The Curious Engineer

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How To Market A Game

howtomarketagame.com

Feel Confident marketing your game

Game developmentGaming

’15’20’25
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346 from 20 Apr 2011 to 28 Oct 2026
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2026 27

  1. AI Cloners Are Here. Are Indie Devs Cooked?
  2. How sloppy is the October 2026 Steam Next Fest
  3. Wishlist inflation is real, but you still need them
  4. You probably shouldn’t launch a horror game in October
  5. Part 3: The Week Of The Golden Age: How Many Dudes?
  6. Part 2: The Week of the Golden Age
  7. The week of the golden age
  8. The state of virtual 3rd-party festivals 2026
  9. Is Friendslop saturated?
  10. Games that used momentum for Steam Next Fest Success
  11. Did AI Slop ruin Steam Next Fest June 2026?
  12. You cannot over-expose your game
  13. Most people will play your demo and not wishlist it and that is ok
  14. How the Steam Personal Calendar affects your launch
  15. June 2026 Steam Next Fest Has Started
  16. 2026 State of Bullet Heavens: How Vital Shell Succeeded
  17. 2026 Q1 Games
  18. 2026 Tips for making your tweets go viral
  19. Void Miner
  20. Making sense of the February 2026 Steam Next Fest
  21. Benchmark: How much money can you make from DLC?
  22. The Counterintuitive Advantage of Launching During Steam’s Busiest Event
  23. Only 28 games recovered from a bad launch in 2024, what do they have in common?
  24. Should you keep your demo up post launch?
  25. What the hell happened in 2025?
  26. PC Gaming Has Changed Less Than You Think (12 examples)
  27. How many games were released in 2025?

2025 39

  1. 2026 Games of the year
  2. Leftover research from 2025
  3. BALL x PIT: My game of the year 2025
  4. Review Guesser How To
  5. The cycle of a hit genre
  6. The optimistic view that indie games are in a golden age right now
  7. Steam Next Fest October 2025: Checking in on the games that broke through
  8. Ghost stories to scare indie developers
  9. A deep dive into the games of the spring showcases
  10. What are game showcases?
  11. 10 Reasons why you shouldn’t delay contacting content creators
  12. How much should we freak out about Silksong
  13. The demo effect: From 7000 wishlists to 42,000
  14. Gnomes: Tower Defense with 10-month dev time hits $367,484
  15. 2025 Q2 games that are selling
  16. Don’t make your game free
  17. Can you market a game with zero following?
  18. Merchant 64: The importance of rapid release and sharing your work
  19. Crafty Buildy Strategy Simulation Buyers Guide
  20. Consider the Horse Game
  21. Most people who buy your game won’t play it
  22. Can itch.io success translate to Steam success?
  23. Benchmark: Itch.io traffic
  24. How an itch.io game became a million-dollar hit: The Roottrees are Dead
  25. The biggest gap in game success
  26. What I heard from Valve at GDC
  27. The hit games of early 2025
  28. ARCHIVE (March 2025) Benchmarks: How Many Wishlists Can I get From Steam Next Fest
  29. Benchmarks: How Many Wishlists Can I get From Steam Next Fest
  30. GDC 2025
  31. When should I post my Steam coming-soon page?
  32. Steam Next Fest Feb 2025
  33. Every Daily Deal of 2024
  34. What is the post launch Discovery Queue
  35. How likely are you to overcome a failed launch? That low? So you’re telling me there’s a chance!
  36. Are game names getting longer: How to quit your job and write a title for your Steam game in 2025: Naming SEO Tips FAQ Guide Profits Earnings Optimization
  37. Do wishlists get old?
  38. Steam Vs People Algorithms
  39. What the hell happened in 2024?

