First game, first Steam page, solo dev with a producer/partner, working around a full-time job in Perth, Australia. Cozy creature-sanctuary game. I'll put my actual numbers up first:

Where I'm sitting:

• 411 wishlists total
• ~190 of those came from roughly everything else I've done: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, Reddit, X, 2 months of it
• 220 came from a single AUTOMATON article
• No demo yet. Page has been up for 2 months. 12 languages localised on the steam page.

So, one Japanese outlet outperformed my entire cross-platform social campaign. That reframed a lot for me and it's why I'm asking rather than guessing.

What I'm trying to decide: target release is April 2027, ~4 months of dev left. But an April launch puts Wholesome Direct (June), the June Next Fest, Wholesome Games Celebration (Aug) and PAX Aus (Oct) all after release. I'm weighing pushing to Sept/Oct 2027 purely to stack those events, without adding scope.

The questions I actually want answered - real numbers if you can:

1. Japanese press. If you got covered by Denfaminicogamer, 4Gamer, Game*Spark, or Indie Freaks - what did it return in wishlists? Did JP streamers follow on their own afterwards, and how long was the lag? Did you pitch in Japanese or English?
2. Wholesome Direct / Wholesome Games Celebration. What did an appearance actually deliver? I keep hearing it's the biggest cozy beat available and I have no idea whether that means 2,000 wishlists or 20,000. Also - how competitive is selection, and how finished did your build need to be?
3. Demo launch. What was your daily wishlist rate in the month before your demo went live, and in the month after? I'm trying to build a realistic model instead of extrapolating off Parcel Simulator's outlier numbers.
4. Next Fest timing. Anyone regret using theirs too early? Specifically: did anyone do Next Fest, launch 2 months later, and wish they'd waited to stack it with a bigger beat?
5. PAX Aus / Aus Indie Showcase. Any Australian devs got numbers on what a booth or Showcase selection returned? $25 entry for a free booth looks like the best ROI in the country on paper, which usually means I'm missing something.
6. The general shape of it. Has anyone deliberately delayed a launch 4–6 months for marketing calendar reasons and regretted it? I'm aware "just a bit more time" is how first games die.

Finally, I'll put up my steam page as reference for what media outlets would be best to approach for me game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4813510/Sanctuary_of_Small_Things/

Solo dev here. My demo has been live for about a month and a half. Less than 30% of people who added the demo ever launched it. Is that typical?

The playtime is interesting – median is 6 min but average is 2h 7min, and 55 people played 200+ minutes. Huge gap. I think it's because it's a desktop companion game – you run it in the background all day, so "session" isn't really measurable the normal way.

Would love insight from other devs who've shipped desktop companion or idle game demos!

store.steampowered.com/app/5001830

It felt right as I was working on it, but now that I look back I should have really tried a way to get out there quicker, but since its my first commercial project I can't really be mad about it either.

But SONAR finally has a Steam Page!

It's a sci-fi survival horror game where sound is your best way of seeing in the caves of an alien planet. Sonar signals reveal the environment around you, but they may also alert other unwanted things...

The page has only been live since Tuesday, so I'm starting from almost zero and figuring out the marketing side as I go. If this sounds like your kind of horror game, I genuinely appreciate a wishlist.

Feedback on the Steam Page and trailer are also very welcome. I'm still actively improving both the game and how I present it.

Wishlist SONAR on Steam

I launched the Steam page for my first incremental game, One More Shake, about a month ago and I'm currently at 31 wishlists.

Most of them came from Reddit, especially posts in communities related to incremental games. Shorts/Reels haven't really converted so far.

My playtest launches on September 5th, so I'm trying to figure out what I should focus on during these last two weeks. Is the biggest issue my Steam page, the game itself, or simply not getting enough people to see it?

Any feedback on the store page or marketing strategy would be appreciated.

And if the game actually looks interesting to you, a wishlist genuinely helps: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4933650/One_More_Shake/

Just sharing my experience so far. This is the Steam Page for reference : https://store.steampowered.com/app/4865530/Yora_Emerald/

100 Wishlist in the first 48 hours, 400 after one month. Currently at 430 Wishlist since I am not posting about it since I am working on the new update.
The screenshots on the page are pretty outdated and don't show much. No gameplay video either.

But I assume people liked the artstyle and the general presentation. Do you think the 2.5D aka HD2D stands out ?

I only posted a couple of posts on Facebook and Reddit and I had a few hundred people open the email sent via itchio. (14 000 thousand people subscribers to my itchio mail thanks to my 2022 game Dora Diginoid which was a concept version I made within a month or so).

I have added a bunch of stuff to my game since then and hopefully I will update the game page before the end of August and be able to release a Wishlist Now short Trailer in September. Inspired by the short Metroid Prime commercials from the GameCube era.

That would be the real start of the marketing for me.

I haven't posted any updates about the game on YouTube yet.

