Honestly just really happy about this one.

I went into my first Steam Next Fest with around 1,500 wishlists, not really knowing what to expect.

Now the festival is ending and Worm Capitalist has crossed 2,100.

Steamworks shows 2,291 lifetime additions now, which still feels a little unreal considering this is my first Steam game and the page only went live a couple months ago.

The graph has been a bit chaotic. I had one pretty crazy spike from China before Next Fest, and then the festival gave the game another really nice push.

Still a long way to go, but seeing actual people discover the game, play the demo, stream it and add it to their wishlist has probably been the most motivating part of development so far.

Full release is November 30 :)

Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5073430/Worm_Capitalist/

How did Next Fest go for everyone else? I'm really curious what kind of numbers people saw this week.

Hey guys, I released a small pixel art platformer one year ago (not the best genre to make money, I know), and I managed to get 7k wishlists before launch by posting a lot on socials. Here are the numbers today. I stopped doing any marketing one month after launch because I had to take a paying job, but I was contacted by a Chinese publisher to help me release the game in the Chinese market, which I know nothing about.

I started marketing again 2 months ago by automating a lot of it so it is less time consuming, I post about one gameplay short every two days on Instagram and YouTube.

The game sits at 96% positive reviews with 132 reviews, which means I don't think I will ever get the 500 reviews threshold for the next tier.

Hey everyone,

I went into Steam Next Fest with pretty low expectations and honestly, a lot of anxiety. Sitting at just 122 wishlists right before the festival, I had no idea if anyone would even notice my game among thousands of incredible titles.

I just wrapped up the week at 516 wishlists.

I know that might look small compared to the massive hits out there, but for a solo developer making a chaotic physics delivery game with zero marketing budget, it honestly feels like a huge weight off my shoulders. Just seeing real people actually download the demo, wrestle with the controls, and break things in ways I didn't expect made the sleepless nights completely worth it.

Still got a ton of bugs to fix and polish to do, but this was the exact boost of motivation I needed to push across the finish line.

Hey everyone! Now that Steam Next Fest is officially wrapped up, I wanted to share a quick post-mortem for my game, Rulebound. As my very first game on Steam, getting it out there into the wild was both an incredible learning experience and a reality check.

Here are the final event stats:

• 374 starting wishlists (entering the event)
• 192 total wishlists
• 566 final wishlist count
• 78 total players
• 13 direct played & wishlisted conversions
• 16 minutes median play time

For a brand-new indie title entering the event without prior algorithmic momentum, I’m taking this as a solid win. But as expected, not everything went smoothly. Here is my honest breakdown:

The Good

• People actually played my game. Getting almost 80 real players to download and dive into a project I built from scratch felt amazing.
• Solid engagement & conversion. A median play time of 16 minutes showed that people were actually sticking around to engage with the mechanics, and around ~16% of players wishlisted it immediately after playing.

The Bad

• Outdated trailer. I didn't get around to updating my demo trailer before the festival started, which definitely cost me initial hook power on the store page.
• Bad timing / Real life. I had to travel out of town right as Next Fest kicked off, meaning I couldn’t patch the game or update the build as quickly as I wanted during peak traffic days.

The Ugly

• Day 1 bug build. I accidentally pushed a buggy build on the very first day. First impressions matter immensely in Next Fest, and starting off with bugs definitely hurt early retention.
• Onboarding & Diegetic UI friction. Rulebound uses minimal UI and relies heavily on full diegetic elements. It turns out a lot of players struggled to grasp how to play without traditional hand-holding. Finding the balance between an immersive, UI-less aesthetic and clear player guidance is something I need to refine.

What’s Next?

The game is admittedly a bit niche and tricky to pitch at a single glance, but it’s a project I’m truly proud of and at the end of the day, making a good game is what matters most to me.

Next time, I'll do better. As for Rulebound, after participating in Steam Scream Fest V, I am pushing straight toward full launch in November, no matter what the final wishlist count looks like.

Huge thanks to everyone who took the demo for a spin and gave feedback during the event!

If you end up giving the demo a shot, I'd love to hear your thoughts

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5057050/Rulebound/

Most influencer advice for indie games boils down to "email a lot of YouTubers." I wanted something more concrete, so I collected public data on 14,474 YouTube channels and 24,587 Twitch streamers and looked at what separates a good target from a wasted email. Here's the process I'd follow now.

Step 1: Aim smaller than you think

Median views per video as a share of subscribers:

• Under 10K subs: ~49% (about 1,600 views)
• 10K–100K: ~24% (about 7,900 views)
• 100K–1M: ~10% (about 27,800 views)
• 1M+: ~3.6% (about 87,000 views)

Big channels still get more raw views, but they're flooded with keys. Ten 10K–100K channels that actually play your genre get about as many views as one 1M+ channel, and they're far more likely to reply.

Step 2: On Twitch, judge by live viewers, not followers

Median average live viewers: 44 (under 10K followers), 170 (10K–100K), 561 (100K–1M), 2,553 (1M+). A streamer with 8K followers and 120 live viewers can be a better fit than one with 80K followers and 90. Watch a couple of recent VODs: does chat actually talk about the game?

Step 3: Expect only 1 in 3 to have a public business email

34% of gaming YouTubers list one. Before giving up on someone:

• Check the "View email address" button on their YouTube About tab (it's behind a captcha, so do it by hand)
• Check their website or link-in-bio page (Linktree, Beacons, Carrd ...)
• Check the descriptions of their recent videos

Don't cold-DM on X or Discord unless they say they take pitches there.

Step 4: Only pitch active channels

Skip anyone who hasn't uploaded or streamed in the last 2–4 weeks.

