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I decided I wanted to dig into the data to determine how long indie game developers are spending on their games, and if more time spent developing a game leads to more success.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be evaluating this primarily from a business/financial perspective. I understand there’s more to it than that from a creative perspective. What I’m certainly not saying is that you should try to put out a bunch of junk games as fast as you can hoping to get a hit. For one thing, that’s not a good business practice anyway.

What I’m hoping to do is discover a basic framework for making games with shorter development times in genres that have proven to be successful. I realize this is not the only way to be successful as a game dev, but I think for newer solo devs and small studios this is the safest way to build your business to mitigate risk and hopefully be able to pursue making games full-time.

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To some degree, the idea of making smaller games is common sense for small teams. People talk about it all the time. I think many devs plan to keep their development time short and scope small when they start, but it slowly creeps over time. They accept the creep, telling themselves that the larger scope will make it more successful.

I’m going to try to use data to demonstrate that it is absolutely vital that you keep your development time short, especially early in your career.

I decided the best way to start was to figure out how many developers release games on Steam and how long they spend making them. The chart below shows the number of total games released on Steam along with the number of developers that have released at least one game.

At the time this data was pulled there were 121,490 games on Steam, released by 79,903 developers. It doesn’t take complex math to see that most devs don’t release more than one game. That’s an average of 1.5 games per studio, but we know that many studios release a lot of games which skews the average.

I wanted to dig into this a little further. How many of these developers actually released more than one game? The chart below shows the number of developers that have released only one game on Steam, and how many have released more than one.

This is staggering. 78% percent of devs only release one game and then stop. Is that because they all became millionaires and didn’t need to make another game? I doubt it. My theory is that many spend too long on their game before releasing it. Multiple years in many cases. Then, it doesn’t do as well as they hoped, so they give up on their dream. Who wants to spend years on another game that’s a flop?

But, that may not be the case for all these devs. As I dug through my data and looked at some of these games with no or low reviews, I realized there’s a lot of strange stuff on Steam. A lot of them don’t even appear to be games. I think it’s important to try and filter that out, because it’s not a good representation of most game devs.

I decided to filter out any developer who never had a game reach 10 reviews. They may have released only one game or multiple games, but if none of their games ever reached 10 reviews, I excluded them. Why 10 reviews? Steam seems to use this as the “sludge” marker. If a game doesn’t have 10 reviews, Steam doesn’t give it any visibility at all. That’s why it’s important to hit that mark as quickly as you can when you launch. If 10 reviews is a good enough marker for Steam, it’s good enough for me. This is reflected in the next chart.

Notice that there are now only 32,775 developers, that’s less than half the original. 64% of these developers stopped at one game, with 36% releasing more than one. That is a little better, but still a lot of one-time devs. My goal is to figure out how we can get more devs releasing more than one game. It’s the only way to make it as an indie dev long term. My guess is it’s going to mean making smaller games.

But let’s finish by taking a closer look at the devs who released more than one game. I want to figure out how long these games are actually taking to make. From my data, there is no way for me to know how long someone’s first game took to make because I don’t know when they started developing it. But if I look at the time between releases for devs who released more than one game, I can get an idea of how long it’s taking them to make them. That is shown in the last chart below.

For this chart I decided to narrow it down a little further because I’m going to be analyzing this data further in the coming weeks. This chart shows the time between Steam game releases split into different timeframe buckets. I excluded games with less than 10 reviews, less than 1 month between releases, and any game released before 2022. The reason for this is I’m going to look at revenue in my next article, and I didn’t want the Covid gaming boom to make numbers look too optimistic. I felt like using 2022 and later gives us a more realistic idea of what to expect when releasing a game. This left 2,966 developers.

This chart displays the median development time per developer, not per game, to account for developers who release tons of “games.” There are a fair number of those.

The overall median development time is about 2 years, with many games taking 3, 4, and even 5+ years to complete. You may or may not be surprised by this. This is among developers who have released more than one game and, therefore, can presumably release games faster than a brand new dev. It also has survivorship bias, because it doesn’t account for devs who quit after their first game. I would bet if we were able to account for those confounders, the median would be even longer.

You may hear a 2-year development time and think it’s short, but I think it’s entirely too long for most devs. For a studio that has released multiple successful games and has a lot of experience, 2 years makes sense. For new devs or small studios who haven’t released a game, or at least not a successful one, this is too long.

There is so much you learn about development and marketing by going through the whole process of releasing a game on Steam. You sharpen your skills by doing it again and again and again. There are game genres you could choose where it would be reasonable to have released 2 to 4 games in 2 years. Maybe you don’t make a million dollars on them, but you start with a good foundation to build a back catalog and hone your skills.

The data is telling me that the sweet spot is focusing on games that you can complete in 6 to 12 months. I’ll share more detail on that data in my next article. For now, don’t be a part of the 64% that quit after their first game. Focus on making small games and be a part of the 36% that release more than one game.

I made a video talking through this. It also gives a sneak peek into what I’ll be talking about in the next article.

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But these are the top performers by wishlists gained based on my estimates.

1. Echoes of Aincrad → 167,008 (wishlists gained)

2. Dust Front RTS → 158,768

3. Mistfall Hunter → 158,672

4. IRON NEST: Heavy Turret Simulator → 144,544

5. OVER SAND → 102,432

6. The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu → 86,816

7. Nightwater → 85,254

8. XenoFeels → 84,304

9. EMPULSE → 77,472

10. Embers of the Uncrowned → 68,448

I find the presence of two different military simulation games on the list quite interesting. But otherwise, all the games are spot on in genres that Steam players traditionally favor.

Today, I’m taking a closer look at all the Next Fest data I obtained to answer questions like, how many wishlists should I have before Next Fest? Should I have a separate demo page? How predictive is peak CCU? Does wishlist velocity before the event matter?

Next Fest is an important piece to your marketing puzzle, but it certainly isn’t the most important. It hopefully isn’t even the most important festival your game will participate in. But, it is one thing that other festivals are not - guaranteed. It is something you can count on, so why not make the most of it?

It’s important to evaluate Next Fest to learn how you can get the most out of it when your game is in it. But I think it may be more important to analyze Next Fest throughout development to get a sense for the direction Steam games and players’ interests are moving. This can help inform your current project, or help you come up with an idea for your next game.

