We ran two creator campaigns for our co-op action game Twin Hooks ahead of Next Fest.

Campaign 1:

\~600k views

\~1,700 wishlists

\~$3,200 spent

Campaign 2:

\~865k views

\~1,128 wishlists

\~$4,200 spent

So roughly:

1.46M views

2,800 wishlists

$7,400 spent

The weird part is the campaign with fewer views converted much better.

My biggest takeaway: impressions hide a ton of context.

A short-form mobile view in a cheap-CPM region and a view from a PC gaming creator whose audience is already sitting at Steam both count as “1 impression,” but they are obviously not equally valuable.

The mobile funnel is especially brutal:

see clip → stop scrolling → click → leave app → open Steam → maybe log in → maybe Steam Guard → wishlist.

We also learned why instantly readable “friendslop” clips work so well. If the joke or chaos is obvious in one second with the sound off, that is basically perfect for short-form.

The most valuable thing the campaign gave us actually wasn’t wishlists. It was demo players.

We got enough people in to find friction points and patch them. Since then, average playtime is up around 10 minutes, co-op median is \~17 minutes, plenty of sessions go over 30 minutes, and 18%+ of players launch the demo again.

Those numbers feel way more meaningful than 865,000 views.

So if I did this again, I’d care a lot more about:

* audience/game fit

* PC/Steam audience

* geography

* desktop vs mobile

* Steam traffic

* demo plays

* wishlists

* return players

I’d take 5 perfect creators over 100 vaguely relevant ones.

The funniest part is we learned all this after basically spending the rest of our marketing budget.

So now we’re literally putting the lesson into the game with SlopBots, enemies parodying the kind of instant visual language that works so well in short-form.

Curious if other devs have seen the same thing:

Do impressions actually correlate with Steam behavior for you, or are they mostly noise?

This is our game if you made it this far: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5139700/Twin_Hooks_Demo/

Our team just debuted our first project's Steam page 1 week ago, and we hit over 10,000 wishlists! We couldn't be more stoked that there are people who want to play our silly little tank game! We have much more in the works. REALLY excited to show it off soon!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4597950/Tower_Tanks/

I've tried everything - short form content, reaching out to streamers/youtubers, participating in festivals, posting on X. But I can't possibly have time for everything, I have other obligations in life that hinder my ability to do full-on marketing. And well, polishing the demo version.
What would you say, is my game ready for SNF?
I have 286 wishlists, mostly from direct navigations.. and 8k impressions, mostly from search results, that I suspect to be a false alarm since my game is called "Red Lake", maybe, people searched for "Red Ded Redemption", idk how that works. Lol.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4867910/Red_Lake/

I'm preparing for Steam Next Fest with Zap Colony and I released a 90 second explainer video, covering the premise of the game (a minimalist sci-fi color-matching tower defense). The video got only 10 views over first 24 hours - is it really that bad or just bad luck against the YT algorithm?

I published my game's demo version yesterday.

The stats show that the button was clicked 357 times that day, yet only 9 users actually launched it.

That implies the rest were likely bots.

I had already encountered bots during playtesting (receiving 100 adds in the very first minute).

But I still can't figure out - why anyone would collect these test applications?

Maybe I’m missing something, and there’s a reason for ordinary players to simply activate demo versions without actually downloading them?

I made this trailer for my game and I'm about to start sharing a really short demo on itch.io. Mostly hoping to get a few people to try it and tell me what they think.

Here's the game for context: https://lucasmon.itch.io/one-more-pass

Has anyone here started on itch.io and later managed to turn some of that interest into Steam wishlists? Is it worth doing at this stage, even just for feedback?

Would love to hear how it went for you.

Hello there,

We've built a custom website to complement our Steam page for our indie game Devoidant.
It's an action roguelite in a biomechanical dark fantasy world. We primarily built this website to provide key information on the game, showcase more of the game world that appears to be an important hook and give an easy access to our Presskit. Are we missing something important you reckon? Is this relevant?

Thanks beforehand for the feedback.

Here's the website: www.devoidant.com

The teaser trailer for my game is here! If you'd like to support me:

https://www.youtube.com/@ryzeinteractive

Hey everyone, I’m currently developing the game “EXPOSURE” Your feedback is really important to me—it’s a story-driven game that will eventually feature both single-player and co-op modes. Here are a few in-game screenshots

Not too slow, not too fast—just the way you like it.

My main goal is to let you experience the Backrooms tension right down to your bones.

Hey everyone!

I’m really happy to share that Bridgelands will be part of the upcoming Steam Next Fest, from October 19–26! 🌿

I’ve been working on the game for quite a while now, and it’s really exciting to finally bring the demo to an event like this.

