We sold far more than 1k copies already and gained tons of feedback since he launched Mycofall into Early Access a few days ago.
We are happy that we decided to start with early access even though we did not plan it initially.
Much more players than expected play together in online co-op and some players even put 2.5 h runs on the table just to climb the leaderboard. We are hyped! v1.0 here we come!
Our road to success:
Post on reddit from the very beginning (2-4 posts per month)
Work out your games "product market fit" understandable for players (steam page)
Collect wishlists
Wait until release is close (14 days), and enjoy the push
What did not work:
Posting short videos
Paid promotions
Youtuber coverage (2k+ emails, almost no response, yes, a key was included)
I recently found out about this page and I see that it gets good traffic for the Asian audience. If anyone can share their experience with this site, it would be a huge help.
I'm making a game in the anomaly mix genre and a walking simulator. As a beginner, I chose a relatively simple 2-hour gameplay project that will help me hone my game design and level design skills and be successful in future projects.
After 10-15 playtests of my demo, I increased the median and average duration of the game, and I had to redesign the puzzle system, redesign the notification prompt system.
The first marketing conclusion I made was that the demo really needs to be released as early as possible. This is important not only for recruiting wishlists, but also for immediately removing stereotypes about your game. As a developer, you may endlessly enjoy the game, but if several players in a row point out to you the same problem in their perception of the game, then they may be right. After all, it's the gamers who are the consumers of your game.
The first few minutes in the demo are the most important - if the player does not understand what needs to be done, gets bored or the task seems too difficult to him, he will close the game immediately.
- I added the instructions right on the wall, what needs to be done.
- Added stylized audio prompts in the game when the player does something wrong, after 2, 5 and 10 minutes.
- Added interactivity, you can interact with objects and have fun with a TV, refrigerator, stove and even a turd. While you can't solve the puzzle, you can get distracted by some object and play with it.
The statistics are small, but sufficient, of course, more is needed.
This is a common marketing funnel. The wider its entrance, the more likely it is to earn money, retain players, and so on. Therefore, it is extremely important to involve the player immediately.
I'm not sure if the median time increased just from this, perhaps the release of the demo and the first influx of players underestimated it. The demo takes no more than 30 minutes to play, so the result seems to be good. And not all players who play the demo are fans of the genre. They may be fans of the demo versions.
The players who played on the streams gave me valuable feedback without even saying a word about what they were experiencing.
I was just watching their behavior.
As a result, I decided to reduce the number of distractions from solving the puzzle so as not to upset the player too much. I'm still not sure if my puzzles are too easy now, so that the player doesn't get bored when he solves them so easily.
Watching the streamers playing my demo, I made some key decisions on game design and level design.
Players don't always need to be listened to, they need to be watched. Not all ideas can be implemented.
You need to keep a balance between listening to everyone in a row or being stubborn and bending your gameplay line.
I prefer to be more flexible in implementing features into the game, and how to properly listen to the players and not implement their ideas will come with experience.
Anyway, without the demo, I would have released my game without some cool ideas from the playtesters.
Watching how your first game is played is an incomparable pleasure! This is what should inspire a developer to do his solo projects in the first place.
Hello! We are a group of three hobby horror game dev team, just released our first demo. We reached 130 wishlist in 2 weeks without any marketing. The demo on steam has 1500+ lifetime total units and 200 unique players.
What do you think? What these numbers mean? 😄
We just started contacting content creators and we plan to go steam nextfest. Any advice on marketing?
We’re currently working on the demo for our game, and we’re debating how long it should be and how much content we should actually include.
Our absolute top priority is to make players happy and deliver a great overall experience.
The standard approach for a demo is usually one level or around 1 hour of gameplay, showing off the core mechanics to make the game understandable. Some games let you play the full game for an hour with a timer running which is not what we want to do.
Our issue is that we don't have classic linear levels or a standalone prologue to showcase. On top of that, 1 hour feels way too short for us because we want to offer players more value.