For this Next Fest, I pulled data on every participating demo every day of the event, as well as 2 weeks before and after. Specifically, I tracked base game follower counts, demo review numbers, and CCU throughout the day. My hope was to use this Next Fest to start validating my own performance markers to help you estimate how your game may perform or compare performance against others.

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Wishlist Estimates

One note, after evaluating survey data and publicly confirmed wishlist totals, I adjusted my normal follower-to-wishlist ratio for estimates during Next Fest. The ratio seems to be higher: more wishlists per follower. The more wishlists obtained during Next Fest, the higher the ratio goes. I believe this is due to two things: players tend to wishlist more games than normal during Next Fest, so they may be less likely to follow them as well. More importantly, Steam makes it much easier to wishlist games on the Next Fest page.

While scrolling, players can click a single button to wishlist a game without even clicking into the store page. I imagine a lot of players use this as a “this seems cool, I’ll check it out later” instead of a “wow, I really want to buy this.” Does that mean Next Fest wishlists won’t convert as well after launch? Maybe, but it’s hard to quantify and certainly not worth worrying about. These are still wishlists you want.

Wishlist count at the start of Next Fest

The first data point I want to evaluate is how important your baseline wishlist count is going into Next Fest. I started by taking a look at how many games reached certain wishlist thresholds before the start. The table below shows the number of games split into different wishlist “buckets.” Note that throughout these charts there were about 279 games I was unable to obtain wishlist estimates for, usually because of a mature content gate, and they are excluded.

Not surprisingly, most games fall into the 0-999 wishlist bucket. This accounts for the majority of games participating in Next Fest. A large portion of them aren’t particularly serious games and have virtually no wishlists. These will certainly bring down the median wishlists gained for that bucket, so keep that in mind.

The chart below shows the median wishlists gained based on how many wishlists a game had entering Next Fest. It also shows a range between the 30th and 70th percentiles.

Here is that same data in a table for easier readability:

This data seems to support the findings of Chris Z with How To Market a Game, that you need at least 2,000 wishlists to get much out of Next Fest. Notice the 2,000 - 5,000 wishlist bucket are the first with a median wishlist gain greater than 1,000.

Although, I think it’s relative. If someone struggled to get wishlists throughout development, entered Next Fest with 1,000 wishlists, and gained 500 that is a 50% increase. They would probably consider that significant. It also depends on the developer’s goals. If this is their first game, or better yet, just a “small” game with a short development time, an extra 500 wishlists would be great. On a $15 game, that could be more than $1,000 in week 1 sales. I agree that 2,000 wishlists is likely the threshold for seeing a 1,000 wishlist gain from Next Fest, but almost any serious game will see some benefit from it.

Wishlist Velocity

So what about wishlist velocity? Is it better to do a big marketing push right before Next Fest or build up wishlists over time?

The table below shows buckets of the number of wishlists gained in the 2 weeks leading up to Next Fest and the median wishlists gained.

Clearly a higher wishlist velocity is associated with a higher wishlist gain. So should you wait to push your game until just before Next Fest?

I would say no for a few reasons. The primary one is you want to get your demo out nice and early so you can polish it based on reviews, more on that later. But also, a higher baseline wishlist count is more closely correlated with Next Fest wishlist gain than wishlist velocity is. The table below shows a higher correlation for starting wishlists with 3 different statistical models.

So my suggestion is to focus on building as many wishlists as you can over time, don’t wait. But if you can also generate hype in the 2 weeks leading up to Next Fest, that is even better. If you can’t do one for whatever reason, just do the other. But please please please don’t wait until right before Next Fest to release your demo.

CCU

The chart below shows peak CCU (concurrent users) for all Next Fest games during the event. The games are divided into CCU buckets, and it displays the median, 30th and 70th percentiles of wishlists gained based on those buckets.

Here’s that same data in table form:

This data is compelling. To me, CCU may be a better performance marker than baseline wishlists. Notice how the majority of games (80% in fact) don’t reach a CCU count of 10. Just by reaching 10 CCU, the median wishlist gain jumps from 224 to 1,284. The 1-9 bucket may be skewed by all the non-serious 1 CCU games where just the developer played it. But I would still suggest using that 10 CCU as a minimum goal to shoot for, similar to having 2,000 wishlists going into the event. It’s a great predictor of performance.

But that is during the event. Is there a way to know how CCU leading up to Next Fest affects performance?

The chart below shows the peak CCU for the Next Fest games in the 14 days before it started.

Here is the data in table form:

This data is a bit all over the place, that may be because I wasn’t polling CCU constantly during that time, so the peaks may be underestimated in some cases. Regardless, similar to peak CCU during the event, 10 CCU is clearly a significant marker. Most of these games do not reach it, and the games that do have substantially higher median wishlist gains.

I don’t think this is a velocity thing. Artificially ensuring 10 users play your game at the same time a few days before Next Fest is not going to help you. Games that were already doing fairly well naturally had players playing them, so they hit that number. This highlights the importance of getting your demo up early, polishing it, and building a player base well before Next Fest.

Separate Demo page vs. demo button on base game page

Now I’ll tackle the age-old question, to have a separate demo page or not have a separate demo page. I was amazed to see that after rounding the percentage to the nearest whole number it was literally a 50/50 split. The table below shows the number of games that chose to separate their demo page and those that didn’t, as well as some information about wishlists and CCU.

This data leans slightly toward having a separate demo page, but I don’t think it presents a clear winner. The separate demo group did have higher wishlist gains and CCU, but they also had a higher number of baseline wishlists. But my theory is that less serious games are less likely to have a separate demo page and are driving the wishlist and CCU numbers down.

So what if we try filtering out some of those less serious games, does it change the result? The table below shows this same data but with games with less than 2,000 wishlists excluded.

This removes about 3,000 games. As you can see, this brings the results much closer together. My conclusion is that, in terms of wishlists and CCU during Next Fest, it doesn’t matter whether you have a separate demo page or not.

