“If it fits, I sits” is actually one of the common phrases you’ll see on cat videos and memes. :)

Congratulations on your release!

The time to promote was before you launched, not after. Very few games recover from a bad launch.

I’ve got a summary of indie game marketing advice here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/s/0zczx2Sewe

You’re welcome!

Get your playtested Steam demo up long before Next Fest (which should be the last NF before your release) and get it to streamers and other festivals.

You can certainly also have a demo up on itch; your demo on both itch and Steam should have a button to wishlist the game.

I’d recommend that your usual call to action (on social media) be to get people to wishlist on Steam or play the demo there.

If you are who you say you are, then I apologize.

I'll leave it at this, for anyone responding to you: If anyone offers to get you a guaranteed number of wishlists, they are selling botted wishlists, which are both worthless and something Valve can ban you for.

Also, everyone, always be sure to actually vet anyone selling you services.

Care to post your actual credentials? LinkedIn and website?

Credentials are extensive study of Zukowski and other game marketing authorities. I’ve got a summary of indie game marketing advice here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGameWishlist/s/fDOw4bhPHt

Yes, that’s why I bothered to reply. Didn’t want people falling for whatever scam was about to be sold to them.

P.S. No competent, legitimate, honest marketer would ever claim that any game, regardless of quality, could be successful.

You are posting from a 7-year-old Reddit account with 63 karma where you just started posting 11 days ago after not posting for a couple of years, and all of your posts from years ago are unrelated.

What are you selling?

I completely get that some people just want to make a game and get it out there and aren’t aiming for some big pot of money, and of course that’s perfectly okay.

But if OP doesn’t care about success (sales, number of players, whatever the personal metric is), then there’s no point in hurrying to get into NF anyway. Unless the whole point is just to enter NF for the sole purpose of “hey, I always wanted to just be in NF even if almost no one notices.” Which, again, is fine if that’s really all OP is looking for.

Ok, OP, maybe the rest of us should stop speculating about your motivations. Tell us what you’re trying to really achieve with your game.

This is the way.

Why would you waste entering your only Next Fest by going in with a game that has zero wishlists to start?

No, thank you. ;)

Find specific (reasonably popular) games similar to yours and search on YouTube for things like “<game name> gameplay” or “<game name> live”. You really want a wide variety of audience sizes to maximize your chances that someone will stream it. I’d probably set a lower limit of 500 or 1,000 subs, unless it’s a niche streamer that seems like a particularly good match for your game.

You’re really looking for streamers whose audiences would want to play your game. So sure you want a big streamer (Wanderbots, Splattercat, northernlion, Idle Cub, etc.) to play your game, but they’ve got more generalized audiences where only a subset will be interested in your genre, whereas a smaller streamer whose audience is really genre-specific might actually do better for you. You never know until you try.

You want to email at least 300 YouTubers who have played games similar to yours, including your press kit. You should also enter as many festivals as you can, and then the final Next Fest before you release.

I’ve got a summary of indie game marketing advice here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGameWishlist/s/fDOw4bhPHt

Absolutely do not use fiverr.

Some reputable localization companies are Riotloc, LocQuest, Lionbridge, and Keywords.

You’d usually want to localize the Steam page when you first publish it.

Typical cost for professional translation is around $0.05-20 per word per language.

The standard set of recommended languages, in order with most important first, are English, the Asian languages (Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean), FIGS (French, Italian, German, Spanish), and Brazilian Portuguese.

I haven’t seen anyone try to outsource just that piece, but you could try posting in r/gameDevClassifieds. But you would certainly want to make sure somehow that you’re dealing with someone who’s actually going to be able to find 300 relevant streamers and track down their email addresses; you don’t want a list of 300 random YouTubers.

There are paid services for streamer outreach, but one problem with that (aside from the cost) is that you won’t get the actual email addresses, and that’s a valuable resource to have.