Step 5: Keep the pitch short

• Subject line: game name + genre + "Steam key inside" (e.g. "[Game] – cozy airship sim, Steam key inside")
• 4–6 sentences, with one line that shows you've watched them
• Key, a 30-second trailer, your press kit link and release date
• One follow-up after about a week, then stop
• Track who you've emailed so you never email anyone twice

Step 6: Time it

Reach out 2–4 weeks before a demo, Next Fest or launch, not on the day. Send launch keys about a week early so they have time to record.

The full numbers for 25 niches (plus a CSV) are free here: https://theugcfinder.com/report

Disclosure: I built UGC Finder, the directory these numbers come from. It does the list-building part if you don't want to do it by hand. Happy to answer questions or pull numbers for a specific genre.

We're participating in Steam Next Fest with our horror pool roguelite, but the numbers didn't shoot up considerably during that period. But on Oct 24, on the day of the Personal Calendar leaving the testing phase, our wishlists started climbing and we broke 50k.

Anyone else noticed an increase on that date? Did anything major change in Personal Calendar on that date (I thought the calendar was available to everyone during the testing period)? Or is it the consequence of our game releasing in the first part of November? Trying to understand what happened better.

Hi, everyone. As you might have guessed from the post title, over the past 3 days I’ve received quite a few requests to participate in playtests for my 2D platformer, “Kettlebell: Inferno Hotel.”

This is really surprising, since I haven’t really posted anything that would have garnered a lot of views.

I can’t rule out the possibility that it might have been that, though that theory is unlikely. Still, I hope the requests came from real players.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments on why there was such a surge. Maybe I missed some news about my game online.

Here’s the link to Steam - maybe someone wants to add it to their wishlist and join the playtests, which start on October 3 and will last for two weeks!

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4032020/Kettlebell_Inferno_Hotel/

Soy nuevo en el desarrollo de videojuegos y no tengo tantas listas de deseos. Tengo como 8 y conozco 4, así que ¿qué mejorarías en mi página?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5427530/Secondary_Life_Missions/?beta=0

Hey guys, I wanted to compare some stats and see how everyone else performed during the October Next Fest. This is mine, filtered to Store Page Only at the top (selecting All Traffic from the drop-down I get 5.5%, but that's a dirty value I guess).

What do you think guys, is 1.8% with 45k impressions a good CTR?

Btw, I got around 200 wishlists so far.

It would be awesome if other devs could share their stats too!

Really get to know your game and figure out who your ideal players are!

We wrote a Next Fest postmortem in our steam page:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/3570680/view/694275728822245198

Don’t forget to wishlist Meltdown now on Steam!

The demo is out and soon the full game will be out!

Join our Discord:
https://discord.gg/JPUaPmQvSZ

#meltdown #nuclear #videogame #story #arcade #retro #immersive #steam #announcement #demo #pixel #management #simulation #indiegame #chaos

My game's page is out like about a week now, I didn't attend at any fesitvals or something what do you think of the numbers? I try to post regularly on x tiktok youtube reddit some posts got some real huge attraction on x and reddit too but the numbers don't go up as much. Is it normal should I keep pushing or maybe release this and keep on moving?

Working on this game made me realize that a lot of the things I'd been stressing over, like spending money on social media promotion, didn't actually make as much of a difference as I thought.

In just the first week after putting up the Steam page, which happened to be during Steam Next Fest, I got almost as many wishlists as I'd managed to collect over five months with another project.

And the funny thing is, the game was barely even in alpha. The Steam page was pretty basic, too.

It really opened my eyes to how much choosing the right genre and a good name can affect your visibility right from the start.

I'm now working on my third game, and this was something I learned firsthand, so I figured I'd share it here. If you're curious, feel free to check out the Steam page. There's really nothing fancy about it.

Hi, I'm making an incremental basketball game and planning to release it on Steam. The Steamworks account approvals are taking quite a while and I'm expecting that the store page approval itself might also take some time. Additionally, I am waiting on some art for the store page from my artist and I will be holding off on going live with the page until that's completed.

My original plan was to drop a demo on itch.io the same day that the Steam page goes live to do a bit of an announcement marketing push to hopefully get some people playing my demo and wishlisting on Steam. Due to these setbacks with the Steam page I'm wondering if I should pivot to releasing the demo earlier to get some feedback and more polish on it before I go live on Steam.

Will I waste the early visibility bump on itch.io by uploading it before my Steam page is live to convert some of the plays into wishlists or is this not really a thing? I'm a noob to all this game dev marketing stuff so any help is really appreciated!

Hi everyone, about two weeks ago I published my first ever Steam page for my 2d deep sea arcade shooter game Ominous Descent.

Wishlists have been a bit slow which was expected but I wanted to make my first overall feedback post so any feedback will be much appreciated :)

Any thoughts on the following?

Trailer

Screenshots

Description

Capsule Art/logo

Steam

Launching demo during a festival in early december.

In the past months we tried posting on different socials and Reddit was the only one that got us a few wishlist so we were thinking to try a small ad campaign on Reddit to get a little more wishlists so that when we press the Steam button to send mail to wishlisters for demo release it goes to more people.

We have a small budget (~200$).

Any advice on how to do it? Anything we should watch out for?

Has anyone else done similar tests? How did they go?

Started SNF at 48 wishlists and have since crossed over the 100+ line. I know its not much, but I still feel like this is a huge win for me. I started working on this game just to prove to myself that I could make one after playing with Godot for about a year. Not to mention I just wanted this type of game to exist so I suppose I had to be the one to make it.

Just wanted to share this little win with others that might have similar experiences with SNF. As someone who hasn't done much marketing, and is trying to do everything by himself, this whole process of making a game and getting it out to more eyes has been quite a process.

How is everyone else doing with their games in SNF?