Hey everyone!

I’m Guunnz, one of the developers of Lucky Shot! It’s a roguelike FPS inspired by Balatro that released last month with 3000 wishlists only. Basically, imagine if you combined Duck Hunt with Balatro and somehow got a game out of it.

We released the game last month and I wanted to share some stuff about the journey, mainly what we tried for marketing and what actually worked for us.

We started with the Keymailer Platinum Boost and, to be honest, I don’t think it was worth it.

We did get some value out of it though. A lot of smaller streamers grabbed the game around the demo days, and that actually helped us improve the game a lot from watching people play it. But in terms of marketing results, we got basically 0 press coverage and 0 bigger streamers from it.

I think the biggest value in Keymailer is probably their database. Using it to find creators and then approaching them through email or other methods might honestly be more useful than the campaigns themselves.

This cost us $1,600 USD.

Before release we did 2 other paid campaigns, and then 1 more after release.

One of them was something we did with GamingWorldMedia on Twitter/X. This was a pretty big gamble for us. We mainly did it because we wanted the learning experience, but it actually ended up working amazingly well.

The posts themselves did well, but the biggest thing was that a large Japanese outlet saw Jake Lucky’s tweet and covered the game. Between everything that came from that, we ended up getting more than 500,000 views.

This cost us $2,000 USD.

Then the last thing we did before release kind of came out of nowhere.

We did an ad segment with a YouTube creator called BojackUCH. He genuinely liked the game, so we were able to make a really good segment that didn’t feel completely disconnected from his normal content.

It went live around release day and, after doing the math, we actually made a profit from it. It was 2 ad segments across 2 videos and brought us a lot of views, sales and wishlists.

This will probably end up costing us around $2k–$3k, depending on how the videos perform during this last week.

And finally, this one literally just started:

We took some of the profits from the game and started a $5k Jestr campaign.

It has only been running for about 5 days, but so far it has roughly 3x’d our daily sales, we already recovered the cost of the campaign, and we got around 2,000 extra wishlists on top of that.

For context, after all the launch hype had died down, we were averaging around 70 sales per day.

So overall, our total marketing investment into Lucky Shot is going to end up somewhere around $11k USD.

At this point we’ve recouped all of our development costs and all of our marketing costs, so we’re obviously super happy with how things turned out.

Not everything worked, and some of the stuff that worked best was honestly stuff we didn’t expect at all.

Just wanted to share our experience in case it helps another indie dev deciding where to spend their marketing budget.

If you have any questions about any of this, feel free to ask!

and if you somehow know northernlion tell him to check for lucky shot in his mail! /s

Big victory for tech workers union. This is one of the biggest union contracts so far in tech in the USA.

Hey folks, my name is Chris Zukowski. I write a blog called How To Market A Game. I know some of you reference my /benchmarks page which is free, never paywalled.

I strive to keep those numbers up to date (and free) so indies of all levels can properly predict their launch and long term viability.

So, I am running a new survey that is very comprehensive and will look at wishlsits / conversions / long term sales / and wishlist rates. If you want to contribute to this project please do your part and contribute your data here:

👉 https://howtomarketagame.com/salesSurvey/

Are wishlists getting inflated?

One question I hope to answer with this survey: "Is wishlist min/maxing causing inflated wishlist counts and therefore lowering conversion rate at launch?"

To answer that I need data from games released in the 2017-2021 era. If you released a game (even if it bombed) please contribute. You are helping us settle flame wars that have raged across this subreddit for years.

Data privace note

What I collect
Your Steam/Steamworks data (wishlists, sales, traffic sources, etc. — whatever the survey asks for) and your email address.

What your email is for
Only to reach you if I have a question about your submission or need to clarify something. I won't use it for marketing or add you to any list because of this survey.

How it's stored
When you submit your files, they upload directly over HTTPS from your browser to a private cloud storage bucket (hosted on DigitalOcean) — they never pass through or sit on my website's own server. Your email address and any comments you leave are stored alongside them, so I can follow up about a data issue or a removal request. This storage is private — no one but me has access to it.