Even still, I strongly recommend you create a separate demo page, here’s why: reviews. Players can’t review your demo without a separate page. Some of you are probably thinking that is exactly why you don’t want one. But the best thing you can get at this stage is live feedback from Steam players. I know it makes you nervous, and rightly so. You need to go ahead and accept that you’ll get negative reviews, prepare your mind for it. Wouldn’t you rather get those reviews now, fix the issues, and prevent them at launch? You would, I assure you.

Since we’re talking about reviews, let’s look a little closer at those separate demo page games. Does it matter how many reviews they had at the beginning of Next Fest? The chart below shows the wishlist gains for games with separate demo pages separated by how many reviews they had at the start of Next Fest.

It seems like the clearest jump in wishlists is once a game hits 25 reviews. I think that is a reasonable goal heading into Next Fest. I also took a look at how the number of reviews gained during Next Fest affected wishlist gains. It was a predictable and linear increase, so I won’t bore you with another chart.

Performance Markers

That was a lot of data, so I think this article deserves to end with a summary of what we found. I think a minimum of 2,000 wishlists before entering Next Fest is a good goal. Reaching a peak CCU count of 10 before and during the event is a good sign and I would suggest shooting for that. Lastly, I highly recommend having a separate demo page. It seems that having 25 reviews on your demo before Next Fest starts is also a good indicator. Again, don’t try to artificially hit these performance markers. That doesn’t help you. But if your marketing efforts get you to this point, that’s a good sign.

What the heck, let’s summarize it with one more table. Why not. It’s more fun than a numbered list.

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There are over 4,000 games participating in Next Fest right now with their demos. I concede that is a lot of games, but I don’t support the fearmongering that happens on Reddit when this gets brought up.

Yes, there are a lot of games. But how many are actually your competition? How many are in your genre? How many even have over 100 wishlists? I’m going to break it all down, and I think you’ll be encouraged after reading this.

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Number of games in Next Fest

To be exact, there are 4,350 games participating in this Next Fest. As it turns out, your game may only be competing with less than 1% of those for visibility.

As you can imagine, there are a large number of these games that just aren’t particularly high quality. I would call them “slop,” but I honestly dislike that word. Let’s just say there are a lot of games that have a low chance of success and aren’t your competition.

The games can be broken down even further into genre and sub-genre. Steam has become more personalized with its recommendations. I wrote about this last week. Steam knows the audience for your game and will show them games like yours. In my opinion, those games are your primary competition during Next Fest.

Steam is being very clear that after the first 2 days of Next Fest, players will see personalized recommendations. See their Exploration Mode widget below. This is included directly on the Next Fest page.

So how many of those games are similar to yours? Let’s break it down.

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Wishlist Breakdown

I used Steam’s web API to pull all the games participating in Next Fest. I also used the game’s follower counts to estimate wishlists (I use follower count x12 for a general estimate, following this data from GameDiscoverCo).

Let’s start by looking at how many wishlists the games had entering Next Fest. This data was compiled about 1 hour after the start of Next Fest. Strangely, the number of participating games increased slowly throughout the first day, so if you’re seeing more than 4,350 games now that is why.

On a side note, I have a theory of why that may be. When the press preview was released a couple of weeks ago, there were 4,938 games noted to be participating, but only a portion of those had released a demo by that time. My guess is, once Next Fest starts if your demo isn’t released you obviously can’t be included. So for whatever reason, 600+ devs registered for Next Fest, but didn’t release their demo. Possibly, there were some delays in approval of some demos and as they make it through the process they trickle in after the event officially starts. Either way, don’t be the dev who forgets to release their demo. Just don’t do it.

The table below shows the estimated wishlist numbers for the Next Fest participants separated into bucket ranges. Notably, 175 games were excluded because they are missing wishlist estimates. They are in the sexual content category, and my program is not able to access their follower counts through Steam. It’s possible, but a bit out of my scope, so sorry if you’re making one of those games.

1,241 (30%) of the remaining 4,175 games have under 100 wishlists entering Next Fest. These are those slop-ish games I was talking about. I don’t like to judge someone’s game without seeing it, but ultimately these are not going to compete with you for visibility.

The next bucket is games with more than 100 wishlists, but less than 2,000. There are 2,146 (51%) of those. This is the biggest bucket, and many of these are solid games. But the data tells us that if you enter Next Fest with less than 2,000 wishlists, you’re unlikely to get much out of it. I’m specifically referencing this article from Chris Zukowski analyzing how many wishlists you can get from Next Fest. So, as long as your game has more than 2,000 wishlists, these games are unlikely to compete with you for visibility after they get their baseline impressions that Steam gives everyone in the first couple of days. I discuss that here.

Games with over 2,000 wishlists are the only ones we’re really worried about. But as you can see, there are only 788 of them, which is just 18% of the original total. That said, I think we can whittle it down even further.

Genre Breakdown

Consider the table below. It shows how many games participating fall into one of Steam’s “Top-Level Genre” categories. Also, be aware that adding together the number of games in this table far exceeds the number of participating games because one game can fall into multiple categories.

The blue bar represents all games. The orange bar represent the games that entered Next Fest with Over 2,000 wishlists since we’ve established we’re only concerned about those.

Almost every top-level genre reduces the total number of games by 80% or more when accounting for games with less than 2,000 wishlists.

Now, let’s take a look at Steam’s full list of regular genres. Please excuse the tall image, but I wanted to include all genres. The genres are determined by Steam and you can find them listed as filters on the Next Fest page in the Steam store.

This is looking even better, are there as many high-performing games as you thought? The competition is still stiff, but it isn’t in line with the “there’s over 4,000 games in Next Fest and Steam is dead for indie devs” type of thinking.

With these more specific genres, most see a greater than 70% reduction in games when removing those that have more than 2,000 wishlists. Point & Click, for example, has 272 total games, but only 27 (10% of total) with greater than 2,000 wishlists. Those 27 games are also less than 1% of the total games participating. So if your point & click game has over 2,000 wishlists, you’re in better shape than 90% of similar games in Next Fest right now and are likely only competing with 1% of the total games!

But on the flip side, that isn’t a good sign for point & click in general, the difference between the total number of games and the number that have over 2,000 wishlists shows they are struggling to get wishlists. This applies to a number of these less popular genres.

