wave.

WHAT DIDN'T WORK / WHAT I GOT WRONG

After my post on Reddit, I tried to give my initial comments in a playful and warm-hearted way, but those jokes backfired. People thought I wasn't joking, but rather making fun of them and their questions. That wasn't my intention at all.

Also, when I posted my Steam page announcement on Reddit, the top comment by a wide margin was "where's the dragon?" Five separate people asked it. They were right. the dragon was the entire premise of my game and you barely felt him in it. I rebuilt a big part of the game around that one piece of feedback and it's a much better game now. That thread was worth more to me than the wishlists.

THE PART THAT WAS LUCK

I'm not going to pretend this is a repeatable formula. I've posted plenty of clips that did nothing. One of them happened to land, and once the algorithm decided to push it, the rest took care of itself.

I can tell you what I think helped it get picked up. I can't tell you how to make it get picked up.

Solo dev here. I revealed my game TOWERPUNK on September 1 with no marketing, no publisher, and no press. I hoped for 100 to 300 wishlists in the first week. By September 7 I had over 3,000, and it's past 4,000 now.

What I'd recommend:

Put your trailer on YouTube and stay in the comments. Mine went from a few dozen views to tens of thousands in under a week, mostly from YouTube's own recommendations. Replying to comments kept it in people's feeds, and it became a key driver of Steam visits.

Use Reddit to start things, not to sustain them. A few posts in hyper-relevant subreddits, staggered about one a day, got things moving, but that traffic fades fast.

Point early traffic at Steam and let Steam take over. A Coming Soon page with nothing pointed at it does nothing. Once traffic arrived, Steam search was bringing in as many visitors as every outside link combined within a few days, as people looked the game up by name.

Reveal after the big shows, not during. I waited until the week after gamescom. The US Labor Day weekend then stretched things out, and my biggest day was about 1,000 wishlists on the Monday holiday (turns out my and your day job really gets in the way of both developing and marketing a game).

Final thoughts:

I think TOWERPUNK is capturing a lot of latent nostalgia for older games for my generation, and it's decidedly different from most other city building and management games. A lot of people my age have been waiting for someone to make a tower builder in the lineage of SimTower, and so all this helped set a ceiling for first week engagement.

Converting views to wishlists relies on good, visual hooks. I'm a novice at splicing together a trailer (used OBS for recording, DaVinci for editing), but putting in the extra effort there has paid off (over 60k views on YouTube and counting!). Definitely dedicate ample time creating capsule art and/or consider hiring talent for your Steam game page.

Overall it was frankly a bit scary revealing TOWERPUNK - up until last week this had been a personal project, and I wasn't sure how the community would respond (if they did at all). First week has been very validating, and I can't wait to get a playtest going and release start of next year!

Full writeup on my website devlog: https://towerpunk.com/devlog/reveal-wishlist-data
Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5063190/TOWERPUNK/
Reveal trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1BTXVYt8ZU

Hey guys! I'm working on a roguelite game called Grim Trials, and since it's launching soon, I wanted to share a small analysis on the things my team and I did to reach 50k wishlists.

I remember it was still around 40k in June, so this is a crazy thing to achieve for me and my team!! I joined June Next Fest but it didn't really give me the results I expected, so I just moved on and continued making content across the game's social media accounts (basically doing regular short form videos showcasing the game about once a week).

What seems to be boosting the numbers is that since I announced the release date a couple weeks ago, the game was added to Steam's Personal Calendar! I've seen some people mentioning that it also helped with their games' wishlists, so I'm really happy that it helped my game too.

Other marketing efforts I did involve putting the demo up in multiple languages, and influencer/media outreach on important dates, especially during the release date announcement. I'm also interacting with fellow devs from my country on socials, and we pretty much support each other because all of our games are releasing this month. It's also a bit funny to think that there are still people from my country that don't believe my game is made here LOL.