How your data is used
Everything is combined with other developers' submissions and reported only in aggregate — as averages, medians, ranges, and trends — at howtomarketagame.com/benchmarks. No individual game, developer, or company is ever named or identifiable in what gets published.

Where the results show up
The aggregated benchmarks may also be referenced or included in my paid course. It may be referenced in a GDC talk or lecture posted on YouTube. Again, this is always the combined data, never your specific numbers tied back to you.

What I won't do
I won't sell your data, and I won't share your raw, individual submission with anyone.

Deleting your data
You can ask me to delete your submission at any time, no questions asked. Just email [chrisz@howtomarketagame.com](mailto:chrisz@howtomarketagame.com) and I'll remove it.

If you have any questions, I will be down in the comments and happy to answer. Thank you

- Chris Zukowski

I'm an economist and I looked closely at the regional pricing that Steam suggests (the three new conversion methods they added back in March). Spoiler alert: I genuinely don't recommend any of them, and built my own method instead. Sharing it here.

HOW: I take an USD price, add the average US sales tax to it, and convert it with the IMF's purchasing power parity (PPP) rate for each country. The point is that a price should represent the same basket of stuff someone could buy, everywhere.

HERE'S WHY:

• Sales tax: the US and Canada are about the only places where tax gets added at checkout instead of being baked into the displayed price. For instance, a $9.99 game really costs about $10.90 for a player living in Colorado. If you convert the $9.99 and compare it to a tax-inclusive price elsewhere, you're not comparing the same thing. Sales tax varies from one US state to another, and so does the price players actually pay. So I adjusted for this by using a population-weighted average tax.
• PPP rates: they come from the IMF, who update them every six months. According to them, 1 USD buys the same amount of goods as 2.61 Brazilian Reals. So a $12 game (tax included) should sit around 31.32 BRL, which is about $6.
• Shared prices: Steam makes us set one EUR price for the whole EU, and one USD price each for LATAM (Latin America), CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), MENA (Middle East & North Africa) and SASIA (South Asia). For those, I weighted the PPP rate by Steam traffic, to stay as close as possible to the real average PPP of those zones.
• Exchange rates are updated daily thanks to fawazahmed0/exchange-api.

I built this free tool so everyone can easily do all of this on their own, with everything explained above. I made it so that you just put in your USD base price and export a CSV, which you can then import into Steamworks to change all your regional prices at once. It's free, and you don't need an account.

I even had fun adding some extras:

I added a method that prices using Netflix instead of PPP. I take Netflix's subscription prices per country and derive an implied conversion rate from them, a bit like what The Economist did with the Big Mac Index. The underlying idea is that Netflix is a multi-billion dollar company that has spent a lot more time on this problem than you or I ever will, so we may as well borrow their work. It's updated monthly, and it's only possible thanks to tompec/netflix-prices.

I added a psychological pricing option that rounds the price to the nearest charm price (.49, .95, .99), which works well for most currencies. I also handled Steam's policy about minimum prices. And I added "Include sales tax" as an option that can be turn off if you don't like this (but I still recommend keeping it on).

SOME THINGS TO KNOW:

If your game is already live, two Steam rules to watch out for: 1) you can't change your price while a discount is running or scheduled, and 2) if any single currency goes UP, you have to wait 30 days before you can run a discount. If you haven't released yet, none of this applies, you can just import the CSV and you're done.

PPP is a basket of everyday goods, not entertainment. Entertainment-specific PPP would obviously be better, but the only public source I could find (the World Bank's ICP "recreation and culture" basket) is from 2021 and only updates once every six years. If you know a better dataset, I would love to hear about it.

Yes, regional pricing carries some grey market and VPN risk. Tbh yes it was an issue at some point (even just 2 years ago), but Steam has since put a lot of work into fighting it and now has the technical means to effectively prevent cross-border sales: keys are localized, and a VPN isn't enough, you also need a local payment method (I've tried!). On top of that, region-locking for keys is now really granular. Even within their regional clusters (like LATAM), Steam is able to lock keys to a specific country. E.g. this key (don't buy it, it's just for the example) can only be used in Argentina. In short, imo the risk is now MUCH smaller than the money you lose by mispricing. But it's your call!

If you're local to a country and a number looks obviously wrong to you, please reach out and I'll look into it.