If you look at the genres that tend to do well on Steam (grand strategy, 4x, colony sim, simulation), they have a higher percent of games with over 2,000 wishlists.

I also performed this same comparison for other categories that Steam applied to these games: Sub-Genre, Visuals and Viewpoints, Themes and Moods, Features, and Players. These charts are really big and some of the info may not be as relevant. But I included each table at the bottom of this article in the Appendix for your reference.

Anyway, I hope this made you feel a little more confident with how your Next Fest might go. Good luck to all those who are participating. If you aren’t in this one, pay attention to Steam during this time. Study how, where, and why they show certain games. Download well-performing demos in your genre. Play them and figure out why they are doing well.

Now, Happy Nextfestivus to all who celebrate! I’m going to go drink some eggnog.

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APPENDIX

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There’s a number of small updates, but possibly the most consequential change for indie developers is the change to the Popular Upcoming widget. The widget now only shows the most popular upcoming releases. It used to show a rotation of any game, regardless of popularity, about to release that has met a wishlist threshold relative to the games releasing at the same time.

What this means for indie devs is it’s almost impossible for small games to be included on the widget, which was something that was achievable previously.

Below is an image posted to Reddit during the beta giving an example of the difference in games shown before and after the change.

This directly affects indie games and will reduce the amount of visibility and wishlists you can count on at launch. That being said, they added something I personally think is a pretty cool idea: a Personal Calendar widget. In this article I’ll try to determine if this helps replace that lost visibility from the Popular Upcoming widget.

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Why has Popular Upcoming been important for indie games?

Let’s back track a little bit and talk about why the Popular Upcoming widget has even mattered to indie devs. Traditionally, it shows games releasing that day who meet the wishlist threshold. Games would fall off as other games below them on the list neared their launch time.

So as long as you had enough wishlists, you were almost guaranteed a spot in Popular Upcoming. Usually having somewhere between 5000-7000 wishlists would get you on the list.

You could even confirm your game was on the list ahead of time by checking SteamDB. Once SteamDB assigned you a ranking in top wishlists, that typically means you made Popular Upcoming. See the image below.

I think a lot of devs grab onto this because it gives them a goal to shoot for. You’ve probably heard it said that you want a minimum of 7000 wishlists before launch. This is to ensure you’re on Popular Upcoming before launch.

So, how beneficial is it to have your game on Popular Upcoming? It varies of course, but somewhere around 1000 wishlists per day on average. Some games are fortunate enough to be on Popular Upcoming for multiple days.

That’s no small amount of wishlists, but I want everyone to realize it’s also not life changing. For most games, not having access to Popular Upcoming will only take away about 1000 wishlists at launch they thought they could count on.

Every wishlist matters of course, but the reason these are particularly important is because that amount of wishlists over a small period of time could be exactly what your game needs to make it on the New and Trending widget.

We’ll dig into that widget another time, but just know it has been renamed to Popular New Releases and has been the difference between a mediocre launch and a great launch for a lot of games.

It’s unclear how many wishlists a game needs to make it onto Popular Upcoming now. The lowest I’ve seen is around 150k wishlists, but I’ve seen mention of games with as little as 80k making it on. Regardless, for the majority of devs reading this it won’t apply to you.

So, while this certainly hurts indie devs, your overall approach doesn’t need to change much. The plan should still be to get as many wishlists as possible pre-launch and try to make it on Popular New Releases.

Could this change actually be better for indie devs?

But wait, there’s more. Earlier I referenced the Personal Calendar widget. This is yet another indicator that Steam does not forget about the little guy. I’m not saying they’re especially altruistic, but it is in Steam’s best interest that indie games be given a shot.

Even Steam doesn’t know what game is going to be the next Balatro or Schedule I. Steam is in the business of selling games, that’s literally their business model. It is in their best interest to show your little game to the exact people who are most likely to buy it.

The Steam store interface has been trending towards being more personalized for a while now. The Popular Upcoming widget is not personalized, it has always been strictly based on wishlist count and launch timing.

This new Personalized Calendar is exactly what it sounds like, personalized. Leading up to your launch Steam will show your game to the exact players who like games similar to yours. Not only that, the calendar appears to start showing your game 2 months before your launch. That is much different than Popular Upcoming which would only show it the day of or day before launch.

Popular Upcoming would provide a lot of impressions, but to a generalized audience. I would expect impressions in the Personalized Calendar to convert to wishlists at a much higher rate.

Popular Upcoming is a widget at the bottom of the home page that is not initially visible, you have to toggle the tab to see it. The Personalized Calendar is much more prominent in the middle of the Store page as you scroll down.

You’re able to explore up to 500 games in the calendar with lots of filtering options. Indie Game Joe recently posted about the change in r/gamedev and he highlighted some case reports for wishlists gained for games he’s aware of. He noted games gaining 2300, 1368, 1000, and 500 wishlists respectively.

I’ll have to study the calendar over time to determine if the exposure it provides is comparable to Popular Upcoming, but in my opinion it is looking promising. Notably, if a player is not logged in as they are browsing Steam none of the personalized recommendation widgets are shown, including the calendar.

The calendar seems to show games in all levels of popularity. In my own calendar I saw big games with 100k wishlists and I was also able to quickly identify a game with about 300 wishlists. Including a game with only 300 wishlists actually surprises me, by any metric that game does not have a high chance of success after launch.

So why include it? It is certainly a positive sign for indie devs, but I wonder if games can fall off of personalized calendars over time. Does Steam treat it like the Discovery Queue, where they give a game some impressions and if they convert well it continues to show that game, but if not it doesn’t? I’ll have to track this over time to confirm, but my gut says this is how it will work.

I’ve seen a lot of reports over the last couple of years from devs that felt like Popular Upcoming did not perform as well for them as they expected. Steam has all the data points, they certainly picked up on this as well.

Indie Game Joe also does a good job of pointing out that Steam has changed a lot over the last 15 years, and with every change indie devs tend to freak out. Here’s my advice: don’t freak out.

Steam has proven time and time again to be a very competent organization, I don’t often say that about billion dollar companies who basically have a monopoly on a product. Steam does what is in their best interest, they just happen to be aware that allowing indie games to have a chance to succeed is also in their best interest. When your interest in selling your game aligns with Steam, you’re in good shape. Trust that, but make sure you are aware of the changes so you can adapt.

