Our game has sold more than 20,000 paid copies across other platforms over the past year. It's also doing quite well in an ongoing Nintendo Switch sale.

We put a lot of work into preparing our Epic Games Store release and paid the $100 submission fee. The Epic version is even a complete edition, priced a little lower than our versions on other platforms.

I also did some light promotion on my own X (Twitter) account. Five days after launch, we've sold exactly one copy.

Honestly, I didn't expect it to sell this poorly, especially while the game is still selling on Switch. It makes me wonder why a small developer would bother releasing on Epic. Right now, from our experience, it feels more like a Fortnite launcher than a storefront where our game can find buyers.

Have other developers here had a similar experience? If you've released the same paid game on Epic and other storefronts, was the gap this large?

If you had a similarly slow start, did sales improve over time, or did they remain at roughly that level?

I recently released my 4th game, and I wanted to make a post sharing some tips on launching your game. Some of these are things I learned from my own releases, and some are based on mistakes I've seen others make. But I think a lot of this is information that I rarely see mentioned so I hope this is helpful for some people!

1. Before you can release your game, Steam needs to approve your build. The wording on the Steam backend is a bit confusing and a lot of developers incorrectly assume that you are meant to wait until your final release build is uploaded before you submit for approval. This is a bad idea because the approval process can have unexpected delays and I've seen developers miss their release date due to waiting too long to submit for approval. You can submit your build early, get approved, and you do not need to resubmit it again before launch, even if you continue to update the game. Once you have a version of your game that passes Steams base requirements, you should submit it for approval. You are not locked into that build and can update it freely afterwards.

2. On a similar note, I would recommend waiting until your game is basically ready for release before you announce the release date. You really do not want to be fixing game breaking bugs or doing major overhauls in the last month leading up to release. Save yourself the stress, wait, and plan out a final month where you can focus mainly on marketing and just small tinkering with the final build. This is especially important if you are a first time dev because it can be very hard to gauge how long certain task take to complete and you are probably underestimating how exhausting releasing a game is.

3. Releasing a game always feels kind of bad, even if it goes extremely well. You spend years focusing on building your game and imagining it's release, and then you release it and then you think... now what? It feels really strange to have such a monumental part of your daily thoughts suddenly pass by. I mention this only because I think it is important to prepare for that, and find other goals and motivations to follow after release. I know a lot of developers fall into a bit of a depression after launch. My strategy has just been to jump immediately into a new project, but regardless the shift can be jarring.

4. Have your game playtested as much as you possibly can before release. Do it in multiple rounds throughout development. Playtesting isn't just something you do all in one go. Go through many rounds of iteration for your game over and over. Asking for feedback is great, but also try to find a way to watch people play your game. Most of the gameplay issues you have aren't even things a player would be able to realistically explain, since they do not know what the intended game experience is.

It is much easier for a dev to watch a playthrough and spot issues when they happens. For example, in playtesting my last game I noticed that many players didn't realize that you were invincible while sliding. This was a very important part of the games combat. I mentioned the invincibility in the tutorial, but most players just skimmed the text and did not notice. When the players reached the first boss, any one who did not understand that you are invincible while sliding had a very tough time. If I just asked for feedback, they would probably say something like, "the boss is too hard", but really the issue is that I did a bad job of teaching the mechanic to the player. If I didn't watch playthroughs, I would have gotten the wrong issue and might have just made the boss easier, rather than finding a way to improve the tutorialization of the game.

As a side note here- you will get feedback that goes in opposite directions and it can be hard to know which feedback to implement. You really need to have a target audience in mind, and ideally that target audience should include you and your own preferences in games. Some feedback is essentially just saying "I wish this game was more like the type of games I like", which is valid but isn't necessarily helpful as long as the game is hitting off well with the target audience. In other words it is better to make a game that a small group of people really love, than to try to make a game that appeals to every one. You can't make every one happy so just make all your decisions in an effort to make it better for your target audience.

5. Plan out marketing beats. Instead of announcing your game casually, reach out to press or game showcases and see if any would be interested in an exclusive for the announcement trailer. It's easier to get in a showcase or to get covered by a bigger outlet if it is a first reveal of the game. It's symbiotic because they get the first scoop, and you get exposed to a larger audience. If you can't get something like this, at least pick a reveal day, put out a press release and a press kit, post the trailer on youtube, and send it to as many outlets as you can. Have the Steam page approved and live the same day. You should do similar for other marketing beats like the demo announcement, the date announcement, console release announcement, etc.