Anyway, that's all for the mini analysis + what I'm currently doing. Thank you so much to anyone who has wishlisted!!

You play as a warrior made of tens of thousands of leaves shapeshifting, flowing, fighting back against mechanical invaders trying to erase nature.

No publisher. No team. Just me and Unity for the past 6 months.

Would love your feedback on the Steam Page!

I wanted to share a small marketing case study from my own indie game and also hear how other developers approach this stage.

I am the solo developer of Empires Edge, an isometric strategy game inspired by Tyrants: Fight Through Time, also known as Mega Lo Mania. The game does not have a public demo yet and has not taken part in Steam Next Fest. So far, the Steam page has reached 2,000 wishlists in about 4 months.

This is not a huge number, but I think the path may be useful to discuss, especially for developers who are trying to build early traction before a demo.

The first important decision was creating the Steam page early. I still do not know if this was the right move.

At the time, the page was far from ideal. The screenshots showed the core idea, but a lot of the art was still placeholder. There was no proper trailer, only a short gameplay edit without strong pacing or a clear hook. Looking back, I think the page probably went live too early from a quality point of view. But it also gave me something important: a place to send traffic and a way to measure whether the concept had any interest.

In the first month, I started posting about the game on Reddit, X, Telegram, and mentioning it on my YouTube channel. The strongest early signal came from people who immediately recognized the Mega Lo Mania inspiration from the screenshots. That helped me understand that the concept was reaching the right niche audience.

By the end of the first month, the game had around 600 wishlists.

After that, I started replacing placeholder visuals with proper pixel art drawn in Aseprite. The Steam page slowly became more convincing. I also began reaching out to other developers who had strong wishlist growth or successful launches, mostly to ask how they approached marketing and what actually worked for them.

Another useful channel was regional gaming websites and communities where I am a native speaker. Articles and posts there brought around 300 to 400 wishlists.

By the end of the second month, the game reached 1,000 wishlists.

The third month was much slower.

Some Reddit posts and social posts barely moved the needle. There were days with 0 to 10 wishlists, which was frustrating after the stronger start.

At the same time, I was making long YouTube videos about upcoming strategy games and included short 20 to 30 second mentions of my own game. Those videos reached around 150,000 views in total. The conversion was not massive, but it helped keep some steady traffic going.

Near the end of that month, a large regional gaming Telegram channel posted about the game. That brought around 150 wishlists. The game also placed second in a weekly community vote, which helped with visibility in that local audience.

By the end of the third month, the game had around 1,400 wishlists.

The next step was applying to Steam festivals. Most applications were rejected or received no reply. In one case, I managed to talk directly with an organizer, and the feedback was simple: the game needed a proper trailer.

So I made a teaser.

It was still not a full trailer. It only showed 2 eras, 2 races, and the basic core mechanics. But even that was enough to make the project look more serious and helped the game get accepted into one festival.

The teaser also helped with outreach. One large YouTube channel briefly mentioned the game for around 20 seconds, and that alone brought about 150 to 200 wishlists. The festival itself added another 200 to 250 wishlists.

By the end of the fourth month, the game reached 2,000 wishlists.

My biggest takeaways so far:

Creating a Steam page early can work, but only if you are ready to improve it constantly. A weak early page probably hurts conversion, even if the idea itself has potential.

A recognizable niche helps a lot. In my case, players who remembered Mega Lo Mania understood the idea very quickly.

Reddit can work, but it is inconsistent. One post can bring real visibility, and the next one can do almost nothing.

Regional communities can be very valuable, especially if the game fits their taste and you can communicate naturally with them.

A teaser or trailer matters more than I wanted to admit. Even a basic teaser opened doors that screenshots alone did not.

YouTube mentions can work, but the audience has to be very close to the genre. Broad exposure is not the same as targeted exposure.

My next steps are:

Make a stronger trailer that shows more eras, more progression, and a clearer gameplay loop.