The importance of Steam tags x3

This is going to be the 3rd time in the last couple of months that I’ve written about Steam tags. The fact that they keep coming up should be a sign to you, they are vitally important.

The Personalized Calendar is just the latest example of that. As Steam moves more and more towards personalized recommendations, you need to double and triple check that your Steam tags are optimized. If Steam doesn’t know what your game is, it can’t appropriately recommend it to players.

Instead of beating a dead horse, I’ll refer you to my articles on the importance of Steam tags as well as the recent Steam tag changes. Since we’re talking about it, I’ll plug my free Steam tag analyzer tool one more time.

Can you game Steam?

The other issue Popular Upcoming has had since the way to get on the list was figured out, is that to some degree it can be gamed. Devs know that if they hit a certain target wishlist range, they’ll make it on the list. This has resulted in efforts to obtain low quality wishlists in order to hit that target, even if it means those wishlists won’t convert well if at all.

It’s possible that we figure out more about how the calendar works over time and it’s able to be gamed too. But I think that’s unlikely. Here’s why: while we understand a little bit about the Discovery Queue, we really don’t know exactly how it works and certainly not how to game it. I think that’s the way it is, and will always be, with these personalized widgets. I also think Steam knows that, and is likely a factor in their decisions to implement these kind of changes.

So don’t freak out. Trust Steam, if for no other reason than you have no other option. They hold the success or failure of your game in their hands, so it’s best to try and understand them in order to adapt to their changes.

Now, I’m going to go sift through my calendar because I’ve already seen some great games I didn’t know about.

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Full article: gamemarketing.substack.com/p/should-you-be-in-the-next-next-fest

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This is something a lot of devs get wrong, but after reading this you won’t be one of those devs.

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Next Fest Basics

If you didn’t know, Steam’s Next Fest event is a week-long takeover event on Steam highlighting demos of upcoming games. They host it 3 times a year in February, June, and October.

The reason devs focus on Next Fest so much is because it’s the only Steam event that you are guaranteed to be able to participate in. Steam lets every upcoming game with a registered demo participate one time.

That’s worth saying again: you can only be in Next Fest one time. It doesn’t matter if you did it before you went into early access; you still can’t do it again before your 1.0 launch.

Should you back out of this Next Fest?

To answer the question posed by the title of this article, should you be in this Next Fest? While it’s too late to register, you can still opt out before June 15th.

The answer is: you should be in the last Next Fest before your game launches. Period. So, if your game is going to launch between the June and October Next Fests you should be in this one. If not, you should opt out.

I regularly talk to devs about their marketing plan, only to find out they were already in a previous Next Fest. It turns out it’s not the end of the world; there are many other festivals that will get you more wishlists. But you still want to take every advantage you can get.

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Why you need to wait to enter Next Fest

Let’s talk more about how Next Fest works and why you need to wait until the last one before you launch. You might wonder why you can’t enter the first Next Fest after launching your demo to help kickstart it. Or to enter well before your launch to boost your wishlist count closer to the threshold to get you on Popular Upcoming.

Those are reasonable thoughts, but there are a few reasons why waiting as long as you can is the best way to get the most out of Next Fest.

The primary reason is that Next Fest acts as a multiplier for the wishlists you currently have. The more wishlists you have going in, the more you will get during the event. So you want to build up as many as you can leading up to Next Fest to get the most out of it.

To further emphasize this point, here is a table from an article by Chris with HTMAG about how many wishlists Next Fest can bring. His data clearly highlights the fact that the more wishlists you enter Next Fest with, the more you will earn during the event.

He also notes that if you enter Next Fest with less than 2,000 wishlists, you have little hope of getting much out of it. It seems to be the minimum you need to have success. There’s nothing special from a Steam algorithm perspective about that 2,000 number; any less just seems to be a negative indicator.

Does Steam give every game the same visibility?

Next Fest has changed over the last couple of years. Currently, Steam gives every game a baseline amount of visibility in the form of store page impressions over the first two days. Not all games get the exact same visibility. The more popular games are going to benefit from being on certain widgets and charts. But they do give every game the same baseline amount of visibility, meaning every game is at least given a chance to succeed.

Then, the games that do the most with that visibility continue to get additional promotion from Steam while the others sink to the bottom. What data points does Steam look at to determine winners and losers? We don’t know exactly, but it’s most likely a combination of engagement metrics like wishlists, concurrent users, demo playtime, etc.

Chris also demonstrates this in that same article. The chart below shows that all games, regardless of the number of wishlists they had, were given a certain number of impressions by Steam on day 1, and then an increased number on day 2. Then, by day 3, Steam starts to take visibility from lower-performing games and promote the higher-performing games more. Performance seems to be directly correlated with how many wishlists a game had entering Next Fest.

When to launch your demo ahead of Next Fest

This is not a full guide on how to have a successful Next Fest. I will put that together another time. But I do think it’s worth briefly discussing how (or how not) to time your demo launch before Next Fest.

A lot of people think they should hold onto their demo until just before Next Fest and then shadow drop it to try and ride some hype into the event. I’m not entirely sure why so many people think this is a good idea, but it might be because they see AAA games successfully shadow dropping things. But if you’re a solo dev or small team, especially if this is your first game, that’s just not going to work.

There’s also this idea that you should wait to release your demo until the week or two before Next Fest because the wishlist velocity you have leading up to the event can affect how much Steam promotes your game.

Chris also studied this wishlist velocity idea and found a slight edge in the success of games that had a higher velocity leading into Next Fest. BUT this is a risky plan and for most devs the risk is not worth the reward.

The table below shows what Chris found in regard to demo launch timing before Next Fest. Basically, launching your demo way before gives you a better chance of success.

Don’t make this mistake!

Lastly, don’t launch your game the week after Next Fest. You’re probably thinking that you want to capitalize on the momentum from the event and launch quickly. That could be a good idea, but the problem is everyone is thinking that.

In general, you shouldn’t worry too much about timing your launch perfectly as long as you don’t launch during a big takeover sale or event that has everyone’s attention. But there are so many games releasing the week after Next Fest that it could affect your launch.