2024 41

  1. 7 things I learned about Steam in 2024
  2. What are Crafty Buildy Strategy Simulation Games?
  3. Minami Lane: 6 months of development, $750K revenue
  4. How We Harvest Shadows earned 220,000 wishlists in 3 months
  5. How do you promote a game before Steam Next Fest?
  6. How was the October 2024 Steam Next Fest
  7. Did too many games release in Q3 of 2024
  8. What Jonas Tyroller’s Games reveal about the Steam Algorithm
  9. You don’t need to be an extrovert to be good at marketing
  10. Launching during a big Store event
  11. Success after a slow EA launch, the Terminus story
  12. The EA Success of Nova Drift
  13. How to cross promote under the new Steam Rules
  14. Valve just took away a valuable visibility tool
  15. Big in Japan
  16. What Steam’s big demo update means for your marketing strategy
  17. When “Mostly Positive” games don’t sell
  18. What games are selling on Steam: The Q2 Report
  19. Should you launch your game immediately after you appear in Steam Next Fest?
  20. Steam Next Fest June 2024: Top demos and genre
  21. Do demos help earn wishlists? Steam Next Fest June 2024
  22. The double jump trick to Steam Next Fest
  23. What is Wishlist Velocity and is it a better indicator of success?
  24. How Screenbound is Building in Public
  25. Do Steam Players Like Hard Games or Approachable Games?
  26. Success via a game inspired by YouTube Content
  27. How Weekend Deals Work
  28. How to get special Daily Deal featuring on the Steam Front page
  29. What Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor can teach us about early access
  30. Spirit City: Lofi Sessions. How shrinking down lead to huge success
  31. How creating a spinoff for a hot genre lead to success for Deep Rock Galactic Survivor
  32. Is the AI flood here yet? How many games have released in 2024
  33. GDC 2024
  34. How to add Steam Key codes to your business cards
  35. Seven Lessons For Achieving Sustainable Game Development
  36. Palworld: What other Nintendo games can we add guns to?
  37. How to get TikTok Influencers to cover your game and earn millions of impressions
  38. Do wishlists matter any more?
  39. What are the top selling indie games of 2023?
  40. Why 14,000 games released on Steam in 2023 isn’t that bad
  41. What I learned in 2023

2023 45

  1. What I respect about PlayWay
  2. Why Educational Games Don’t Work on Steam
  3. Why am I not getting wishlists? A step by step solution
  4. Part 2: What games should former AAA developers make when they go indie
  5. My advice to AAA-developers trying to make indie games
  6. Deconstructing the underwhelming launch of a automation builder game
  7. The other game that succeeded during the Starfield launch
  8. What does it take to get in the Discovery Queue?
  9. 14 Reasons why every indie game developer should make at least one horror game
  10. The missing middle in game development
  11. John Romero on his book Doom Guy and developing games at a small scale
  12. Early Access Tips Part 3
  13. Three inspiring marketing success stories
  14. Killing the myths behind Steam’s visibility
  15. What is the Discovery Queue?
  16. Estimating Early Access success
  17. Frequently asked questions about Steam Next Fest
  18. How to get wishlists using Twitter game aggregators
  19. Should you do Early Access?
  20. Was 2022 a bad year for indies?
  21. Where visibility comes from
  22. How to market a multiplayer, the Battlebit Remastered story
  23. Marketing your Steam game before you have a Steam Page: The Tiny Glade story
  24. Launching a Steam Coming Soon Page the right way
  25. Respect player’s time by making longer games
  26. Why 1000 True Fans doesn’t really work for games
  27. Tape To Tape: How an indie sports title generated amazing sales
  28. Steam’s themed events are huge opportunity for visibility and sales
  29. What is the difference between a Steam Wishlist and a Follower?
  30. What if Valve Didn’t Take 30 Percent?
  31. What happens when the mainstream media covers indie games?
  32. The games that you like probably aren’t the ones that sell well on Steam
  33. How to use the Prologue trick to potentially earn thousands of wishlists
  34. Will your games be marketed by Chat-GPT
  35. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about marketing your game
  36. Why demos don’t hurt your visibility
  37. How New Genres Are Invented
  38. Editorial: Maybe mixing genres is a bad idea
  39. What’s the best day to release an indie game?
  40. How Cosmoteer’s 4.5 year marketing campaign shows that wishlists don’t get stale
  41. Lighting the ZERO Sievert fuse: what a Steam Strategist actually does
  42. Pay attention to these secretly popular sub-genres
  43. How a pixel art shooter achieved a million dollar launch (the ZERO Sievert story)
  44. Are Vampire Survivor-Likes Dead?
  45. What Splattercat and Wanderbot think about the games of 2022