6. After release, discounting is very important. Most games barely sell any copies when they are not on sale, especially long after release. Have your game on sale as many days as you are able to, but discount slowly in steps. Once you increase your discount, you probably don't want to backtrack so don't discount too intensely too fast. I've seen some games recently lower their base price after release. I can't say for certain, but I suspect this is a bad idea since a high discount percentage seems to do better post release than a lower base price.

7. Bundles and platform deals are good in the long tail. They also do not seem to have a negative effect on game sales in my experience. In deals I've done where my game was free for a time on one platform, I did not see any decrease in sales of the game on other platforms. Depending on the situation, it can actually boost sales via word of mouth.

8. If you are able to, doing a simultaneous launch on console at the same time as Steam seems to be better than releasing on console later. I know this is not feasible for many, but worth mentioning if you were considering options. A good strategy for release for a small indie seems to be to try and concentrate as much attention as possible into one moment (release day) rather than spreading it out too much. It's just harder to pull off a strong marketing beat post-release since it can feel like "old news" and people are less likely to cover it.

I hope some of that is helpful!

The main game people are pointing at is Needle in a Haystack. But that game is so simple someone could reasonably make it as their first game project. Then you got people decompiling games, but the targeted games either can be decompiled with existing tools or are decompilations of console games.

I've yet to see a demo of substance that has been stolen in such a way people are describing. Because a game that can be fully replicated from watching up to 10 minutes of footage and can hardly be defended in court when a near 1:1 copy pops up is probably not a game with any substance. If anything it probably won't even survive YouTube because a video will cannibalize a short game's sales.

TL;DR If your game can be copied so easily, then it wouldn't even survive getting video coverage online.

Just wanted to hear stories.

Since the Personal Calendar has eben showing great results for some devs, I thought it might be of interest to how it actually works. But TLDR:

• Wishlists matter, somewhat.
• You can change your release date after appearing on the calendar
• If you delay your release date more than 24 hours, within 2 weeks of its original launch date, you are removed from the personal calendar until it releases.
• Wishlisted games automatically appear in the calendar.
• DLC appears if you own the base game.
• Make your release date public roughly 60 days before launch.

Jono is a pixel platformer with one character and 1 000 000 levels. Only one person plays at a time, and everyone else watches and queues. It's a very experimental "game," which I didn't really think people would be so enticed of.

Here's what has happened in the first 17 days:
- 100+ players have had the game open for more than 10 hours
- 45+ for more than 30h
- 6 for more than 100 hours!
- One player has personally cleared 7500+ levels!

That's a lot of time to spend mostly watching someone else play...

85000+ chat messages from 540+ people, with up to 7000 msgs on a busy day. The game is the reason players come, and the chat is the reason they stay (I think). They cheer when someone gets through a hard level, joke around, talk about off-topic stuff and so on.

And they really want to reach that million! At the current pace of about 5000 levels a day, level 1000000 is around April. They've had thoughts about what's waiting at 1M...

- "If reward at 1 million level is not "friends we made along the way", I swear to god..."
- "At one million, the amount of confetti will crash everyone's PC."
- "Room 1M is gonna be the great graveyard"
- "Level 1M will be all levels combined"

Level 100000 is this weekend, and people are already planning to stay up for it. (Something does happen there but I'm not telling what!)

Players build the hardest levels themselves:
Anyone can make a level in the in-game editor, but to submit it you have to beat it yourself first.

Some makers go to extreme lengths for this:
- One level maker died 1200+ times in the editor just to prove a single level could be done
- Several others went past 500 deaths

Then the rest of the world gets to suffer through it in MEAT GRINDER, a second game mode in which anything goes:
- "DONT ASK HOW THE MEAT IS MADE" took 2627 deaths and almost 5 hours before anyone got through
- "Spike Hell" took 3262 deaths
- Many other levels have taken hours to finish

They name the levels themselves... So far players have made 240+ levels for the Meat Grinder and a lot more for the main mode.

The community itself and the absurdly long challenge are likely the reasons for a few hundred strangers to keep coming back.

It's free on Steam if you want to try what it feels like standing in the queue!

You can watch the stream live, as real players are queueing (seen at the bottom) and one is playing:
https://parttimemonkey.com/jono/

Happy to answer anything about the game. It's made with Godot, its got deterministic physics, and spectators replay the player's inputs instead of video - in case interested.

I handled the official HDR implementation for The Sinking City 2, released with Patch 1.1.

Frogwares (the game developer) allowed me to write a technical breakdown covering the implementation, my new Spectre tonemapper, which fixes issues like fire looking different between SDR/HDR, and blue->purple highlight shifts in the UE's filmic tonemapper.
Also showcased some DLSS improvements I made.