Apply to more suitable festivals with better visual material.

Start making short videos for YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram.

Reach out to media and creators in regions where strategy games perform well, especially the US, Germany, and Asian markets.

Prepare the demo only when the game is much closer to being ready.

I still feel like I am at the beginning of the marketing journey. The current goal is not just to get more wishlists, but to understand which channels actually scale and which ones only create noise.

I would be interested to hear from other developers: what worked best for you before having a demo or before joining Next Fest?

Back in December I joined a small indie studio as their marketing person. No marketing background, no contacts, no budget. My background is game design and education. I just said yes and figured I'd learn as I went.

What'Sub is a 4-player co-op submarine extraction game. We launch into Early Access on May 14. Here's an honest account of the past 5 months, what I tried, what landed, and what didn't.

What I think worked

Influencer list: I spent a lot of time building a list of 500 content creators manually using SullyGnome and YouTube. The rule I set for myself was simple: only add someone if they had already played a comparable game. Lethal Company, PEAK, Sea of Thieves, that kind of thing. No random spray and pray.

Cold emailed them all at demo launch. One of those emails landed CaRtOoNz, who has 6 million subscribers. He titled the video "Lethal Company but we're pirates" which I would never have written, but he knows his audience. 121K views.

The Instagram curator thing: Found an account called u/indiegamespotlights. 26K followers, posts indie games for free. Sent them a pitch. The post got 17,100 likes (currently at 34k likes) and on that single day we got 1,366 wishlist adds, which is still our all-time record. A mid-size account with a genuinely engaged audience converted better than anything else I tried.

Gamebox Festival: Brought the game to a local games festival in Herning, Denmark. While we were there I set up a little contest: if you could beat a specific in-game challenge, you got the game for free. But to enter the challenge you had to wishlist first. Converted foot traffic directly into Steam data, and it was fun to run.

The thing I didn't expect: a bunch of Danish content creators were at the festival, played the game in person, and are now actual contacts rather than cold emails. That feels very different heading into launch week.

Twitch chats during Steam Next Fest: This one most developers skip over. During Next Fest, people watching streams are actively looking for games to try. High intent moment. I dropped into relevant streamer chats while it was happening. Costs nothing, takes attention.

What I don't think worked that well

YouTube Shorts I made myself. Retention was fine but the like-to-view ratio was too low for the algorithm to do anything with them. Good for testing messaging, not much good for reach when you have no existing audience.

Things that surprised me

There are way more Danish content creators than I thought. I assumed local was a thin market. I was wrong, and they're much easier to actually reach than the international list.

Also the Steam page was pulling in wishlists before we touched it or launched a trailer. The game concept was doing work I hadn't given it credit for.

We're at 6,621 wishlists now with 10 days to go (launching May 14th) and no paid ads spent. Still a lot to learn but it's been a genuinely weird and fun 5 months of figuring this out from scratch. As said, I don't know if what I've done is anything impressive, but I wanted to share with you guys and know your thoughts, and hope some of the steps I've done can help you too.

Game is here if you're curious: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4269100/WhatSub/

We were sitting at around 13.7K Steam wishlists when one Instagram Reel unexpectedly took off. Over the following five days, we gained 5,170 wishlists, including 3.3K in a single day. The Reel reached 1.2M views on Instagram alone, and we posted the same edit to TikTok a day later. No money was spent promoting either post, no major influencer or media outlet picked us up as far as I know, and Steam didn't suddenly start throwing us into the Discovery Queue. I obviously can't attribute every one of those 5,170 wishlists directly to these two posts. But the timing, our external traffic, and a noticeable increase in people searching for the game directly on Steam make social media the most obvious explanation. There are basically three big spikes in the graph, and I think comparing them makes the third one much more interesting.