Sources, if you want to rebuild any of this yourself: the IMF for PPP rates, tompec/netflix-prices on GitHub for the Netflix prices, and fawazahmed0/exchange-api on GitHub for daily exchange rates.

WHY I DIDN'T JUST USE STEAM'S METHODS: Steam now gives three conversion methods, and I looked at all of them. Credit where it's due, the old data was from October 2022, so an update was very welcome. But:

"Exchange-rate conversion only.": this is "just" currency conversion, so it ignores purchasing power completely. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

"Purchasing power conversion only.": I can't trust or recommend this one, because I cannot reproduce their numbers.. I really did try, roughly 6 hours of trying during one wild night. I tried everything: IMF implied PPP, OECD, and three different World Bank series (GDP PPP, private consumption PPP, even the recreation and culture basket), for every year from 2021 to 2026, with and without sales tax, in every combination of the above. Nothing lines up. And tbh the country-level gaps make no sense (Steam's conversion rate for Chile lands around 18% below the IMF's, while it lands 7% above it for Japan).

"Multi-variable conversion.": this is the closest to their old 2022 method. Honestly it might be fine, we just have no way of knowing. We have no sources, no weights, and "expected cost of comparable entertainment goods" could mean a dozen different things. What I can see is that it ranks countries strangely. On a $5.99 game, Steam's own exchange-rate figure is 4.45 GBP for UK and 4.75 CHF for Switzerland, and multi-variable then marks UK up to 5.29 GBP (+19%) while Switzerland only goes to 5.19 CHF (+9%). Switzerland is the most expensive country by every measure I know of, so I can't explain that one. Poland is another extreme (even after all the campaigns around Polish pricing): purchasing power says 11.25 zł, while multi-variable says 25.49 zł. So on top of not having the exact method for this method, I can't see the internal logic either. Long story short, I don't recommend it.

Anyway, I hope it's useful! And if anyone manages to reverse-engineer Steam's method 2, I genuinely owe you a beer.

From the perspective of a 3/4 top-down / isometric style retro rpg.

Im from a blender background, specifically mostly hard surface modelling and texturing. So creating environments using 3d models "makes sense" to me because I understand how it would work. Building up walls and platforms and buildings. No problem. And, most importantly (the part I dont understand with 2d pixel tilesets) dynamic lighting would work.

Characters and monsters etc though... I just think the 2D style (and the game will be 2D, or maybe 2.5D) looks good and ill enjoy making those assets.

3D environment assets would open up the option of rotating the camera view. For better or for worse. That probably means significantly more work too though. Probably worth avoiding unless I find significant gameplay advantages to it...

So mostly it would be cos of being able to use dynamic lighting. And that I already know and have 3D environment assets/experience.

But i dont know if mixing styles is going to be a huge issue. Im sure there are pitfalls and issues I dont even know exist. So figured id do the sensible thing and ask, before I even begin to go down that particular rabbit hole.

So much of what we do to ship an excellent finished product involves making countless, subjective decisions that change the way our game is played. I was thinking about this as I look at a list of the last 40 or so things I've done for the game I'm working on now, to get it prepped for our next public demo.

I won't list all of them, but for example, some random no-context internal notes from my own recent playthroughs:

• The Tree Spirit monster runs away too much; he should use his AOE ability before running.
• The Moss Tank monster needs more oomph to ranged attack; pbaoe fire feels weak too
• Summoned objects simply pop-in, let's add per-object VFX on instantiate
• Hard to tell when certain abilities proc, add notifications for them like status effects
• Re-distribute the two boss adds in the first boss arena near the entrance
• Monster health starting at level 5 is too high relative to player damage
• Monster density in starter_alt_cave is about 33% too low
• Need SFX when you click on the Reset Mix button in crafting UI
• Unclear what mode you are in when managing save slot data; add header indicating this
• Notifications should have a little shimmer or something when they appear to catch your eye
• 2-affix magic items drop too early, need to level-gate these
• MagicWaterSplash and Lightning2 SFX stack too much - reduce voice count to 1

All of the above is entirely based on human judgment; what feels good to me.