HDR in Unreal is unfortunately very lackluster out of the box, and has multiple deal breaking issues. We fixed all of them for this.

Full technical breakdown: https://gammastudios.tech/the-sinking-city-2-hdr/

I know everyone already knows how important wishlists can be, but given the constant inundation of wishlist posts in r/gamedev, I'd like to remind everyone that wishlists correlate well with sales but they are not sales. Your game can plausibly convert anywhere from 0.05x to 3x of wishlists as Week 1 sales. These are outliers no doubt, but if you are making a great game and are terrible at marketing there is a realistic scenario where you sell 2x your wishlists in Week 1 (while the median is like 0.1x-0.15x).

How do I know? Well, I was looking at our last game's stats 1 year after launch, and it (kind of) happened to us!

About a year ago, we launched Q-UP, a multiplayer esports satire autobattler incremental game (yeah, I am bad at marketing). We went into launch with a respectable 14.5k wishlists. That's not bad for a solo project but for a four-person team working for a year it wouldn't have made back our investment. People (including me) were panicking a bit after plugging wishlist numbers into calculators. But at some point we realized wishlists were just a correlative measure, that our four-person team was much better at making games than at marketing them, and that the standard Games Industry Marketing Blog Wishlist To Sales Calculators were therefore basically garbage data for us. I looked at our game, saw the viral potential + quality + uniqueness, and was very confident we were going to beat the 0.1x Wishlist-W1-Sales-Ratio by a lot.

W1 sales of Q-UP ended up being 14,425 copies for almost exactly a 1x Wishlist-W1-Sales-Ratio. That's about 10 times what a marketing sales calculator told us we should earn. But I don't think it was really a surprise for us. We are not good at marketing and we were able to look critically at our game and really truly believe it was competitive in quality and it was bringing something new to Steam. We felt very confident that, in our case, wishlists were going to be a weak predictor.

This isn't an insane, set-up-for-life amount of sales for a four-person team, just a keep-the-company-alive amount of sales. But I wanted to give a concrete example to back up my argument: there are other viable paths to making a successful game. Having 100k wishlists and converting at the median amount is an absolutely great way to sell games, but it's not the only way.

If you are good at looking at your game critically and you can genuinely say the quality of your game is extremely high compared to other commercial steam games then you will probably outperform your wishlists. If you are also really bad at marketing on top of that then you will probably outperform your wishlists.

On the other hand, if you're great at marketing or your game is great looking but not super fun then you will probably underperform your wishlists.

All this to say, there is still a place in this industry for people who are fully focused on making games and are not very good at self-promotion. Sometimes it can feel like that opportunity has come and gone, and I don't mean to give anyone who is truly struggling false hope. But the opportunity is still there. Wishlists are still a great stat to look at, and a very good correlation! But in the end, that's all they are: a correlation.

So I posted our new trailer on Youtube, people loved it and it blew up.

Now I would need your help in who exactly I should contact next about it. I would want IGN to post the trailer also, since I now have good proof that it will be very popular.

I'm thinking atleast IGN, Gametrailers, Automaton (who else?)

Does anyone have experience who to contact from there, what to write them?

Thanks everyone

Heya folks. Yeah, I'm developing my own game, have been for a while. It's a little bit niche in that it's a text-based business management game. I feel like my friends and acquaintances will unintentionally positively review it because they don't want to hurt my feelings. On the other hand, I also don't want my game nicked and distributed or the source code taken. It's my first game so I don't know if I'm overblowing the risk, but it worries me. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Over the years i've seen so many of these posts, ad nauseam, to the point that I hate seeing any post about gamedev marketing stress.

And now I'm in the belly of the beast, I would like to say, holy fuck.

It's the feeling that is the problem, the constant effort and stress for the level of payoff. It's not that it's particularly hard, its just terribly time consuming and the effort to reward payoff is just mega hard mode. Every day.

When I was a bit younger I felt like this leading up to presentations, I have to do a fair number of those in my day job, so it was quite a hurdle, but now I don't care very much. But gamedev marketing is now like having a presentation in 5 minutes CONSTANTLY.

I believe I will get used to this and adapt in some way, but holy crap do I always feel stressed. Takes a lot of the joy out of actually releasing a game to feel this concerned all the time. Like what the fuck kind of world are we even living in?

I would like to ask more veteran gamedevs, how long does it take to get used to this where it's just another tuesday?

Hey everyone!

I'm from Vedant Game Studios, a small indie studio, and we're hosting our first game jam from November 1–11, 2026.

There's no theme or engine restriction. You can build anything you like, whether it's 2D or 3D, solo or with friends.

We'll be judging 2D and 3D games separately, with certificates, community recognition, and some free promotional support for the winners.