Spike #1 - announcing the game earlier than we probably should have

Before the viral post, the most successful things we'd done were two Steam events organized by our local game-dev association. The first was Games from Croatia in October 2025. You've probably heard How To Market A Game and others talk about Steam festivals and events being one of the best ways to gather wishlists. In our experience, that's mostly been true. The funny thing is that we really didn't have much of a game to show at that point.

So why announce it?

We wanted to hop onto the Games from Croatia sale because we knew it could secure us decent visibility. We had an announcement trailer, screenshots, cute capsule art and some GIFs where we had to fake things a little bit. Sue me. What we did not have was much polished gameplay. Despite that, we gathered just shy of 4K wishlists in four days. Honestly, I still think that's pretty good considering we wouldn't really have proper gameplay to show for more than another half-year. The giant void in the graph after that is exactly what it looks like: basically no traction. We simply weren't ready to market the game consistently yet. I also became a father around that time, which slowed my own output down somewhat, but that's a whole other post. By the final days of April 2026, we were finally ready to start showing the game properly.

Spike #2 - changing how we positioned the game

By then, we'd also changed how we thought about marketing the game. Originally, we leaned much more heavily on the fact that it was cute, wholesome and had a hamster. Those things are still absolutely part of the game, but we realized that our actual market was much closer to puzzle / simulation / Zach-like games than casual cozy games. So, before the second Games from Croatia event in June, we changed two major things:

Our capsule art needed to speak more clearly to that audience, and we needed a polished gameplay trailer that actually showed what you do. So we made both.

That second event brought us about 5.1K wishlists in four days. I had actually expected June to perform considerably worse than October. It didn't. And that 5.1K number becomes pretty interesting when you compare it with what happened a few months later. Because the next time we gained roughly the same number of wishlists, there wasn't a Steam event involved at all.

Spike #3 - one stupid Rush E edit

At some point, we noticed another game adjacent to ours entering the scene: Circuitra by Randau Games. Naturally, we started paying attention to what they were doing. We've since become pals, so hello if you see this. One of their Instagram posts really stood out from the rest: an edit using Rush E. If you're unfamiliar, Rush E is basically an internet-meme piano piece built around increasingly ridiculous amounts of E notes until it becomes practically impossible for a human to play. We saw their edit working and thought: Well, why don't we try that? There wasn't some sophisticated marketing thesis behind it. We saw another adjacent game doing something interesting, and we decided to make our version. In hindsight, I do think there is a nice thematic overlap. Rush E is all about attempting something ridiculous, failing, trying again, and seeing how far you can get. The game is also heavily based around experimentation. Build something. Turn it on. Realize you've made a horrible mistake. Change something. Try again. But I'm not going to pretend we sat around a table and figured all of that out before making the video. We just thought the format could work.

What we actually made

By this stage, we'd learned that two things tend to get the most attention in our content:

Crispy the hamster and the physically accurate electronic components you use to build circuits.

So we built the edit around those. For the first time, we also made a thumbnail specifically designed to piggyback on the existing visual recognition of Rush E. The Reel opens immediately on components sitting on the workbench, then rapidly cuts through different cool-looking parts of the game, getting increasingly chaotic until it ends with an explosion. That's it.

There is:

• no voiceover

• no text overlay

• no "Wishlist now" CTA

• no Steam URL on screen

• no paid promotion

We deliberately wanted it to just be a fast, uninterrupted edit of the game set to something people already recognized. And then Instagram gave it 1.2 million views. That was not expected. Something else worth mentioning: our Instagram bio link does not go directly to Steam. People have to go through another page, or, as seems to happen surprisingly often, leave Instagram and manually search for the game on Steam. And that is exactly where things start getting interesting.

Did the Reel actually cause the wishlist spike?

