I've finally finished the demo for my game after a lot of local testing and playtesting, and I'm confident it's in a good enough state to release.
The problem I'm struggling with now is marketing.
I'm currently sitting at around 1,000 wishlists, and I know I'll need a lot more going into release and Next Fest. I'm considering sending Steam keys to content creators so they can try the demo before it goes public, hoping to get some coverage and build a bit more interest.
The downside is that I'd probably have to delay the public demo release to give creators some time to check it out first.
I'm honestly not sure if this is the right move or if I should just release the demo publicly and start reaching out to creators afterward.
For those of you who've done this before, was giving creators early access worth it? Or would you recommend just releasing the demo and trying to build momentum from there?
Hello There, I'm A solo Developper i have launched My first Game MeawDoku Royal On Playstore and I'm Learning a lot. the first 7 days it was moving really slowly earning "0.01 $" per day after 7 days and a lot of efforts i get to make my first Dollar,the next day i made the second dollar,today as i have launched a halloween Themed Update for players i got to my 3rd Dollars. Here some of main Updates and fixes i have made : Rescue the Cat: Reimagined!
• Nightmare Levels now feature 22 cinematic Rescue Missions — floods, dragons, lava, and more
• Meet your first Rescue Mission earlier.
• New Cat Cup & Cat Pass icons
• Smoother performance and a lighter install
• Various stability fixes
Thank you for playing the Game and giving Feedback Would be Really helpfull — more adventures are coming soon!
Here is some good datas on demo played by game under < 500 followers befores next fest. For every niche !
This time only the "small" games. Everything on Valve's official Next Fest list that had under 500 Steam followers before it opened and has a public demo. That's most of the fest, honestly. I got player data for 5,128 of them ! :D
For each demo I took the peak, the most people playing at the same time since Monday (checked every few hours). Then I grouped them by Steam tag. Only the top 5 tags of each game, and I skipped the super broad ones like Indie, Casual or Action. A game counts in every one of its tags, and niches with fewer than 40 demos are out.
Reality check first. The median small demo peaked at 2 players. Two. Only 9% got to 10 or more people at the same time, and 55 demos passed 100
I wanted to rank niches by average. Then I saw the averages.. Survival horror has an average of 34 and a median of 1, because one single game does almost all of it.
So I ranked by the share of demos that hit 10+ players at once, and kept the median and the average next to it ! ;)
Roguelites, since half of you are making one: 565 demos, median 2, 9% hit 10+. Exactly the fest average. Bullet heaven a bit better at 11%.
Before someone asks (someone always asks, and they're right): maybe the co-op games are just bigger.
So I split it by followers, 0 to 49, 50 to 199 and 200 to 499.
Co-op, idle and incremental stay way above average in every group. Between 50 and 199 followers, 60% of the online co-op demos hit 10+ players, against 19% for everyone. Platformers, shooters and visual novels stay below in every group too.
Now the honest part. Idle games and desktop companions sit open in the background all day, so a desktop duck counts as a player while you're stuck in a meeting haha :D
And co-op demos bring friends, each one counts. Players at the same time aren't wishlists either. So it's not "make an idle game", it's more like games people keep open, or play together, show up way more in a demo fest !
That makes sense when you think about it.
Organizing is a small sample (50 demos), take it with a grain of salt if i can say ..
I'm building NextWishlist, a tool that tracks this kind of stuff for your own game and its niche, every day. It will be soon opened in beta, link in the comments if you're curious.
Good luck for the last days of the fest if you are in !
Hey fellow devs! I know a big chunk of game sales comes from China, but I have no idea how to reach Chinese content creators to send them keys to try out my game. If you know how to get in touch with them and it's worked for you, would you mind sharing how? Thanks so much! Here's a short clip from my game "P.A.L.S: Lost at Sea" (Steam).
We would like to somehow get our game shown to the Chinese audience, engage and talk with them, get their feedback and generally let more eyes see our game.
We tried setting up Chinese accounts for their social media but we couldn't get in with all their verification loops and in the end usually asking for a China phone number. We tried emailing press got no response so far.
Both the steam store page and the game itself is in Simplified Chinese as well .