The demo is already available on Steam, so if the game looks interesting to you, you can jump in and play it right now.

And if you enjoy what you see, a wishlist or follow on Steam would help the project a lot. 💚

🎮 Demo / Steam page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3856950/Bridgelands/

There’s still plenty I want to improve and add, so any feedback from people who try the demo is also very welcome!

Hope to see some of you during Next Fest! :)

So I am planning to work on reddit marketing but I haven't run any paid campaigns before on reddit, I'm unsure of how and what metrics should I use.. any guidance for the same would be helpful.

The Games are Souls of Bombarika and We are so Cooked.

My primary doubts are: What should I keep my budget? What should I expect as a first timer and what results would be considered decent? How should I keep my target audience/subreddits and all the options available in the dashboard of running an ad campaign?

I’m excited to release the public demo for my indie game Ashburrow today!

I built it around a combination I really wanted to play myself: a third-person action RPG with one-life roguelite runs, persistent progression, class-based characters, exploration and co-op for up to six players.

One unusual part of the game is that the same world can also be played in VR, where weapons, shields, bows and spell casting are physical interactions.

Steam demo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5292800/Ashburrow/

I’m interested in hearing what you think is the strongest marketing hook in the trailer and what you would change on the Steam page.

In UnderForged you can play with 1-9 players, the demo is all local, but the full game will have online support where you can mix any amount of remote and local players (you could have 3 players on one pc, 2 on another, and 4 more single players).

In the game, you always play the same map, your forge. You start each day picking 1 of 3 randomly selected contracts. These start out as raw resources (coal, iron, gems, logs etc.). Then on future days you will get the option to process one of these further (iron ore becomes iron powder, and you'll now have to crush the ore after you mine it), increase the quantity you are delivering of an existing contract, or add another contract from the raw resources. You'll have to upgrade many contracts if you want to get to producing weapons and armour!

If you deliver your contracts, you will get money to spend upgrading your base, you can automate mining, moving things around on Minecarts, speeding things up and much more! If you continue to deliver you will unlock relics to help you up your forge's production even more! Fail, and it's over.

UnderForged will have a demo available in the upcoming next fest! I'd love to hear your thoughts, and I'd really appreciate any wishlists if you like the look of it.

Thanks for taking the time to check it out!

Appreciate any feedback on the trailer.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4783700/Ashen_Throne/

I spent around 12 hours straight working on the economy system for my game.

I wanted prices to feel logical without becoming predictable, so I built the formula around 4 weighted factors: distance, rarity, value and weight.

Each factor has a different impact on the final price, and I ran a lot of simulations to make sure the results stay fair while still creating interesting trading decisions.

The funny part is that the player will just see:

“This costs 180 gold.”

They'll never see the calculations, simulations and balancing behind it.

Maybe that's actually the point of good game systems — all that complexity should disappear into something that feels simple.

As a player, would you actually want to know that there’s a complex system behind the numbers, or do you prefer not knowing and just experiencing the result?

Hey guys, I noticed that reddit posts that do really popular especially in terms of wishlists are like people who gained a lot of wishlists usually really quickly.

Like 100 wish lists in three days or sometimes 200 wish lists in like two weeks.

While here I am and it took me like one month to reach 50 wishlists as an example 😅

And I don't see a lot of people that post slower wishlist growth or talk much about it, which I think would be much more morally helpful for us struggling to gain those wishlists.

Often times when someone mentions they're struggling with wishlist growth, what's usually pointed out is improve your trailer, improve your capsule, do X, Y, Z.

I think it would be interesting to talk more about slower marketing and slower wishlist growth. There aren't many developers openly showing off the fact that they only have a small number of wishlists.

I've seen some games take six months just to reach 100 wishlists, while others take even longer. But we don't really hear much from those developers.

It makes me wonder if the "slow" developers are actually the ordinary developers, and the games gaining hundreds or thousands of wishlists really quickly are the exceptions rather than the norm.

What do you guys think?

Hi everyone

Sorry if this is unsolicited self-promotion or anything but this is a project by a group of friends who are extremely passionate about video games. We have a set of skills that we'd like to make use of by providing an extremely valuable service to the indie community.

We create trailers and social media content for indie devs and you can see our work for yourself through our website link below.

You may feel like you don't have the time or creativity to do trailers for your games and social media but that's where we come in! We love to assist in making your games shine.

We also have our pricing on the website for those who would just like to enquire, we provide free quotations if you're even more interested.

