777 wishlists in a week with no press coverage: an honest look at one indie launch
I read a report on Habr by developer Andrey Apanasik (Suvitruf) about the first week of his game's Steam page, and what I liked most was how candid the numbers are. The game is called Pocket Cat Desktop: a pixel cat lives on your desktop, wanders between windows, asks for food and attention, and keeps a diary of its adventures.
The author expected at least a hundred wishlists. He has two Telegram channels (over 11,000 and over 3,600 subscribers) and a Twitter account with almost 10,000 readers, but Western gaming media did not answer his emails. From September 27 to October 3, the net gain was almost 800 wishlists, or 791 in the regional report. The daily average was 113, and the median was 87.
UTM tags show where people came from. Of 842 tracked visits, 269 became wishlists. Telegram brought 141, Twitter 64, DTF 28, and Pikabu 22. Interestingly, Pikabu had the highest conversion at 59.5 percent, though it sent only 77 visits. Those four sources accounted for nearly 95 percent of the attributed additions. A separate spike came on October 2, when two large Telegram channels wrote about the game on their own and for free, and that day brought 289 additions. The author estimates the free effect at roughly 200 wishlists and notes that the conversion was very low.
By country, almost everything is predictable: Russia 52 percent, Kazakhstan 23, Ukraine 6.7, together about 82 percent. There was little interest from East Asia, even though the page is localized. The author also writes about Reddit: posts in r/cozygames and r/SoloDevelopment worked, but a post in r/Games during Indie Sunday was removed, and he advises reading each subreddit's rules carefully.
His conclusions are sober. Your own audience helps at the start, but after that everything depends on the developer. Count real reach, not subscribers. Marketing is part of development. From his experience, paid promotion of posts on Twitter ends up going to bots. What I found especially close to my heart is his caveat about data: the wishlist report and the UTM report use different attribution rules, so honest "organic" traffic cannot be calculated by simple subtraction. For anyone preparing a Steam page, material like this is more useful than a dozen general tips.
Source: Habr
The author expected at least a hundred wishlists. He has two Telegram channels (over 11,000 and over 3,600 subscribers) and a Twitter account with almost 10,000 readers, but Western gaming media did not answer his emails. From September 27 to October 3, the net gain was almost 800 wishlists, or 791 in the regional report. The daily average was 113, and the median was 87.
UTM tags show where people came from. Of 842 tracked visits, 269 became wishlists. Telegram brought 141, Twitter 64, DTF 28, and Pikabu 22. Interestingly, Pikabu had the highest conversion at 59.5 percent, though it sent only 77 visits. Those four sources accounted for nearly 95 percent of the attributed additions. A separate spike came on October 2, when two large Telegram channels wrote about the game on their own and for free, and that day brought 289 additions. The author estimates the free effect at roughly 200 wishlists and notes that the conversion was very low.
By country, almost everything is predictable: Russia 52 percent, Kazakhstan 23, Ukraine 6.7, together about 82 percent. There was little interest from East Asia, even though the page is localized. The author also writes about Reddit: posts in r/cozygames and r/SoloDevelopment worked, but a post in r/Games during Indie Sunday was removed, and he advises reading each subreddit's rules carefully.
His conclusions are sober. Your own audience helps at the start, but after that everything depends on the developer. Count real reach, not subscribers. Marketing is part of development. From his experience, paid promotion of posts on Twitter ends up going to bots. What I found especially close to my heart is his caveat about data: the wishlist report and the UTM report use different attribution rules, so honest "organic" traffic cannot be calculated by simple subtraction. For anyone preparing a Steam page, material like this is more useful than a dozen general tips.
Source: Habr
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