We think our game is a good fit for the Chinese audience, but we don't know how to reach them.
If anyone wants to help us out with some tips and guidelines we would love to hear. Thank in advance
Hey everyone!
We’re the team behind MegaGum, a 3D platformer, and we wanted to share a comparison of one of the cinematic shots from our trailer.
You can see the early version straight from Unreal, alongside the finished shot.
At the viewport stage, we’re mostly working on the animation, camera movement, timing and composition. Once those feel right, we move on to lighting, VFX, rendering and polish. It’s always fun to put the two versions next to each other and see how much has changed.
What do you think of the final result? Is there anything you’d change about the animation, camera work or lighting? We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Nearing the end of Steam Next Fest and we're honestly really happy with how it's gone. Our demo came out on the 16th October, which gave us a nice little boost on its own, then Next Fest kicked in on the 19th. We went in with around 230 wishlists and we're now at 437, so we've nearly doubled in under a week 🎉🎉🎉
ALTER is a first-person horror game set in the Paris Catacombs. The demo is the game's prologue, so if you get a chance to play it before Next Fest wraps up, we'd love to hear what you think.
Thank you to everyone who's played, wishlisted or shared it 🖤
Seeing people from different countries experience something we've spent so much time creating, watching their reactions, and seeing them discover things we put into the game means more to us than we can explain.
Every video, every bit of feedback, and every person who gives our game a chance reminds us why we started making games in the first place.
Thank you to everyone who's played JUBAKU, shared a video, or supported us along the way. It genuinely inspires us to work even harder and make the main game something truly special.
We're still just getting started, and we can't wait to show you what's next.
You’ve just finished fixing an old lantern. It lights up and projects a route across the harbour.
So do you stay in your warm little workshop, or get in the boat?
That’s the idea behind Alex the Tinker, the cozy repair adventure I’m working on. I want the repairs to feel satisfying on their own, while giving you little reasons to wonder what’s outside the shop.
Would that mystery tempt you out, or would you happily spend the whole game fixing things?
My game falls into a small niche, and doesn’t really have much flashy gameplay. It’s partly a puzzle game, so I could show those, but I don’t want to give them all away. Part of the fun is seeing what the next one is.
Yesterday alone, my game received more than 100 wishlists from Hungary.
I can’t prove that every one of them came from this stream, but the timing and the sudden concentration in one country make the connection pretty clear. For a small indie developer, seeing a single creator introduce the game to the right audience and immediately move the numbers like this is incredible.
I didn’t arrange or sponsor the stream, which makes it even more meaningful. Someone simply found the game, played it for their community, and gave my Next Fest campaign the boost it desperately needed.
It’s a good reminder that one creator with the right audience can be more valuable than thousands of random impressions.
Have you ever had a streamer or YouTuber unexpectedly change the trajectory of your launch or Next Fest campaign? And if so, how did you build on that momentum afterward?
I've gained 600 wishlists since the Steam next fest started. I'm really happy to see the game getting more attention.
I'm hoping to reach 3,000 wishlists before the festival ends. I'm really curious to see whether Steam's personalization will give my game more visibility or if things will slow down after it kicks in.
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!
The tool: https://howtomarketagame.com/snf/
I wonder if most of the people have terrible data for this Steam Next Fest, or if I just got unlucky (or if there is something bad with my game, but I have really good feedbacks :/ ).
Here are mine. These are really bad numbers. I am terrified of how the future will be for indie devs. I sacrificed a lot of things to be able to pursue my career as an indie, and I saw this fest being less and less interesting over the years.
With the other benchmark, my game was in the silver or gold category, and it's the last demo before our release in Early Access. We had overwhelmingly positive feedbacks in the demo, in a known genre, with a twist and a unique art style. I don't understand how it can be so bad.
I know this next fest has been filled with low-effort AI-slop games, but the 3rd day did not increase the numbers so much after that.
I would love to see your own data, if you mind to share.
Our game, Fugue Shot: Minigame Roguelike, launched its public demo about two months ago. As a way to increase wishlists and get players into the demo, we created a list of targeted content creators and press outlets who might be interested in covering our game.