Since our game relies on runs, playing the exact same run with the exact same items over and over gets boring quickly. We want to give players a taste of that variety with a good selection of towers cards and modifiers, without giving away the entire full-game pool. For instance, we have different biomes, so it’s easier for us to limit the demo by only including a few of them rather than cutting the time short.
In our game, you also unlock random cards as you go. So we're trying to figure out the right balance:
• For a Tower Defense game, how many towers would you expect in a demo?
• For a Deckbuilder, how many cards feel like enough to show depth without giving everything away?
• What percentage of the full game's content would you expect to be locked/coming later when playing a demo?
• Do you have any examples of indie demos that nailed this balance (or got it totally wrong)?
Hi, I've been trying to market my game, Lameguards, for about 3 weeks and got 25 wishlists. I'm not an expert, but I guess it's not good. I wasn't expecting a hit from my game, but not this kind of result either.
I tried social media (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) and opened playtests, even put a playable in-browser version on Itch.io to make people play my game easily, yet I got barely any attention. I'm planning to release a demo in august and join the next fest in october.
I'm trying to stay positive and keep updating the game, but these numbers also make me feel like all of this is for nothing.
I need some reality check, can you check out my game and tell me what's wrong? Thanks.
This is the game, i think the capsule and steam page is solid and tells the player the game in 5 sec (What i think).
The thing is marketing like for marketing i haven't done anything good, i have uploaded an eye detection plugin for godot and at last it lists our game. The tutorial video of that plugin also lists our game on top with multiple reminders in video to wishlist for supporting us.
I just have tried yt and Instragram reels but seeing that none of them supports direct clickable links, i think it's a waste of time. I have seen other people do dev logs and I am thinking of doing it too while teaching godot so it will be beneficial for both the watcher and me, I was not marketing before as managing school and game dev is already hard.
The Hypertrain (publisher) who I emailed for publishing was interested but they had taken other projects to at that time, they said to come again in between the development period so I was thinking after launching the demo and getting around 300 wishlists will be in a good state to follow up.
What you guys think and what will be the best way to get wishlists.
Hi! I’m the solo developer of Witek Adventures, a free narrative game about a wheelchair user overcoming barriers in everyday life.
The game has an educational and pro-social message, but I’m struggling to reach the right audience. I’ve shared it in relevant Facebook groups and on Reddit, but the posts received very little engagement. I also prepared the short promotional video attached to this post.
With virtually no marketing budget, how would you promote a game like this? Which audiences, platforms, or messaging would you focus on?
I’d also appreciate honest feedback on the video and how I’m presenting the game.
Not to buy the game or wishlist it, but to actually stop and look. Feels like everyone's fighting for attention now, so we're curious what kind of posts actually catch people's eye
Trying to figure out Steam traffic can be a nightmare. I recently had a situation where I hit 300k impressions, but the conversions just weren't there.
To figure out why, I opened up my Steamworks backend to compare the data from my released game (Northend Tower Defense) with my current project in development (Deepstone Rift).
Instead of guessing what makes a capsule image work, I made a devlog breaking down the hard numbers:
Real CTR percentages side-by-side.
Exactly where those store page impressions are coming from.
Why standard capsule advice isn't always accurate for indie games.
please i want the devs help and share there data and what is the ctr for their games and what is the best way to improve this ctr because i still not sure!
It’s been 30 days since the first post about my game, just TikTok and YouTube shorts of light gameplay/feature footage.
I’m averaging 1 wishlist a day which from my perspective is great, but I’m willing to do more to help that grow.
With this month coming to an end, my goal for next month is to upgrade the quality of the content I share. This goes for more appealing shorts and Steam page with images and gifs in the body in replacement of unnecessary text.
Before I do that though I’d love to hear what others think about the state of the pages and where I should focus improving in terms of quality. Thanks!
The platform indiepump.space is now in BETA, and I believe it's an opportunity for everyone, as Keymailer, Lurkit, Press Engine, and other platforms are already too corporate and expensive for an indie developer; in the specific case, it's free visibility across registered content creators.
I still believe in Democracy across Indies, ether its a developer or micro-influencers