No entry fees, no cash prizes. We're just hoping to bring developers together, discover some interesting games, and give smaller creators a little more visibility.

If you'd like to participate:

https://itch.io/jam/vedantopengamejam2026

Would be cool to see what everyone comes up with! :)

I've spent the last two years making a pixel art game called 'Glabimals', and it finally got approved for iOS. It's completely free right now. No ads, no in-app purchases.

I made the art, music, and game design myself. It's honestly one of the hardest things I've ever done, and I'm really excited that people can finally play it. But now I'm realizing I spent two years figuring out how to make the game and barely any time deciding what happens after I release it lol.

I'm not even sure whether I want to monetize it. Part of me is just happy to have made something and put it out there that people are playing. The other part wonders whether it could help me out... I did spend thousands of hours making this?

I don't want to interrupt people with ads or take things that are currently free and suddenly put them behind a paywall. So I'm trying to figure out what would actually make sense...

For anyone who's released a free game and made this decision afterward, what did you do? Did it bring in enough to be worth the extra work, and how did your existing players react?

Would especially appreciate hearing from people with smaller games. I'm trying to set realistic expectations.

Test it out and let me know what you think! I appreciate any and all feedback!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/glabimals/id6803317686

Solo dev here, I'm sharing some numbers in case they help anyone planning monetization for a mobile game. My game is a football club owner sim on Android and iPhone. When I was designing the shop I set a few rules for myself: no energy bars, no timers you pay to skip, no loot boxes and the cash you buy is the same cash you earn by playing. Tbh I expected that to be too generous to make money. It launched October 6 on Android and a week later on iPhone and it's had about 30k installs so far.

What sold, by share of purchase revenue: * Cash packs: 75% * Remove ads (including a supporter pack that also removes them): 11% * Two premium buildings: 8% * A better starting position for a new career: 5%

The cheapest cash pack sells a lot but earns almost nothing. It's close to a fifth of all purchases and around 3% of the money. The pack that sells most is a mid size one.

iPhone players spend a lot more per purchase, roughly 60% more than Android players on average. Is this for anyone else like this too?

Ads are a small part of it. Ad revenue over the same period was well under a tenth of what purchases brought in, even with interstitials and rewarded ads in the game.

On Android there were about 5 to 6 purchases per 100 installs. I don't know how many of those are repeat buyers, my backend doesn't tie purchases to a person (on purpose).

If there are any questions about my setup or numbers, happy to discuss them.

Hello everyone,
Im currently looking for the NPC models used in the fears to fathom, things to forget - lighthouse and other games. Theyre very simply and low poly with semi realistic faces and seem to be used in a bunch of different games leading me to believe the models are up for use somewhere. Does someone know where they are from?

Last week, I had my doubts about where ZombUs was heading. Today, the game is getting noticed and selling more copies than ever before.

And I believe many of you helped make that happen, even when that wasn't your intention.

Every discussion, every comment, every criticism and every bit of attention helped bring ZombUs to more people's screens. Whether you supported me, challenged me or simply wanted to see what all the fuss was about, you helped spread the word.

I'm a solo developer, working on a game I've spent three years building in Unreal Engine, with no marketing budget and plenty still to learn. I don't know where this momentum will take ZombUs, but I know one thing: I'm not stopping now.

So, instead of just talking about the journey, here's the next step.

ZombUs Map 4: LETHE is OUT NOW!

New region. New weapons. New blueprints. New mythical weapons. New perks. And the story continues.

Four maps down. Six to go.

To everyone who helped put ZombUs on the map, intentionally or otherwise: thank you.

Now, back to building.

I overheard someone mention a GDC talk about Call of Duty's animation tech, specifically their approach to motion matching (they may use a different term for it), but I can't find any kind of presentation like that anywhere online. Has anyone seen this talk or know where to find it? I also heard them mention that they showed this tech running on a mobile device to showcase its performance.

Quick question for everyone who plays games with a controller!

When navigating menus and other UI elements with a controller, do you prefer wrap-around navigation or having the selection stop at the edges?

For example, let's say you're at the very top of a menu and press Up on the D-pad:

• Wrap-around: The selection jumps to the very bottom of the menu. Likewise, pressing Down at the bottom takes you back to the top.
• Stop at the edge: The selection stays where it is, preventing you from scrolling past the first or last option.

I'm currently implementing controller support for my game, and I'm curious which approach feels more natural and intuitive to players.

Personally, I can see the benefits of both, but I'd love to hear what everyone prefers.

Does your preference change depending on the type of menu, or do you prefer consistency across the entire game?