One of the primary reasons is that this can affect your placement on the Popular Upcoming widget. It’s not based on a specific amount of wishlists, but on the relative amount of wishlists for the games releasing that day. It’s possible you get knocked down or even off the list. So wait until the following week at least, if not later.

If you are signed up for this Next Fest, I hope this article helped you either solidify your choice or realize that you should back out. If not, keep this in mind for the next Next Fest. Or the next. Your time will come soon enough. Don’t rush it.

Now, I’m going to go find some fun demos to play for “market research.”

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Steam added 17 new tags, removed 28, and merged a few others. I’ll review them so you can decide how this might affect your game.

Even though I recently wrote an article about why Steam tags are important, I felt this was a significant enough update to make sure you take another glance at your tags. Plus, this pairs well with that article.

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The importance of Steam tags

Steam gives you 20 tags that you can apply to your game using their Tag Wizard in Steamworks. It’s very important that you utilize all 20.

Your first 5 tags are the most important. Steam even reiterates this in the FAQ of the article.

Q. Does the order of my tags matter?

A. Yes, to some extent. Customers can often make assumptions about your game based on the order of your tags, as generally the top tags represent most of what the game is about, while lower-ranked tags might describe smaller aspects of a game. It’s also worth noting that the first few tags are most visible on your game’s store page. Steam generally uses all of your 20 visible tags for generating recommendations.

In the players blog, Steam also described how players can assign tags to games from the store page if they feel like it applies to that game by clicking the ‘+’ icon shown below. This is very important for developers to understand.

Players can assign any tag to your game. Even if it’s in good faith, if it’s inaccurate or not a tag you want associated with your game, the Steam algorithm may categorize your game in a way you don’t want.

You need to periodically check these, remove inaccurate ones, and just use the 20 tags you set up in the Tag Wizard.

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What did Steam change?

Now on to the tags that Steam changed. They mention that they normally add a few new tags each year, but they haven’t since 2024, so this list is long. They also removed some tags, which they haven’t done in a really long time.

Added tags: Bullet Heaven, Desktop Companion, Organizing, Cleaning, Decorating, Wuxia, Xianxia, Falling Blocks, Espionage, Samurai, Zoo, Wolves, Capybaras, Animals, Cult, Poker, Language Learning

Removed tags: 3D Vision, Ambient, America, Blood, Crowdfunded, Cult Classic, Documentary, Drama, Dungeons & Dragons, Electronic, Experience, Feature Film, Foreign, GameMaker, Games Workshop, Illuminati, Kickstarter, LEGO, Masterpiece, Mature, Movie, Narration, NSFW, Roguevania, RPGMaker, Warhammer 40K, Web Publishing, Well-Written

Modified tags:

• Clicker → Incremental

• Conversation → Dialogue Heavy

• Pool → Billiards

• Jet → Flight

• Unforgiving → Difficult

• Pluralized: Dogs, Foxes, Vampires, Elves, Dwarves, and Assassins

Tag additions

I think the most notable tag addition is Bullet Heaven. Now I can stop calling them Vampire Survivors-like games. It turns out that making one of these games can still be viable, despite their popularity peaking a few years ago.

Desktop Companion is another good one. I have a soft spot for Samurai, so it’s cool to see it codified in Steam. I also did not realize just how many capybara-related games there were until I started looking around.

Look through the tags they added. Do any apply to your game? Swap it in.

Tag removals

The update emphasizes the importance of specificity with your tags. Most of the tags they removed were because they’re vague and could apply to multiple types of games like Ambient, Drama, Experience, etc.

It does not benefit you to have generic tags. If you’re not sure if a tag applies to your game, don’t include it. You want your tags to tell Steam exactly what your game is, but still be sure to use all 20.

I detail a good method to make sure your tags reflect your game accurately in this article about how important Steam tags are. I also created this free Steam tag analyzer tool to help you audit and create your list of tags. It now reflects these updates.

They also removed branded tags associated with a specific organization. This does make sense, even though the D&D tag has been helpful to me in the past. But Steam mentions that their collections in franchise pages essentially covers the purpose that tags serve in this case.

They also removed the Kickstarter tag, which may make more sense than removing Crowdfunded. Even though I like to be able to filter and see games that were crowdfunded, it doesn’t actually tell me anything about the game itself. A pixel art platformer and a bullet heaven game can both be crowdfunded, but they are going to attract completely different audiences.

The most important thing about your tags is that they reflect your game exactly and that Steam can associate it perfectly with a similar popular game.

I presume that if you were using one of these removed tags, it has been taken off your list so you’re not currently utilizing your full 20 tag slots. Be sure to double check.

Modified tags

The modified tags are a little less interesting. I think people have been calling clicker or clicker-adjacent games incremental for a while. But what all these modifications do is make the tags clearer and more specific.

When Steam says to do something, you should do it. Clearly all of these changes are signaling that you need to have very specific tags. Make sure you do!

Most common Steam tags

I want to end with one more FAQ from the article. Steam tucks it down at the very end, but I think it is actually the most important takeaway for indie devs.

Q. What are the most common tags on Steam?

A. The “Singleplayer” tag wins by being applied to over 98,000 games (about 62% of all games on Steam). The runner up is the “Indie” tag, which is applied to more than 82,000 games (about 53% of all games on Steam). Then “Action”, “Casual”, and “Adventure” in that order.

I’m not sure why they decided to include this information, maybe they thought it would be a fun fact for players. It turns out to be very valuable for us. Because these are the most common tags, it also means they might make it harder for Steam to categorize your game.

In Chris Z’s free course on how to make a Steam page, he specifically recommends against using the Indie tag. The reason is that it is too broad and doesn’t tell Steam anything about your game. Look at how many games use it, it’s the second most common tag. That tells me that games in any and every genre use this tag. If you’re intent on using it, put it low on the list.

Chris also recommends against using the Casual tag for similar reasons. I think sometimes Casual is used in place of, or in addition to, Cozy. But if you’re a cozy game, I don’t think you usually need the Casual tag as well.