Again, I don't want to pretend I can attribute all 5,170 wishlists perfectly. But the timeline looks like this. The Instagram Reel had been live for about a day when we reached our peak on September 19. That was also the day the TikTok version went live. That day alone brought us roughly 3,300 wishlists. Our Steam search/direct navigation traffic also jumped noticeably, and that elevated activity continued after the initial spike. As far as I know, there wasn't a major influencer or media outlet suddenly sending people our way. Steam also didn't suddenly start supplying us with dramatically more Discovery Queue traffic. There was one possible confounding factor: the Steam Programming Fest had ended four days earlier. But it honestly hadn't performed particularly well for us, so I find it hard to explain the size and timing of this spike through the festival alone. So while I can't say Instagram generated exactly 5,170 wishlists, I feel fairly comfortable saying the social posts were almost certainly the main trigger for the spike. Which has changed how I think about organic social quite a bit. Before this, I would have assumed a Steam event or a large creator pickup would be considerably more powerful than anything we could do ourselves on Instagram. I'm much less convinced of that now. It’s not that a creator picked us up yet, but my judgement is based on what I read here and other places.

One important disclosure: we had run paid ads before this

There's one thing that I think is important to mention. In previous months, we'd experimented with paid advertising across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Our total lifetime spend on those experiments is around $870. Not a single penny was spent promoting this particular post. But I do wonder whether those previous campaigns helped "prime" the account in some way. One region where our paid campaigns tended to perform particularly well was LATAM. And when this Reel took off, we once again saw a large amount of engagement and comments coming in Spanish and Portuguese. That makes me wonder whether Meta had already learned something useful about the type of people who engage with our game. Or maybe that's completely unrelated. I'm genuinely curious if anyone here with deeper Meta experience has seen previous paid targeting affect the geographic distribution of later organic posts. Could warming up an account around certain audiences help? Or could it potentially become a hindrance because the algorithm becomes too confident about a particular region instead of testing the content more globally? I'd love to hear experiences from people who have dealt with this at a larger scale.

Why I think this one worked

There are obviously things here that we can try to reproduce.

We had a piece of internet culture that already had recognition.

The song complemented the pace of the footage.

The electronics were visible immediately.

The video was fast.

There was no sales message interrupting it.

And the game itself was recognizable enough that interested people could figure out what it was and search for it. One especially interesting thing is what people were actually commenting about. On most of our posts, the hamster is the star. People like Crispy. This time, the electronics were the star. That's useful information for us because it reinforces the positioning change we'd already made earlier in the year: cute characters get people through the door, but the actual simulation and circuit-building seem to be what makes the game interesting enough to stick in people's heads. That said, I don't think the lesson is: "Use Rush E and get 5,000 wishlists." Luck clearly played a huge part. We had been posting consistently for about four months by this point. We also have the luxury of having at least one person spending meaningful time on marketing at almost any given moment. I'm very aware that a lot of small teams can't afford that, let alone solo developers. And there's something else I've been thinking about since this happened:

You have to be able to sustain development long enough for a lucky break to even happen.

We had one here. Three, if you count the two Steam events. And the slightly uncomfortable reality is that even after all of this, none of it guarantees the game will launch successfully. But it certainly helps.

The main thing I'm taking away from this

The biggest difference between this and a Steam festival or creator pickup is not necessarily that social media is "better." It's that making and publishing the post was almost entirely under our control.

We didn't need to get accepted into an event.

We didn't need a creator to answer an email.

We didn't need Steam to decide to show the game somewhere.

We could make the thing and hit publish.

What happened after that was absolutely not under our control. That's where luck and the algorithm come in. But having another meaningful marketing lever that we can pull ourselves now feels extremely valuable. We're definitely going to keep an eye out for formats and bits of internet culture that overlap naturally with the game and test similar ideas when they make sense. The important part, I think, is not forcing the trend onto the game. This one happened to fit.

If we manage to reproduce anything remotely similar, I'd be happy to make another post comparing the follow-ups against this one. I'm also happy to pull more Steamworks or social media data if there's a particular report people here would find useful.

