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Joined 10 days ago
Cake day: September 11th, 2025
  • doeinthewoods@lemmy.ziptoGames@lemmy.world•9 months after its 1.0 launch flopped, an indie dev just learned that Steam never emailed the 130,000 people who wishlisted its gameEnglish
    4·
    3 hours ago

    It sucks but my impression is that people familiar with releasing games on Steam all seem to immediately see why this could happen and gave feedback. Also it doesn’t seem like a beloved early access game in general by those that bought into early access. It had its hype period a long time ago and limped out of early access. Now Valve is trying to help them market

    Steam for the most part is the primary marketing platform for indie games. Not just for PC, also PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo because of how lackluster those shops are for discoverability of games that aren’t front page advertised with large thumbnail/poster placements. Success on Steam is viral marketing for other platforms

    Still recommendations are always to try to build a following both on and off Steam. Twitter for a while were the major social media accounts indies should spend time building up a following. Now it’s Tiktok. YouTube and Twitch influencers are also a good choice for getting viewers converted to customers but you can’t just pick a popular person, got to be mindful for if their viewers watch for game recommendations or for the personality only. So in that way, it’s not as simple as pay a popular streamer to play your game and their fans will play the game

    Regardless Steam is the best for marketing. Steam curators are way smaller than YouTubers, streamers, Tiktok but it’s highly directed at spending customers. Some Steam reviewers have followers. You can follow game developer/publisher pages. That’s how I learn of some games. I get emails and check out publisher Steam pages of games I like.

    Until any competitor actually tried to compete with Steam as a service, I’m not going to knock Valve heavily over Steam. They keep improving. Itch is not anything close to marketplace that can compete with Steam. It’s even more barebones of a service than Desura over a decade ago. At the basic level to compete with Steam, it needs a desktop client and social media functionality for developers to build followers. Maybe it needs to open source and join under the Linux foundation or KDE or something to help guide it to the next level