So take a few minutes to have a date with the Tag Wizard and review your list, then make sure you haven’t had any players apply weird tags to your game. The algorithm will thank you. Now, I’m going to go get knee deep in some Next Fest data. Don’t forget, it’s right around the corner.

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With that many wishlists, a conservative estimate of copies sold in the first week would be 250,000+. But in their first 7 days it looks like they sold less than 100,000 and they’re currently sitting at 71% (mostly positive) reviews on Steam.

Why is that? I’m going to break down 3 preventable mistakes I think the devs made that you should avoid and that could have greatly increased their sales and positive reviews.

Disclaimer: Hindsight is 20/20. I don’t want to sound like I’m speaking negatively about the game or the development team. I’ve been following the game for a long time and it’s a great game. The devs are also great and very responsive to their community. But I think it’s worth trying to identify some avoidable reasons why they don’t have more positive reviews and sales to help you during your launch.

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This is not a failed launch

Now don’t get me wrong, this game is still going to be wildly successful by indie game standards. It was simultaneously released on Steam, Epic, Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch so they are doing just fine. But Steam gamers are very particular, so I will focus on its reception on that platform.

For reference, according to GameDiscoverCo’s latest survey data on wishlist-to-sales conversion, median Day 1 conversions are ~5% of total wishlists, Week 1 conversions are ~20%, and Year 1 conversions are ~60%.

By that math Outbound should have had 300,000 sales in its first week (20% of 1.5 million). That’s why I said 250,000+ is a conservative estimate, because with extremely high wishlist counts like this the percentage will dip some.

In these situations, I like to take a look at the top negative reviews to see what players are griping about. In a lot of cases, even with this game, you’ll see comments like it’s too “boring”, “slow”, “short” etc.

At this point, there’s not much to be done about that. Those issues would have needed to be addressed during the demo phase. I’m not saying the devs ignored those types of criticisms at the time, in fact I’m sure they did everything they could to address them.

I think those types of reviews are a consequence of having so many wishlists. When you have cast that broad of a net, you’re going to get players who aren’t used to your genre and, therefore, may not fully understand the gameplay experience like fans of the genre would, resulting in a negative review.

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Mistake #1: Not rewarding your early adopters

Since gameplay issues may be unavoidable, that is not the mistake I want to address in this section. One of the top reviews references the fact that they are upset that they were a Kickstarter backer and did not get early access to the game, but streamers did.

This made me take a deep dive into the Kickstarter campaign to see if this was ever promised to backers.

As far as I can tell, it was not. Some of the backer tiers gave early alpha or beta access to the game, but no tier promised early access to the full release. So do players have the right to be upset about that?

I don’t think they do have the right. But what I think doesn’t matter, it still resulted in negative reviews. Along with that, the review, as well as comments on the Kickstarter campaign, reference the fact that the backers actually received their game keys a few hours after the game was released.

Does that deserve a negative review? Again, I don’t think it does and yet it did. The problem is, Steam gamers are very particular. They expect white glove service and tend to be a bit spoiled. Maybe this is a result of Steam having such good customer service, I don’t know.

The takeaway here is, it doesn’t matter if you have a Kickstarter campaign or not, players who have followed your game from the beginning expect to be treated a certain way. This may be your newsletter subscribers, Discord members, or just active members of your community.

These players who are invested in your game are the most likely to leave reviews. But as we see here, it’s not a guaranteed positive review. It might not have been reasonable for the devs to predict the backers would be upset that streamers got early access and they didn’t, or that they would react harshly to the keys being a little late.

But now you know so you don’t have an excuse, giving these players access just one night before launch could have avoided these influential negative reviews. Nurture your early adopters.

Mistake #2: Asking players to change or remove a review

Alright, this is a pretty easy one to avoid. It’s extremely tempting as a dev to comment on negative reviews and ask a player to change or remove them. My suggestion is don’t do it at all. It was referenced in the most liked negative review. If you’re going to do it, there is a right and wrong way.

Unfortunately, the Outbound devs chose the wrong way here. They suggested to a negative reviewer that they request a refund and then change or remove the review after. Don’t do this.

A post on the r/Steam subreddit about this became pretty popular.

To their credit, they apparently apologized and removed that comment. I couldn’t find exactly where they did that, but I saw it referenced.

Also, if a user refunds the game it does not count towards the review score. So even though it is still visible, it has much less of an impact.

It’s also against Steam’s rules to artificially influence reviews on the part of the developer or player, which many Redditors quickly pointed out.

I do think it’s funny that all the Redditors yelling about the devs breaking Steam’s rules also went and upvoted a couple of negative reviews en masse to artificially raise them to the top. More on that later.

Steam, as always, gives some practical and measured advice regarding reviews here. The whole section is worth reading, but I thought this part was particularly relevant:

If you’re going to do this, focus on reviews that have clear and actionable concerns. Something like a localization issue or specific bug, not a general complaint like the game is too boring or slow.

Only after you have fixed the specific issue, you can comment on the review with an update and request the player update their review if they are satisfied with the fix. Steam even suggests doing this.

Mistake #3: A Day 1 DLC

Steam gamers really don’t like it when the devs include a DLC on launch as an extra purchase. They will accept the soundtrack as a separate purchase, but they get really mad about in-game content not being included with the main game on launch.

Now, I’m sure the devs know this and they are smart people so there must be a good reason for including this. Maybe they ran the numbers and decided that the people willing to buy a $2.99 bus DLC outweighs the lost revenue by players who are put off by that.

Maybe it has something to do with the bus being available in certain versions on different platforms, so they were somewhat forced to include it as a separate purchase.

Either way, I tend to suggest not doing this. If you really want something to be a DLC and not part of the main game, just hold it for a bit. At least a month, which is when a large portion of your base sales and reviews happen. After that period, some negative sentiment regarding a DLC will not have as much of an effect.

A caution about relying on the top negative reviews

At the time of this writing there are 283 negative reviews in my language for Outbound. A review that mentions the devs asking players to change/remove reviews is the #1 most liked negative review (1,471 likes) and the Kickstarter issue is the #2 most liked negative review (987 likes).

But guess what, I pulled all the negative reviews and it turns out that only 2 reviews reference the Kickstarter issue and 4 reviews reference the devs asking players to change reviews as their primary concern. That’s it! The table below shows the amount of negative reviews sorted by the primary issue.