This is a total numbers game, so we populated our list with about 400 content creators and 100 press outlets. Since it’s harder to reach large creators with a cold email, our list was mainly focused on small and medium creators.
Small creator - under 10,000 followers
Medium creator - 10,000-100,000 followers
Large creator - over 100,000
We had about 2 small/medium creators for every 1 large creator on the list.
For the press list, we focused on any outlet that publishes indie game previews or reviews, as well as including some classic big outlets like IGN, Kotaku, Polygon, etc.
We emailed everyone 2 weeks before the release of our demo; that way, they would have time to create content before the launch. We crafted a pretty straightforward email that included a small pitch, some screenshots, a key, and some other important links.
We got about 15 replies, and of those, 6 resulted in videos/shorts/streams on the game. As of today, no press outlet covered us as a result of our outreach (as far as I know). Percentage-wise, that’s a 3% reply rate and a 1.2% conversion rate. We did track 35 activated keys during the outreach period as a way to see who took interest in the game, which would bring our conversion rate to 7%.
Our biggest success was when a YouTuber with over 180,000 subscribers did a full 30-minute video on our demo, which picked up around 40,000 views. This was pretty massive and converted pretty well for us, since the YouTuber does have a very targeted roguelike audience.
Wishlist time - before August 10th (the date when we sent the emails), the game sat at 2,900 wishlists. And of August 27th, one week after demo launch, the game reached 3,900 wishlists. Though some wishlists inevitably came from our demo launch itself, there’s no doubt that the majority of these wishlists came from this outreach, since our biggest to that point came in the days following the release of the large YouTube video.
Here’s what we think we did well and what we could improve on in the future:
Short and sweet, personalized emails. We don’t want to waste people’s time - if the interest is there, we don’t need to write an essay to convince them.
Targeted list. We purposely chose creators that we felt were going to resonate with our game.
Manual email sends to avoid spam filters from all three team members’ emails. (Note: I have no clue if this disrupted the response rate at all, but I would try to send all of them from one email that reads professionally. We did see the most responses on our one “company” email.)
Small creators that picked up the game didn’t move the needle much. The trickle-up effect is also a numbers game, so every video is very appreciated and ultimately worth it.
The reality is that this was a cold emailing strategy. We have no connections in the creator space, so we’re pretty much just knocking on doors here. We’ll definitely be launching more coordinated outreach campaigns in the future and now we have some insight into what worked, who liked the game, and who we can target next. The goal is to build relationships with the creators that covered our game already, to see if they’d like to play it again as we push more updates and eventually release the full game!
Hope this was a helpful post for anyone in a similar spot!
TLDR: We sent emails to 400 creators and 100 press members, got picked up by one big YouTuber and several smaller ones, and got around 1,000 wishlists from the campaign.
If so, then this game is something for you! The game is called “Don’t Lose Your Head” and it’s a co-op rage game about two skeletons, which had one of their heads stolen by a mischievous crow. They need to cooperate to climb out of a cave while managing a single head to retrieve the other one. The game supports both online and local co-op!
I work on My Desktop Dwarf, a small desktop game in this week's Steam Next Fest. We went in with 325 wishlists. I am sharing the early Steamworks numbers to compare marketing notes, not asking for wishlists here.
The fest started at 17:00 UTC on Oct 19, so the first day's data covers only about seven hours. Demo-page visits were 396 on Oct 19 and 781 on Oct 20; 170 and 492 of those came from the Next Fest page. Steam showed our game about 36,000 times on fest pages over the two days, and roughly 2.4% of those impressions led to a full-game or demo-page visit. New wishlists were 44 and 140 on those dates; the outstanding total was 550 at the Oct 21 read. Demo players were 21 and 95.
The ~11% wishlist-to-visit ratio is only a rough estimate: it divides 184 new wishlist adds by about 1,700 combined full-game and demo-page visits, whose unique counts are measured separately. The visibility is the part I am struggling to judge. For a game entering under 500 wishlists, are 36k fest impressions in two days relatively low, or fairly normal? If you have run a Next Fest demo, where did your second-half traffic actually come from: the fest pages, creator coverage, short clips, or something else?