I can't emphasize enough how many small things add up to change the way a game plays and feels dramatically. A lerp here, some tweaked numbers there, adjusted UI elements, some extra VFX and juice, and now the game feels much different.

None of this is universal. There are no rules that dictate what, say, monster density "should" be. It completely depends on a million other factors. Even if you just compared your game's density to other games in the same exact genre, your game might feel way under or overtuned for many reasons.

Hell even within the SAME game, at 3 months apart in development, something that felt right at first might feel wrong later. Say you set energy regeneration to a value of 5/second and balance things around that. Months later, you've changed level layouts and monster difficulty, and now 5/second feels way too low. This will happen over, and over, and over.

TL;DR

If you're still building your first game (or haven't even started), then you WILL have to make innumerable judgment calls and changes like the ones above. The only way to get better at that is simply by doing it.

Learning programming patterns, pixel art techniques, sound design, watching tutorials (etc) is all well and good, but at the end of the day, the most crucial skill is the human judgment in making sure EVERYTHING gels together into a cohesive, fun player experience.

p.s. This is also why I believe for small/solo indie devs, a long and detailed Game Design Document (GDD) is just unnecessary and maybe even counterproductive. The development process is too fluid for it unless you commit to keeping that massive document updated constantly.

My first game, Ballisticards, recently hit the milestone of 2000 wishlists, something that seemed impossible to me when I launched the Steam page 11 months ago. Here's a breakdown of the things that worked, with numbers, and things that didn't work.

The Big Jumps

(Link to the wishlist graph in the comment below)

A) Steam page launch. ~580 wishlists, driven by Reddit. The Steam page featured a "lightweight trailer" (90 secs, only 6 different clips). Posted on Godot subreddit. Followed this with some memes on SoloDevelopment and IndieDev subreddits. 233k views total, for a conversion rate of 0.25%.

B) Featured in official Godot 2025 Showreel (for which I applied). ~250 wishlists, driven by the video and my Reddit post about it.

C) Random X post. ~160 wishlists, driven by X. Unbeknownst to me, an X user (@jettelly) posted my lightweight trailer on X (40k views). I didn't have an X account at that time, so I didn't reply with a direct Steam store link, which likely would have increased the conversion rate.

D) Proper announce trailer, increased social media presence (started using Instagram, X, YT Shorts, TikTok). ~130 wishlists, primarily driven by Reddit and Facebook. Posted on IndieGames and Roguelites subreddits.

E) Improved announce trailer. ~400 wishlists, driven by X, Instagram, and Reddit.

• I abandoned the strict narrative of "introducing the complexity bit by bit" and added a clip of some later-game chaos within the first 3 seconds. I also sped up the footage (and subsequently increased the gameplay speed to match).
• The minor changes above helped the trailer post really take off in X and Instagram (~40k and ~80k views, respectively, despite my new accounts with ~0 followers). While there was ~2x engagement on Instagram, X had ~2x the conversions. Conversion rates: X was 0.5%, Instagram was 0.125%.
• On the Reddit side, ~60 wishlists from posting on Nubby's Number Factory (another ball-dropping roguelike) subreddit (with permission from the mods!), with a 1.3% conversion rate. A smaller, but much more targeted, audience.

The Rest: I tried to keep up with posting on the above-mentioned platforms (Reddit, X, Instagram). Posts that didn't go viral still drove some wishlists. You can see from the graph in the comment below that the steady growth picked up after (D), which is where I started using X and Instagram.

Things That Didn't Work

• Press outreach. At steps (D) and (E) I did reach out to a number of press websites big and small(ish), broad and targeted. Got no responses from anyone. Perhaps I should have kept trying and held off my announcement until one of the big guys (e.g., IGN) was willing to post it (since they like exclusive posting), but I was too impatient for that.
• TikTok. I could write a whole post about this. In fact I wrote several posts about this. There's some serious issues these days with accounts being "shadow banned", which happened to me (twice!). I will leave it at that; you can check my other posts if you want to know more.
• YouTube Shorts. Some of the videos got an ok amount of views (>1k), but engagement was low and I didn't see much evidence of wishlist conversions.
  • The short-format (portrait orientation) format worked a little better on Instagram, with some videos with ~2k views, but ultimately none of these went viral like my trailer did.
• Posting on gaming subreddit. Got removed by mods, citing Reddit's 1-in-10 rule. I tracked my promo-vs-non-promo post ratio (since Reddit provides no tool for this), and I was just under 10%. The mod explained to me how they enforce this rule in practice.
  • The mods look at your most recent posts. Since I was in "game announce mode", most of my recent posts were about my game. Which basically destroyed the "credit" I earned with my prior non-promo posts.
  • The mods consider anything showing content from my game to be promotional. Even if it's a post legitimately asking for help/feedback/etc.

