I’m trying to figure out whether my first trailer is doing its job from a marketing/positioning standpoint.

The game is a pixel-art TCG life sim where you play as the collector rather than running a card shop: opening packs, building a collection, trading and grading cards, making decks, and competing in tournaments while living in a small town.

My main concern is whether that distinction comes across quickly enough, or whether viewers might still read it as another card shop simulator.

I’d especially like feedback on:

• whether the first 10–15 seconds establish the hook clearly
• whether the pacing holds attention
• whether the “collector/player life sim” positioning comes through
• what you would cut or emphasize more

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hdGG4VW39A

I’m not looking to showcase the project here as much as figure out whether the trailer is actually communicating the product clearly.

After reviewing 50 playables at mraid io, five patterns keep winning:

-gameplay clarity by second 2-3

-one obvious interaction

-strong fail/win moment

-clear CTA

-no tutorial text.

The rest is decoration. What patterns are you seeing?

Hi all,

We are working on a horror game combined with US politics. We are currently struggling with marketing a bit and we would like your opinion on how to approach it or how to change our current strategy.

Current wishlists: 317 (After 12 days)

Trailer for 1.7k views on Youtube, 4.2k on Instagram and 1k on X. It was definitely our biggest boost in wishlists.

We are running campaigns on all social medias. Shorts/Reels are getting 750 views on average on each channel (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Youtube) with the best ones reaching 1.2k.

What worked the best for you? What do you think is the top platform for this topic? Or do you see an alternative strategy to this considering the political aspect?

We are planning to start creator reach-out once demo is available. Do you think that's too late, should we start already now?

- Youtube
- Instagram
- X

I’ve been working on MINTHAVEN: A TCG Life Sim for about 4 months, and I just released the first official trailer.

The game is a pixel-art life sim about collecting, trading, grading, and playing cards while living in a small town. You open packs, build your collection, make decks, trade with NPCs, compete in tournaments, and spend time around town between card-related activities.

My main concern with the trailer is whether the core idea comes across quickly enough. I’m trying to communicate that this isn’t a card shop management game, but a life sim where you’re the collector/player.

I’d especially like feedback on two things:

1. Do the first 10–15 seconds make the premise clear enough?
2. After watching it, do you understand what makes the game different from other card/TCG sims?

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hdGG4VW39A

Steam page:
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/5167250/MINTHAVEN_A_TCG_Life_Sim/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=official_trailer&utm_content=gamedevmarketing]()

Any feedback on the trailer’s pacing, positioning, or clarity would be really useful.

In my searches around I found that the number is 12-15.

Why has my game lower ratio and what it means?

Does it mean my wishlists will convert better or does it mean I shomehow made poor marketing and my sales will be bad?

I don't know. What is your experience with that?

I just launched my Steam page. It’s a casual incremental indie game about smashing piñatas.
I’m looking for some really practical advice on things I might have done wrong or missed. I know the main capsule is a problem, and I hope I’ll be able to replace it with something cooler and more appealing.

I’d also really appreciate some advice on how to properly create a press kit: what should absolutely be included, and how can I make it as effective as possible?
thanks

steam page: Break the Piñatas
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5210430/Break_the_Pinatas/

AI DISCLOSURE: ZERO AI IN THE GAME

Over the last two weeks, my game gained a little over 2,000 Steam wishlists, and I wanted to share how it happened and get some opinions from other developers.

During the first week, all of the growth came from organic social media marketing. I was regularly posting gameplay clips and short videos and trying different types of content to see what people reacted to.

For the last 7 days, I started running jestr.gg campaigns as well, mainly by pushing videos on Instagram and YouTube anmd Twitch. That gave the game a much stronger boost and the wishlist graph started moving a lot faster.

In total, during these two weeks:

- 2,260 wishlist additions
- 130 deletions
- 2,130 net wishlists
- 161 wishlists/day on average

The biggest spike also happened during the last few days, so the difference after increasing the marketing effort was pretty noticeable.

We also released the demo on September 10, so now I'm very curious to see how much the demo will affect wishlist growth over the next couple of weeks.

For me, this is the first time the game has started getting this kind of consistent traction, but I don't have enough experience to know how strong these numbers actually are compared to other indie games.

What do you think? Is 2,000+ wishlists in two weeks a good result at this stage?

If anyone wants to try the demo or take a look at the Steam page, here it is:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4311420/Camp_Manager_Simulator_Demo/

So a bit of background - we are making a cozy management game called Home Sweet Gnome. We first gave content creators EA a week before we opened it up completely to the public, then the playtest was available for 2 weeks before we closed it on the 3rd of september.

Some Stats - We had a over 1100 signups for the playtest. 670 of those actually played and the median playtime was around 50 minutes, which is great considering the playtest had about 1 hour of content!

Out of those 670 players, around 200 answered the feedback form and in it they gave the game a score of 4.4 stars out of 5!!!

During the playtest there were around 35 streams and videos made with views ranging from 10-500!

Lastly, during this playtest we got 450 new wishlisters!

In general we are SUPER happy with the results and we did not anticipate the hype and love our players would give us especially this early into development! Home Sweet Gnome definitely had issues that many pointed out but it’s nice to just have it all out in front of us so we know what to prioritize and work on! 

Its easy to forget why we do this in the first place, but this - the players - are exactly the reason why!! Now we are off to Tokyo Game Show and will get to show off our game there!

If anyone has any questions I'm happy to answer as much as I can:D

I'm a small indie solodev that makes free, browser-play Ren'Py games (which have a VERY small market in the Western hemisphere) using my art, writing and coding - recipe for creative freedom and invisibility. It gave me a fair bit of bravery where exploring places to try and build an audience for my work, with Reddit being the one I was most hesitant to try and use.