2022 51

  1. Bundling is giving
  2. The median indie game does not earn a whole lot
  3. Six types of best selling games
  4. Done with Twitter? You should start a blog instead
  5. How to get covered by IGN
  6. Steam Next Fest October 2022: How did games perform
  7. What is a good median play time for a demo? [Benchmark]
  8. 6 Interesting lessons from the Dome Keeper Launch
  9. How Dome Keeper Achieved A Million Dollar Launch
  10. Should I translate my steam page and other effects on Steam traffic
  11. How many wishlists should I have when I launch my game?
  12. Benchmarks for selling a game on Steam
  13. (ARCHIVE) How many wishlists should I have when I launch my game?
  14. Benchmark: What is a normal number of wishlist deletes?
  15. What is a normal click-through rate or wishlist rate on Steam?
  16. What happened at PAX West 2022?
  17. 4 Myths about looking at the market to determine what type of game to make.
  18. 4 tips to help you price your indie game
  19. Are indie games too cheap?
  20. Inspiration Thursday August 4th
  21. How to go viral on Twitter
  22. Why don’t some games sell well?
  23. How do you get streamers to cover your game? Get a better capsule.
  24. June 2022 Steam next Fest: How did these games earn so many wishlists?
  25. Using mailing lists to gain thousands of wishlists
  26. One way to actually make money on your first game
  27. 20 Minutes Till Dawn’s half-million-dollar week
  28. 10 reasons you should stop targeting casual gamers
  29. More evidence of which genres Steam shoppers love to play
  30. Other indie developers are not your competition
  31. How Ravenous Devils made a killing and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars
  32. How Peglin Made $1,049,413 in 1 week.
  33. Elon Musk bought Twitter?! What should indie game developers do now?
  34. What genres are popular on Steam in 2022
  35. How Journalists play your show demo
  36. Independent Games Summit: Building The ‘SkateBIRD’ Brand In Layers
  37. Classic Game Postmortem: ‘Wolfenstein 3D’ (Achtung!)
  38. Community Management Summit: Was This Review Helpful? Translating Feedback into Priorities for Production
  39. If you build it they won’t come: marketing fallacies and missed opportunities
  40. Episode 2: What’s wrong with your publishing contract?
  41. GDC 2022 – Day 0
  42. What Valve says about Steam in 2022
  43. What should you spend money on if you have a small marketing budget
  44. How to market during the Steam Next Fest: Observations from the February 2022 Edition
  45. The Law of opposite and how to get visibility by taking on the market leader
  46. How to go viral on Tiktok
  47. Seven great tips for marketing your indie game on Tiktok
  48. Vampire Survivors Success: An opportunity in the Steam marketplace
  49. Why your first 10 reviews are the most important
  50. Is going viral all luck?
  51. How a two-person team earned 11,000 wishlists with one Reddit post

2021 49

  1. What worked in 2021? A summary of game dev postmortems
  2. Who you should follow and talk to on Twitter
  3. How many wishlists can you expect when you launch your game’s “coming soon” Steam page
  4. [ARCHIVED version from 12/12/2021] How many wishlists can you expect when you launch your game’s “coming soon” Steam page
  5. How to find and apply for game festivals in 2022
  6. The tools I use to run a blog and stream
  7. What Valve thinks about the future of festivals on Steam a Valve Q&A
  8. Beta test your marketing
  9. Retention: The most important number you are not paying attention to
  10. Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms
  11. How Choo-Choo Charles earned 90,000 wishlists in 2 weeks
  12. Steam Next Fest October 2021
  13. Implement these features to avoid bad reviews
  14. Marketing Meatball Theory: How to use free to get more followers
  15. Why even market a game? (the bowling ball vs the feather)
  16. How to run cheap contests
  17. Does Imgur still work?
  18. How to get shoppers to stop waiting and just buy your game already.
  19. How you can beat the algorithm and release small games
  20. How Steam works against small games
  21. I am starting something new
  22. GDC 2021 Wrapup: The best slides of the event
  23. GDC 2021 Thursday wrap-up
  24. GDC 2021 Wednesday Wrap-up
  25. GDC 2021: One More Run: The Making of ‘Spelunky 2’ with Derek Yu
  26. GDC 2021 Tuesday Wrapup
  27. GDC 2021 Monday Wrap-up
  28. How To Market Your Indie Game in 2024: A 10 Step Plan
  29. How was the Summer 2021 Steam Next Festival festival?
  30. Wishlist Wednesday: How much promotion should you be doing?
  31. My Favorite Question to Ask Playtesters
  32. Mass wishlist deletes are coming and what to do about it!
  33. Neat ideas for your game’s demo
  34. How many Steam wishlists will you get in your first two weeks
  35. Keep your free Steam demo up forever!
  36. Capsule Trends: Spring 2021
  37. How to market your game using Steam’s Events system
  38. Yes you need to create a Steam page right now
  39. How to use Steam’s UTM feature to track the number of wishlists and sales your marketing is generating
  40. News from the Steam Q&A April 2021
  41. What to do if Microsoft buys Discord (Step 1 don’t panic)
  42. How to run a mailing list without Mailchimp’s high fees.
  43. Was the Steam Winter 2021 Festival Worth It?
  44. Valheim: 7 marketing lessons from their amazing launch
  45. How to use Twitter to market your game
  46. How to get more Twitter followers and promote your indie game
  47. How to spy on your competition
  48. Can you make a living from small games on Steam?
  49. Happy 2021: You are going to finish a game this year

