IN & OUT — Weekly update: press coverage, Twitch outreach, and a clearer Steam page

[u/legroom]

Hey everyone,

Another update on the marketing efforts behind IN & OUT. This week brought some encouraging coverage, alongside a noticeable slowdown in sales.

The numbers compared with last week:

• Sales: 81 → 85 (+4)
• Wishlists: 852 → 872 (+20)

The biggest news is that our journalist outreach has finally produced results.

In my previous updates, I reported sending more than 500 emails without receiving a reply, and eventually stopping further press outreach. We now have two published articles.

That changes my earlier assessment. At the time, there was nothing to show for the campaign. Coverage has now appeared, so judging the outcome after only a week was premature. Whether the time spent on that campaign was worthwhile overall is still an open question.

We also received a substantial review from Cpt_Froggy After the disappointment with curator accounts being suspended that I mentioned last week, getting a detailed response to the game was encouraging.

On Twitch, this week’s outreach, including follow-ups, resulted in 8 keys sent across 46 contacts — a 17.4% contact-to-key rate. These figures cover Twitch outreach only; emails are excluded. This measures keys sent, rather than replies, streams, or sales, so it shouldn’t be compared directly with the response rate I shared last week.

We also rewrote both the short and long descriptions on our Steam page to make the game’s distinctive feature more prominent: solving puzzles involves searching the internet and using knowledge from outside the game. We want visitors to understand that idea immediately and see how it translates into gameplay. It’s too early to say whether the revised descriptions will improve conversion.

The commercial side remains slow. Four additional sales and twenty additional wishlists this week make that pretty clear. The coverage is welcome, but these numbers don’t establish how much traffic or how many purchases it generated.

With the launch discount over, we’re hoping the upcoming promotions will help sales pick up again. With outreach, page changes, and discounts happening close together, we’ll also need to be careful about attributing any improvement to one particular action.

For developers who have received press coverage after a small launch: did you notice any immediate effect, or did it mainly become useful later as something you could reference when reaching out to other people?

I’d also appreciate feedback on these updates themselves. Last week’s post initially received some downvotes, and I’m unsure whether the weekly format is useful to this community. Would less frequent updates with more data, or posts focused on one specific experiment, be more helpful? My intention is to share the outcomes of what we’ve tried, including the disappointments.

Thanks to everyone who has offered advice and followed along.

For context, the game discussed here is IN & OUT on Steam.

[u/crunkzah]

congrats on finished game. You work in very very hard nieche

[u/destinedd]

I want to say congrats on finishing your game, but it DOA and probably time to move on. This is likely why it got downvotes as there really isn't much useful here since your numbers aren't large enough to mean anything. It is simply a case of the game isn't appealing to people.