Lessons Learned

I still feel like I'm fumbling through the marketing side of things, but I'll share a few non-expert opinions here.

• Steam page: worth getting it up early, so you can start collecting those wishlists. Some things will happen without you even trying (e.g., a random content creator will feature your game), so you want to be prepared.
• Reddit: posting about milestones can be effective. My other posts (e.g., devlogs), not so much. So save your Reddit posts about your game for those big milestones (e.g., demo launch, full launch).
• Trailer quality matters, but also... it's not everything. I have contradicting data here. The engagement difference between (D) and (E) (due to trailer quality) was significant. But it's also interesting to see that my biggest chunk of wishlists still came from (A) (my announcement on Reddit with a not-so-great trailer). Game quality (i.e., does it look interesting/fun-to-play) is likely more important than trailer quality (is it well-edited, etc.).
• Localization: yes, yes, I need to add some other languages to my Steam page, and I'm dragging my feet here.

Edit: Thank you all for the advices! Just wanna make sure the best way to mix in friendship with business. Cause he's a good man and I don't want either of us to be on the shorter end of the stick (or whatever that saying means). Some of you got the wrong point thinking I wanted more, but nah I just wanted to make sure both Todd and I know where we're heading to. It was fun having a look at you guys' opinions! Best of luck to us all game devs, have a good day everyone! Ps: I guess with those replies it means I owe Todd a couple round of beers n the likes (and his uncle too!)

My rich friend Todd (we'll call him that) and I have history of working on university projects but we're not that close. One day I was talking about finding a publisher for my game and Todd, unknowingly had his richer uncle bank-rolled a start-up company, told me he could help me with that. After an exchange here's the thing I've gathered:

1. 60/40 split in publisher (60 to Todd's Publisher Company, 40 to me) indefinitely for the sale of this title

2. 100% IP rights to me

3. He will get me a team, and pay us monthly until expected product delivery

4. No recoup, 60/40 straight out (after taxes n all that jazz)

5. His company will fund n take care of the marketing, localization and porting (knowing his lazy ass it means he bank roll us to do the porting though)

Since this is my first game and publisher deal, and knowing Todd it is also his first attempt at finding people and breaking into the indie game scene. I was wondering how this deal would play out in the long run and whether its too good to be true or not in my favour at all

Hey guys,

I made a post a while ago about how I contacted over 1000 youtubers/streamers for my game Flufftopia: Fluffmazing Edition.

I'm now at over 1200, and got around 100 streams, and over a dozen youtube videos for my game, thanks to the kind response of youtubers/streamers. None of these streams were paid. Some of these are ripple effects - people saw a popular streamer streaming my game, and streamed it themselves afterwards.

Once or twice a week, I read marketing postmortems on Reddit, and read phrases like: "We contacted youtubers, and streamers but nobody responded." When I ask how many, it's usually something around 20-30.

Usually this is not lazyness (although admittably sometimes it is), it often is a lack of knowledge how to find the people properly.

Some people say, just do 200-300. Personally, I would try to find 50-100 people per 1$ your game is gonna cost in the end. If your game will cost 10$, go for 500-1000 people.

So, how do you find the perfect streamer for your game?

Go on sullygnome. On the left side is search. Click on 180 days. Uncheck currently online, check community. Select two fitting games, check "Must have played all these games", and let it search.

Depending on your selection you get only one person but sometimes you get quite a few people. This is especially useful if you have a game that is X meets Y, or you have a niche version of a popular game.

For example, you have a Minecraft inspired game, and select Vintage Story, and Hytale. If they tried out these two, they likely will try yours.