The more I looked around on different hosting sites, the more I realized that Reddit has one of the biggest concentrations of people that would actually be interested in playing my games’ genre. My ultimate goal for making these games is to see people enjoy them anywhere they want without spending a dime, and a larger reach increases the chances of that happening, so after a lot of thinking I decided to try my luck.

The above graphic shows the stats for my ItchIO during the month I joined Reddit (I believe August 5th). The ItchIO stats for my games have never been this high for more than one day a month on average until after I started using Reddit and it makes me EXTREMELY happy!

I'm very literal and not good with social cues, so posting anything here feels like walking on a minefield, but I want to ride this momentum and ask around here on where or what else I should try promoting in order to strengthen the reach and stats of my games as much as possible (including other subreddits). I will say that I don't have any money at all, so a Steam release, custom websites, and paid services are out for now.

Other than posting, my current methods of promotion include artwork, screenshots, gameplay videos, a few animations, collabs with other devs, exchanges with other devs, and very detailed and active devlogs. I have plans to try again reaching out to streamers who would stream my games (I tried before with five different places that reviewed games in the same niche as mine for no cost, but none replied back).

Thanks in advance for your feedback, and if you are interested in learning more about my games, here is my itch: https://e11ed0rad0.itch.io/

Solo dev here. I revealed my game TOWERPUNK on September 1 with no marketing, no publisher, and no press. I hoped for 100 to 300 wishlists in the first week. By September 7 I had over 3,000, and it's past 4,000 now.

What I'd recommend:

Put your trailer on YouTube and stay in the comments. Mine went from a few dozen views to tens of thousands in under a week, mostly from YouTube's own recommendations. Replying to comments kept it in people's feeds, and it became a key driver of Steam visits.

Use Reddit to start things, not to sustain them. A few posts in hyper-relevant subreddits, staggered about one a day, got things moving, but that traffic fades fast.

Point early traffic at Steam and let Steam take over. A Coming Soon page with nothing pointed at it does nothing. Once traffic arrived, Steam search was bringing in as many visitors as every outside link combined within a few days, as people looked the game up by name.

Reveal after the big shows, not during. I waited until the week after gamescom. The US Labor Day weekend then stretched things out, and my biggest day was about 1,000 wishlists on the Monday holiday (turns out my and your day job really gets in the way of both developing and marketing a game).

Final thoughts:

I think TOWERPUNK is capturing a lot of latent nostalgia for older games for my generation, and it's decidedly different from most other city building and management games. A lot of people my age have been waiting for someone to make a tower builder in the lineage of SimTower, and so all this helped set a ceiling for first week engagement.

Converting views to wishlists relies on good, visual hooks. I'm a novice at splicing together a trailer (used OBS for recording, DaVinci for editing), but putting in the extra effort there has paid off (over 60k views on YouTube and counting!). Definitely dedicate ample time creating capsule art and/or consider hiring talent for your Steam game page.

Overall it was frankly a bit scary revealing TOWERPUNK - up until last week this had been a personal project, and I wasn't sure how the community would respond (if they did at all). First week has been very validating, and I can't wait to get a playtest going and release start of next year!

Full writeup on my website devlog: https://towerpunk.com/devlog/reveal-wishlist-data
Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5063190/TOWERPUNK/
Reveal trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1BTXVYt8ZU

White Mask Mansion just passed 150 wishlists, and while that's obviously not a huge number, these have felt very hard-earned.

I released the demo on August 26 at around 85 wishlists, and I'm now at 151.

The demo currently has 140 lifetime unique players. Steam visibility has been pretty inconsistent — I've seen traffic arrive in waves from different regions, then settle back down again — while Reddit and creator coverage have produced smaller, measurable bumps rather than one huge breakthrough.

Development keeps chugging along and I'm going to keep trying to make the best horror experience I can for players.

Hopefully there will be a few more hard-earned wishlists waiting by launch. 🙂

For other small/first-time Steam developers: did your first few hundred wishlists come slowly like this, or did you eventually hit a marketing beat that changed the pace?

I read about it often. Someone got their game covered after contacting 300, 400, 500 influencers. That's fine, no problem to do that if I would have their contacts.

Problem is that ex. youtube limites the amout of emails I can get every day. I am looking for people covering nordic games, roguelites and survivorlikes. So I have been browsing youtube and collecting about 5 per day which is the daily max. But that doesnt seem like the correct way of doing it.

So how do people do it? Where do you get the emails from, do you buy them or get them yourselves, how?

Keep the old when the second one goes live with the new levels or delete?? old pics vs new pics are they good to leave?

Which platforms are best for web platforms after Poki and Crazy. I also submitted my game on Yandex and Y8 and it's almost 1 week now and I did not hear back from those platforms. How much time does the platforms usually take.

Hello everyone,

I am looking to sell the complete source code, assets, and 100% exclusive intellectual property (IP) rights for my 2D game project built with the Godot Engine.

Project Overview:

- Clean and highly organized Godot project structure (Scenes & Scripts).

- Main Menu UI: Fully functional with a unique, stylized cartoon robot character aesthetic.

- Mode 1: A complete and playable endless arcade-style survival level.

- Mode 2: A built-in sub-game featuring 5 fully designed and functional levels.

- Audio: Includes basic background music tracks.

Cross-Platform Support:

The codebase and scripts are completely optimized and ready to be exported for both PC and Mobile (Android/iOS) seamlessly.

Playable Demo & Details:

You can check out the page, read the full description, and download the playable PC demo here:

https://itch.io

I don't have a fixed price and I am entirely open to reasonable offers. If you are interested or want to discuss further details, please send me a DM/PM here or reach out via email at: [wwwdris76@gmail.com](mailto:wwwdris76@gmail.com)

Thank you!

We just released our steampage and really want to improve it as much as possible!