2020 44

  1. 5 things you need to do before the end of the Steam Winter Sale
  2. How to drastically increase your game’s daily wishlist rate
  3. Was the Steam Autumn Festival (2020) Worth It?
  4. Why improving your Steam page matters
  5. Steam 101: What Steam tags should I watch out for?
  6. Steam 101: How to tag your game
  7. What a short stint as a political hack taught me about marketing video games
  8. Trends for Steam Capsule Design
  9. What genres are players looking for on Steam?
  10. How much and when should you discount your game on Steam?
  11. How to Broadcast your game on Steam and get on the front page
  12. I come in peace: Why indies are not competing against each other
  13. What does Valve say you should do to sell your game on Steam?
  14. Among Us: The 6 lessons of their viral success
  15. Introducing Game Data Crunch
  16. Example of a great email signup form. Huge wishlist counts, and why do Early Access
  17. 4 common email marketing mistakes and how to fix them
  18. The 5 types of people that you are not marketing to but should be
  19. Great talks at GDC Summer 2020
  20. Five trends in Steam capsule art
  21. Was the Steam Summer Festival worth it?
  22. 5 lessons from Devolver’s latest playable marketing experience
  23. How to make your game’s features more interesting
  24. Online game festivals 2020
  25. 40 lessons I learned in 40 years of living
  26. How to stress-test your marketing
  27. Why you should start your own festival
  28. 10 easy tips to get your game ready for the Summer sale
  29. 3 steps to figure out how to describe your game to strangers
  30. Great talks you probably missed
  31. Did WarriOrbs use of prologues “fail?”
  32. How to confront failure
  33. 2 inspiring stories from the community
  34. How one new image increased sales 20-fold.
  35. How to make your game acceptable
  36. Should we be marketing games like it is 1992?
  37. This is what I forgot
  38. How to budget for your game with Guesstimator for Steam
  39. More cheap tips on getting feedback on your game
  40. How to get feedback on your game. Cheaply!
  41. How to talk to your fellow game developers
  42. How to talk to your customers
  43. How to talk to Streamers
  44. How to find your Anchors

2019 15

  1. Know your game’s anchor
  2. How I did competitive analysis for my next game
  3. What is word-of-mouth?
  4. The stairstep approach to indie game marketing
  5. How to please your customers with Steam’s New Library Feature
  6. Methodology for a qualitative study of Steam
  7. If Paul McCartney needs to market himself, you do too.
  8. The best slides I saw at GDC 2019
  9. GDC 2019: Platforms Are People Too: The Importance of Finding Your Champion
  10. GDC 2019: Decorticating ‘Dead Cells’: A Business and Marketing Deep Dive
  11. GDC 2019: Getting your PC/Console Game Noticed: A comprehensive how-to-guide
  12. GDC 2019: No Time, No Budget, No Problem: Finishing the First Tree
  13. GDC 2019: Building a Community for Your Game From Scratch
  14. GDC 2019: Put Your Name on Your Game, a Talk by Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage
  15. GDC 2019: Slay the Spire – Success Through Marketability

2018 6

  1. Boyfriend Dungeon: the secrets of their email marketing strategy
  2. How to learn who your audience is
  3. Why people aren’t buying your game
  4. How to build your marketing system
  5. What we can learn from indie fiction authors
  6. How to actually finish your first game this year

2017 5

  1. Top 5 Mailing Lists of 2017
  2. What Nintendo Power Can Teach Us About Indie Game Marketing
  3. Email Marketing 101: How To Actually Use Your Mailing List
  4. Your first indie game failed? Here is what to do next.
  5. The 5 Reasons Why You Need to Build An Email List This Year

2015 2

  1. How to Design Mario Levels That Don’t Suck
  2. Drill Planet: How I developed and released a game to the App store in 69 hours

2012 6

  1. Progress update June 27
  2. City Tuesday now in playtest
  3. What happens when you don’t push start?
  4. Why is every Dream-Build-Play winner a 2D platformer with grass?
  5. Training levels
  6. Creator-intensive content

2011 16

  1. City Tuesday progress for September 8th
  2. City Tuesday progress August 9th
  3. City Tuesday progress August 2nd
  4. City Tuesday progress July 26th
  5. City Tuesday progress July 19th
  6. City Tuesday progress July 19th
  7. Screenshots
  8. New cover
  9. New cover
  10. Announcement of the game
  11. Announcement of the game
  12. Let’s make these types of games
  13. HOW TO: Curves editor for simplified jumping
  14. Get the thing out
  15. The new thing
  16. The first 5 minutes are the most important or not