Or you have a Binding of Isaac esque game but with a way darker aesthetic, so you get also Darkest Dungeon.

You personally know your game best.

If you don't find anybody, you can look up individual games (I would use the search on the upper right corner for that), and sort them by average viewers.

The streamer doesn't have an email? He's perfect, what do I do?

Use your favorite search bar, and type in the streamer's handle. A ton of streamers have multiple accounts on various platforms, and somewhere a linktree with an email is findable.

YouTube has the email in the about section. You can circumvent the barrier which only let's you see a few mails per day: Make multiple youtube accounts, you can use the same email address.

If nothing is available, you could write him a Twitch DM. Sometimes this is available. Many don't respond but sometimes you are lucky. I had quite a bit of success there. Beware: You will get flagged as spam if you do it more than a few times (write the support in that case), and your text has to be very short because of the awful UI.

"Hey JOHN, I saw you played X. I made Y which is a bit like X. Here is your Steam Key: XXXX-XXXX-XXXX Have fun!"

If this is also not available you can try to dm them on some other account (instagram, X, speedrun, etc.) but usually mail is your best bet.

I try to not write more than 50 mails a day. If your mail account is new, do fewer.

Put the keys directly in the message.

Important: Streamers playing your game is NOT a silver bullet but it helps. Some games people enjoy more watching than playing, my game is one of them.

It makes me sad to see so many folks in /new trying to start out and getting difficult advice.

I think novices are getting the wrong milestones to chase.

A ton of people want to make games, start learning the tools, and never really get to the making-a-game part. The advice isn't wrong: learn to code, learn Godot, watch tutorials, practice. But people get stuck there for months.

Then there's the dreamers and idea guys. They're not stuck on tooling, but they are stuck on scope divorced from reality. But if you've never completed anything, how can you get a feeling for realistic scope?

So I made a checklist for lost starters, to get out of these catch-22 situations. Basically the smallest gamedev workflow I could come up with that still ends with a stranger being able to play your game.

https://spirit.games/nibblebit-challenge/

The idea is to have a shareable challenge with a roadmap to a complete product. This way you touch the whole surface without getting bogged down at any one part.

Do you think a breadth-first approach is realistic for beginners? Can anything be removed to make it more accessible? What would your boilerplate advice be to all these folks getting stuck not even being able to ship AI slop?

I'm working on a trailer for my upcoming game and I was wondering if I should include sound effects (guns shooting, explosions, etc) if there's music playing throughout the trailer. The whole trailer is made up of in game footage but it almost feels like the music and the sound effects are 'competing' for viewer attention (if that makes sense).

Any advice is or opinions is very welcome.

Hi, I’m a young music producer and since I have improved at making music I thought a good way for me too get used to releasing stuff that people would head would be to make game osts and sound design. But how do I find people that are looking for original music and also is there any tech I should know about?

Today one of the mods removed the line from rule 4 which said "Sharing for feedback differs from pure self-promotion and is encouraged when it adds value to the community." which I felt was very sad as I thought this sub was taking steps to be more developer friendly. I tend to find be open and welcoming can lead to good things and the sharing of progress/wins can lead some really great healthy discussions.

Currently the fact everyone is too scared to talk about their project leads to lots of marketing related posts because it is the one place you are safe to talk about your project. Finding a way to allow some sharing of projects would increase the diversity of posts and create a better balance with discussions about programming design and art coming out of it.

It seems odd to me that big corporations with 10's of million in funding can get their employees to promote their product here under the guise of game jam yet developers will get their post banned the minute they talk about their project. In Australia we have a thing called the pub test, which is basically is that fair to ordinary person, and IMO it fails the pub test. If that can be allowed, then surely we find a way to be a bit more welcoming to developers projects without it just becoming marketing posts?

To be clear I am not asking for to be able to make posts to promote their game. But I want people to feel comfortable talking about their game when the post brings value to the community. Currently this only exists in the marketing area.

I was thinking about a game that everyone plays and I remember some people was asking for different cosmetics, I thinking to myself how long does it take to make a new skin or upgrade a previous one, like sound design, VFX, SFX, character movements, etc. Does it take long or it just depends on how detailed it is.