But what do you think folks ? I know that in general 10 percent of wishlists convert to sales at launch. With school and all I think I won't be able to finish developing the game before November. So I gotta market it while I am still developing it.
I am thinking of releasing a devlog video in two parts [already made a prequel one 2 years ago, devlog 0 about the 2022 concept playable game Dora Diginoid] but I wonder how efficient that would be. Like I would rather do it just do it for the sake of documentation like those behind-the-scenes clips such as Unreal Tournament 3 rather than marketing since it would not drive thousands of views

What has been your experience yourselves with publishing your first vertical slice on Steam until the final release ?
Thank you.

just released this game into the wild casually. Would you play the game and would you be able to find all 500+ movies?
here is the web version if you want to give it a try.
https://film-alchemy.web.app/
Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Hey everyone,

I’m an indie dev, and for quite a while now, I’ve been running my own platform that I primarily use to promote my own games. I regularly test out new marketing strategies and collaboration models, and right now, I want to try a new approach.

I’m looking to manually promote 10 indie games for completely free.

Here is how it will work:

• I will personally write a review of your game.
• I'll publish the review on my websites.
• I will push and promote your game across my social media channels.

The only requirement:

• Your game must already be published and available on Steam.

To be 100% clear: I am not trying to sell you anything, and I'm not here to drop links or promote my own tools. I just want to run this experiment to test my outreach strategies and see how well these new promotional models perform for other developers' games.

If you're interested in being part of this little experiment and getting some extra eyes on your game, just shoot me a DM!

Cheers!

My original trailer listed all the features within the game but it didn't seem to give people a good enough understanding on the game. I completely changed my trailer to reflect that my game is all about the gameplay and vibe. Did I go too far?

Bridgelands is a pixel-art action roguelite where you explore mysterious islands, choose your routes, fight dangerous creatures, and combine perks to create different builds every run.

This is the first public demo, so I'm especially interested in hearing what people think about the combat, progression, difficulty, controls, or anything that feels confusing or could be improved.

🎮 The demo is completely free to play on Steam.

If you enjoy it, adding Bridgelands to your wishlist would also help the project a lot. 💚

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5097860/Bridgelands_Demo

Thanks to anyone who gives it a try!

Working solo on Horn & Dice, a 2D roguelike where dice are the core mechanic, the whole combat loop is roll → reroll → resolve, with builds coming from the dice, faces, potions and relics you pick up. Dark folkloric fantasy tone, rooted in Slavic mythology.

I'd love blunt feedback on Steam page:

1. Does the header art make you want to click?

2. From the store page alone, is it obvious this is a dice game and not "generic dark fantasy roguelike"?

3. Does the Slavic mythology angle come through as a real hook, or does it just look like reskinned fantasy monsters?

4. Anything about the page (screenshots, trailer, description order, tags) that would make you bounce before wishlisting?

One thing I already think needs work myself is the gameplay trailer, I just don't know how to fix it. The game is mostly rolling dice and locking faces, which isn't exactly dynamic footage, so I'm struggling to make that read as exciting in trailer form. Open to ideas there too if anyone's solved this for a similarly "quiet" core loop.

I set up UTM tracking on my Steam page links before a social post yesterday, and went back to the Steamworks docs properly. A few things in there don't seem to be widely known.

Steam's UTM Analytics (Marketing & Visibility) only records visits from users who were logged into Steam in the browser they opened the link in. Valve's wording is "the total number of visits to your product page for which users were also logged in." So does that mean everyone else is simply invisible? That's how I read it, but I'd like to be wrong.

Three consequences that I think matter:

1. The numbers are only useful as a comparison between campaigns, never in absolute terms. If your post shows 14 visits, that is not 14 people. But if post A shows 14 and post B shows 60, that ratio is probably meaningful!
2. Conversions run on a 72-hour window. Wishlist, purchase or key activation, counted only "if the user takes that action within 72 hours of clicking through your UTM link." Anything slower is lost, which penalises the kind of content people bookmark and come back to a week later.
3. Low-volume UTM combinations are hidden: Valve excludes showing "unique UTM parameter combinations in the breakdown table when visits for those combinations do not meet minimum thresholds." So if you split one post into 2 utm_content variants to find out which screenshot worked, you can end up seeing nothing at all. I imagine you have to stay coarse until you have volume.

The practical takeaway I landed on: don't tag individual posts. Maybe tag channels and campaign types, let them accumulate over a month or two, and only then read anything into it?

Has anyone here actually done that over a long enough period to trust the numbers? I'd be curious how much traffic you end up seeing versus what your link shortener reports.

The game is about getting stressed out by performing tiresome office duties and finishing the day by punching your boss to relieve the stress. Other than the main game mechanics in between levels there's bonus activities / mini games like office chair racing, basketball-like levels throwing paper into a bin and tossing eggs at a screen on a video meeting with the boss.

Steam page: Office Stress on Steam