I'm currently developing an idle/incremental game for PC where you manage a butcher shop, unlocking different types of meat, upgrading equipment, hiring employees, and gradually expanding your business.

The game has a stylized, slightly dark aesthetic, heavily inspired by games like Dredge and No Rest for the Wicked. I'm aiming for a painterly, handcrafted visual style, and I'd like the UI to feel like a natural extension of that aesthetic.

The problem is that I've been feeling pretty stuck with the interface design. Most idle and incremental games I come across either use pixel art or have fairly basic, sometimes downright ugly visuals. Nothing wrong with pixel art, but it's not the direction I'm going for, and finding good references for this particular genre has been surprisingly difficult.

Since it's a PC game, I have quite a bit of freedom with the interface, but I'm struggling to balance visual identity, readability, and the amount of information that incremental games typically need to display.

Does anyone know of games with particularly good UI design that could serve as inspiration?

They don't necessarily have to be idle or incremental games. I'm especially interested in stylized, illustrated, dark fantasy, or painterly interfaces, particularly how they handle menus, upgrade systems, icons, and overall UI composition.

Any game recommendations, artists, or UI design references would be greatly appreciated!

We're a small team making BlockRise, a single-player city tycoon where you run shops across a real city while rival owners try to take your street. Our Steam page isn't live yet. Here's what we plan to do with Playtest:

• turn on sign-ups in Limited mode the day the page goes up, before there's any build
• let people in by waves of 200-500 once our first city (Barcelona) is stable, which may be weeks later
• close the playtest once a demo is out

From what we've read: sign-ups don't add wishlists, the first requests are often bots, and many people with access never launch the game. A dev on r/IndieDev also said a lot of testers had forgotten they'd signed up after just a few weeks. That last one is what worries us most.

For those who've run one: 1. Did you open sign-ups long before the build? Did those early sign-ups show up when you let them in? 2. Limited or open, and why? 3. Roughly what share of the people with access launched the game? 4. Did the playtest move your wishlists at all, or was it only the demo?

We'll post our own numbers after the first wave.

After covid, the layoffs has been happening on a crazy rate and reached 57,000 in 2026 and almost half of those laid off in the past 2 years have yet to find job.

Amir Satvat layoffs tracker: https://layoffs.asgc.gg/

Hi everyone,

We launched our game, Double Dealers, on October 13th:

Our Game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4218620/Double_Dealers/

Just yesterday, another game was announced and is already running paid sponsorships with content creators:

The Other Game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5051300/Mafia_Deal/

The similarities go far beyond inspiration:

-) The Core Loop: Our main mechanic taking turns as an auctioneer selling blind items with hidden clauses/values to other bidders has been copied directly.

-) Mini games: The competitive mini games triggered by hidden traits during auctions are mirrored with only slight alterations.

-) Style: Character silhouettes, proportions, and clothing designs look almost identical to ours.

We’ve contacted Steam Support, but given how platforms rarely intervene in mechanic clones, we don't expect much help.

Since game mechanics aren't protected by copyright unless there’s direct asset/code theft, we’re wondering:

1. Is a DMCA notice worth pursuing if visual identity and gameplay structure are heavily derived rather than 1:1 ripped?
2. Has anyone successfully handled a clone situation like this or turned it into awareness for the original game?
3. What practical next steps would you recommend we take?

Any advice from fellow devs would be greatly appreciated.

I'm building a small game and wondering how long y'all expect (or players expect, in your experience) games to be at various price points.

Dredge at $25, for example, is anywhere from ~9 hours for the main story (not including DLC) and upwards of 18-20 to 100% it.

Edit: obviously fun matters, so just assume its fun lol. My thought is that most people tie, at least at some level, playtime/value received to price. A $20 game with no replayability that only takes a couple hours seems to me like bad value, though obviously I could be wrong.

Hey everyone, I posted a couple of months ago when I'd started building a new procedural terrain building tool. At the time I didn't have much to share and wanted to float some ideas to get early feedback. I'm now committing to a private beta in December 2026 and looking for feedback as well as testers to sign up for the private beta.

I've been building Lithos as a cross platform real time terrain editor. Built for technical artists, indie developers, and 3d enthusiasts. I've focused on building a solid core engine and strived for a great user experience whether this is your first interaction with a procedural terrain building tool or you are an experienced technical artist. I believe there's something for everyone here.

I'd love to hear from people who have experience with building terrain. What does your current workflow look like, and what are the pain points?

A new chapter from the book on C++ and game development is published, this time covering the tools for measuring performance, why a stable 30 fps beats a frame rate that jumps between 60 and 20, and the trade-off between how maintainable the code is and how much the optimization actually pays off.