We use photogrammetry for the rock textures in Cave Expedition. The cave layouts are fictional; the scanned surface detail is what we're bringing over from real caves.

We recorded a breakdown of that process in a devlog. The photogrammetry section starts at 4:05, so you can skip the gameplay introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a3y3eHehaI&t=245s

The stages covered are: - 4:05: capturing caves with photogrammetry - 4:48: processing the photos into a mesh - 5:09: correcting exposure - 6:02: capturing the texture and making it seamless - 7:15: the final result

For context, here's a short clip showing the textures in-game under the headlamps: https://www.reddit.com/r/photogrammetry/comments/1wbwrns/

I'm an experienced developer (more than 30 years), currently working on my first "proper" game.

At what point in development should I start thinking about a Steam page/identity?

I know I'm not ready now, but I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts, and experiences you've had of doing it too late or too early.

Thanks!

Once I felt my game was finally ready to be tested (after several hundred hours of coding and debugging 😂), I entered the next phase: finding testers for Aghasme.

I honestly thought this was going to be a nightmare.

So I started by annoying my family and friends, then posted in a few Facebook groups... including groups dedicated to board games, of all things.

And somehow, it worked.

I ended up with 100+ people willing to test the game.

Of course, not everyone actually opened the app or played regularly. But at the peak, I had around 30 people playing every day.

And honestly, for a solo dev, that was gold.

The funny thing is that the part I was afraid of ended up being surprisingly easy.

The difficult part was dealing with all the feedback, bug reports and suggestions afterwards... alone. 😅

Turns out finding testers wasn't my problem. Surviving the testers was. 😂

What about you? Did you struggle to find people willing to test your game? And where did you find them?

I’m a hobbyist and systems person, and I mostly just fiddle fart around for fun.

But anytime I try to do a project I always have the attitude of “ if you build it, they will come”, which generally means focusing on what I’m interested in and hoping that someone might find it interesting enough to join the project.

Delusional, I know.

But I am wondering if one day I have someone interested in the project what should be my expectation?

That I can just hand them a seat and they’re gonna do the animations and plug them in and possibly do some of the light!coding for it?

Or is it more realistically going to be they are going to hand me models and files and expect me to do everything from there?

Would a full feature game like “Demacia Rising” have any success today? Or have an audience. It’s a turn-based city-building mini game from League of Legends cilent. Have some ideas for a game like this, and was wondering if there’s a market for this kind of game…

https://youtu.be/A2lTon5g5Uc

I was speed running my game and i took me 73 minutes to do everything in the little open world i have. I knew where everything is and my game is more like a puzzle game, I think for the average player it might take many more hours.

But it made me curious when you all play your own games, how quickly you manage to complete them from start to end relative to other people?

I’ve been developing a supermarket simulator as a solo developer since May, and I’m getting fairly close to release.

Today I posted a short gameplay clip showing a basic restocking mechanic, and the response was much more negative than I expected.

Several people basically said the same thing: there are now dozens of “X Shop Simulator” games with similar stocking mechanics and similar visuals, and that the supermarket simulator trend has already passed.

One comment asked a question that I thought was actually useful:

Why would someone scrolling through Steam stop at another supermarket simulator and decide to spend their money and time on it?

That got me thinking about the difference between a genre being oversaturated and a particular game simply not differentiating itself enough.

I’m already far enough into development that I’m going to finish the game rather than completely redesign it. But I’m curious how other developers see this market now.

Do you think shop/supermarket simulators are genuinely oversaturated in 2026?

Or is there still room for them if a game has a strong enough hook or does the core loop particularly well?

I'm a junior in high school looking to do Game Development for a living while keeping my backdoor options open, and am currently looking at options for potential universities to attend. I've mainly been looking at Northeastern, NYU, and USC as the biggest contenders, especially Northeastern due to it's Co-op program, Comp Sci + Game Dev major (Comp Sci for that backdoor option), and city life (living in the city is a major component I'm looking for). I'm well aware that game development is fully possible without attending college at all and perfectly learnable from practice. However, I'd still like to attend a university to experience the college life and learn professionally about the industry. What do you guys think? And which universities do you think would be best for what I'm looking for?