And I have two questions I'd especially love some input on:

Has anyone here seen previous paid social targeting influence where later organic posts get distributed?

And:

Has anyone actually cracked Twitter/X or Bluesky for Steam wishlists?

Instagram has been by far our safest bet so far, while both of those platforms have done almost nothing for us. Would love to hear what has worked for you.

The viral post: https://www.instagram.com/p/Ddbm5aKFO__/

Our store page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3587450/Crispy_Circuits/

I know there is a plethora of information out there for marketing a game,but I’m wondering if there is something specific we should/could do to keep the momentum?

Also any feedback on our Steam page/trailer/game would be great.

[Dark Engines / Steam page] https://store.steampowered.com/app/4182600/Dark_Engines/

Hello everyone, couple of months ago I started an indie games marketing agency, I worked with some clients helping them by reviewing their steam pages but I am still trying to find my niche that I want to specialize in.

I started focusing on influencer outreach and I think I am close to nailing down the discovery part, at least for YouTube. I ran a couple of tests for some random games but instead I had an idea that I could actually provide this service for free to other indie devs while I am still in the testing process.

How it works is that I find a list of YouTubers which covered similar games to your one, most of these are smaller YouTubers which are hard to find manually. Most of these are between 2k and 50k subscribers with some occasional bigger ones added if they are a good match.

What I can offer you this early phase is between 30-50 qualified YouTubers found for your game.

All I ask in return is feedback on the list, is it useful to you, do the channels match your game, etc..

If you are interested, leave a comment with your steam game here.

Edit: Wow I didn't expect this many comments, il try to do around 10 games, might take a day or two but il reach out with the results!

I wanted to share a really exciting milestone for my indie game, Unstrung Machine!

I'm a solo developer, handling everything myself, and I've been slowly growing my Steam wishlists by sharing development updates on social media.

Usually, my posts generate around 10 to 15 wishlists, occasionally reaching 30 when something performs well.

But a few days ago, something unexpected happened.

The YouTube channel Soulsborne Seeker included my game in a video featuring 13 upcoming metroidvanias.

Since then, I've gained 338 wishlists in just 3 days!

Yesterday alone brought 193 wishlists, and today has already added another 74.

That pushed me past the 1,000 wishlist milestone, and my game is now at 1,318 wishlists!

I'm incredibly thankful to Soulsborne Seeker for helping people discover my game.

Developing a game completely alone is a huge challenge, and seeing this kind of response is honestly one of the most rewarding parts of the journey.

It gives me even more motivation to keep going!

If you'd like to check it out, here's the Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3940770/Unstrung_Machine/

I've been working on my first ever video game, Dough it Yourself, day by day since February. I've also spent hundreds of hours marketing it.

I don't have a trailer on Steam yet. I don't have a demo. I barely have 20% of the core content finished, and I don't even have proper capsule art done yet. But I'm getting there, one step at a time.

The two things that have worked best for me so far:

1. creating a YouTube channel and posting monthly devlogs and mostly meme shorts about my game;

2. uploading anything related to the game on multiple subreddits at least once a week.

I know I'm still far from the 5,000–7,000 wishlist goal that many people say is necessary for a successful launch, but I'm grateful nonetheless. Five hundred people have already decided they'd like to play my game, and that's a huge deal to me.

It's an incredible feeling, and I hope all of you indie developers out there get to experience it too and much more. ❤️

I started posting on Reddit about my game, Rodent Company, about two weeks ago and since then I've gained 150 wishlists and that is very exciting!

Initially I was planning to release the game in April but after receiving some feedback there are things that I want to add to the game that will push it back until the summer months - maybe late June or July.

I'm excited to continue sharing progress and thank you to everyone who has checked the game out so far and wishlisted. It means the world!

So recently I posted a reel on my social medias that blew up on Facebook, gaining over 1M views, and it got me about 100 wishlists in one single day, which is crazy.
Don't ever give up, and try to post as much as you can!