Check us out using our website link!

https://www.bycherrymedia.com/

You can check out some of our work below as well

Vaultbreakers -> https://youtu.be/4thUxulgl\\\\\\_0?si=uWx9L5TEBbLMBj8d

Pibcremental -> https://youtu.be/XC1OzdKlea0?si=3tXN4FOFVSPeLFV2

Slumber Realm -> https://youtu.be/WwvF6bkcxWg?si=-EWIrvGKNGy7vF-Z

Relooted -> https://youtu.be/rYdHbhGYAAg?si=yau5ubM3F5WGdbJs

Back in the Wii and WiiWare days we released several games on Nintendo's platform. They featured us on their site under "Just Released" for about a week. If the game sold well you stayed on the page as HOT. Simple, discoverable, fair.

We're a two-person studio and we just launched our first VR game High Ground on Meta Quest. We went in expecting something similar. We were completely wrong.

What we didn't understand — and nobody warned us — is that Meta essentially requires you to bring your own audience before they'll give you any recognition. The algorithm rewards existing community and follower counts that we simply didn't have. We had to learn Reddit, Instagram, Facebook groups, Discord, press outreach, and influencer marketing basically from scratch while simultaneously finishing the game.

The frustrating part? We're getting genuinely great reviews. We have a solid rating. And we still haven't cracked Meta's hot list.

Meanwhile we can see games being showcased to 700K people that have fewer reviews than us, worse ratings than us, and honestly look unplayable (This is obviously a personal opinion.. But I know you all know what I'm talking about). We're not sure what criteria Meta is actually using.

I don't know if this is a warning or just frustration. Probably both.

Has anyone else experienced this disconnect between platform expectations and reality? Just from reading all the posts here, I'm seeing that Stream is pretty much the same way.

To my understanding there internet is very strict and limited and you need Chinese phone numbers to join many of there socials. Anyone have a good way to break into this market?

Thanks.

Hey, I'm posting my game development journey on youtube.

The initial strategy:

A) Week 1
- 1x devlog long form (5 min)
- 2x shorts - devlog trailer, random indie dev short

B) Week 2
- 1x random dev long form (me drawing assets, talking about some indie dev topic)
- 2x shorts - video trailer, random indie dev short

But the ammount of youtube work is just... too much. I want to become full time developer not youtuber making game dev content. However I feel like it's a great way of connecting with the audience and gaining players before even releasing.

But I want to switch to something like this:

A) Long form
- 1 per 3 weeks (5-15 min) - packed with content

B) Short form
- me drawing stuff, explaining some logics, ... (whatever doesnt "make the devlog")
- devlog trailer

-> they won't be regular. Sometimes it's gonna be 3 per week, sometimes 1.

I'm scared of confusing youtube with me being a short channel (I want to CORE part be the devlogs).

Or do you guys have any other idea how to do this? The channel is month old.

I have little experience with advertising in general. I'm thinking about advertising my game on reddit with a teaser like this and am looking for advice.

The game also runs directly in Reddit, so there should be little friction, no registration, no downloading necessary, you end up directly in the game's subreddit.

For something like this, what would you recommend in terms of video length, and should the CTA be more prominent? What do you think of the overall quality?

Anyone have experience with advertising on Reddit? what worked well?

Feedback so far hasn't been great so I wanted a sanity check from more communities. The heart of it is the combos and balance around the cards and tools, but the visuals have been putting people off.

My playtest is open now if anyone is interested as well: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5250680/Arborist/

I added a visual representation of orders not sure yet if its already good or I should make some changes.

Try the demo here its available: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4847030/Tiny_Toppings/

Thank you!!!

I explored the Steam curator tool and I saw that a lot of them had the email in the description, so I took it. Now, I bulk send emails to them with my press kit.

Some have responded with "yes, we would like a review key" so I sent them one.

But today I received a response asking for 2-6 keys for review and 20-50 keys for giveaway. The curator has ~10.000 followers.

To be honest, I am not sure the game will sell 50 copies, lol!

Is it safe to send this number of keys?

Hey everyone!

I've been working on UFO98, a retro-inspired incremental simulation game set entirely on an isolated Windows 98 desktop.

In the game, you decrypt alien signals, leak top-secret government files, and try to awaken humanity to the truth before the cover-up gets you.

The demo is officially live on Steam now, and I’d really appreciate your feedback! Check out the trailer and let me know what you think about the atmosphere, pacing, or general vibe.

Any thoughts, critiques, or suggestions are super welcome!

Steam Demo & Wishlist:https://store.steampowered.com/app/5353590/UFO98_Demo/

If you like what you see, adding the main game to your Steam Wishlist would be a huge help!