Here’s what that tells me. For the vast majority of players who actually purchased the game, those issues were not their primary concern. Gameplay, price and other technical concerns were most common.

So why do the top negative reviews have so much engagement? Because you don’t have to own the game to like/dislike a Steam review and help it float to the top. Steam gamers L-O-V-E a developer controversy, it’s their guilty pleasure.

The traction that these issues got in their respective communities (Steam, Reddit, Discord etc) drove non-players to the page to rage-like those reviews to “get back” at the devs.

So you might be thinking, “why does it matter if it only represents such a small percentage of the negative reviews?” I think that’s true to a degree, there is nothing for the devs to do about it now.

But those reviews are going to stay at the top. As a potential buyer, they are the first you’ll see, and combined with the number of negative reviews, you might think many more players are concerned about that than actually are.

Plus, Steam gamers like to try to stick it to devs who they think have done players wrong. Even though I think these are extremely minor gripes, their visibility certainly will influence some players not to buy.

I know there is so much to consider during your game launch. It’s impossible to think of everything, but avoiding those negative reviews early on is so important for a successful launch.

Any time you find an easily avoidable mistake, put it on a list. Reference it once before launch to make sure you aren’t doing any of those things, and you’re good to go. Now, I’m going to find a good game to back on Kickstarter.

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I’m not exaggerating like most people when they say something ‘went viral.’ I’ll break down the data in a minute, but basically with a single post he’s been able to generate 25,000 wishlists, 20,000 wishlists, and 7500 wishlists respectively for different games. How did he do it?

Why this challenges the usual Twitter advice

The view of Twitter over the last few years among game marketers has been that Twitter is a great place to interact and connect with other devs, but it’s really hard to break through and reach actual gamers.

For a small percentage of games that are extremely visually appealing or have a great hook, Twitter has been valuable. For most other games, even great games, it has not been good for wishlists if they rely heavily on a gameplay hook.

The question is, does the success that Indie Game Joe has had in promoting indie games change that perspective?

As it happens, while I was writing this article the king of game marketing himself, Chris Zukowski, also released a blog post on Indie Game Joe and how to make games go viral on Twitter that you should absolutely read.

If you’re on the same brain wave as Chris Z then you’re doing something right. Though, this article is going to approach Indie Game Joe’s success in a different way. Chris looked closely at how he formatted his posts, decided which games to cover, and edited the trailer to help create a framework for indie devs to use when posting their game on Twitter.

I’m going to evaluate whether Twitter is better than we thought at getting wishlists, or if it is still only beneficial for certain games unless you happen to get picked up by Indie Game Joe.

I will break down a number of his posts, both the successful and not so successful ones, and take a closer look at the games he posted about. I’ll analyze the wishlist bump Indie Game Joe gave them, their wishlist trajectory prior to the post, and whether or not they had success on Twitter or other social media apart from Indie Game Joe.

All of this will help you make an informed decision on whether or not Twitter is worth your valuable time.

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How I pulled the data

So let’s get into it. I’ve realized something about myself - if there is a chance for me to waste countless hours compiling data that is hard to reach I’m probably going to do it. Also, Happy Mother’s Day to my wife, who lets me occasionally skirt my fatherly duties to spend hours looking at Indie Game Joe’s Twitter profile.

I decided to compile every one of Indie Game Joe’s posts about an indie game from the date he started (March 9, 2026, to May 10, 2026). He uses the same format in all of his posts, so they are easy to identify.

I even tried posting about some indie games in this same format. I don’t have nearly the following of Indie Game Joe, but this did result in one of my top posts.

You can find the full data set in this Google sheet.

Twitter is very frustrating in this regard. As I’m scrolling down his feed it randomly refreshes, so it’s hard to know for sure if I captured every post, but it should be the vast majority of them.

In those 63 days, he made 126 such posts. For each one, I used Gamealytic to find the wishlist count the day before the post was made and then 48 hours after to estimate the number of wishlists they gained from the post. Gamealytic estimates wishlists based on follower count, so keep that in mind. But the velocity over those 2 days should be directionally accurate.

Below are the estimates for the games that had the highest wishlist bump in that time.

I think digging into the success or failure for each post based on genre, hook, art style etc. could give valuable insight into the potential popularity of your game on Twitter. It’s not often you get a snapshot of the same big account posting about such a variety of games. Typically, it’s the game’s dev account making posts and the variation in following as well as the account’s health (tweepcred) in the eyes of the algorithm make any comparison apples to oranges.

This is the same account, posting in the same style, to the same following about a variety of games. Granted, his following did more than double over the time of this data pull (from ~20k to over 46k followers).

But that’s not the point of today’s article, maybe I’ll analyze those trends another time. Chris’s article gives a good overview on this so I think that is certainly good enough for now.

What the numbers say

For today’s data, here are the broad strokes:

5 games were excluded from the wishlist numbers because they did not have a Steam page live at the time of the post. In general, higher post engagement was correlated with higher wishlist additions, but there were some outliers.

So, should devs spend more time on Twitter?

What I want to focus on today is whether or not you need to spend more time posting on Twitter. Before Indie Game Joe, my recommendation would be to give Twitter a solid try - a month or so of consistent posting. If your posts resonate and you get a lot of engagement, your game may have what it takes to do well there.

If it doesn’t, stop spending time on Twitter. Post a couple of times a month to let people know you’re still active and pop on every once in a while to network with devs in your genre. Otherwise, ignore Twitter. If you’re in this camp it is not a bad thing. Honestly, you should be relieved. This frees up a ton of your time to focus on your game.

So has my mind changed? Let’s look at the data.

To determine this, I want to look at developers who were active on Twitter before the Indie Game Joe post. Were they already successful and Joe just compounded their success, or did he take games from Twitter obscurity and make them go viral?

83/126 (66%) of the games have a developer Twitter account listed on their store page. For each of those accounts, I captured the highest number of likes one of their organic posts ever had. You can also see this in the data set.

The reason I did this was to try and determine which of these games already had viral potential before Indie Game Joe. How do I define a viral post on Twitter? I don’t really know. For the sake of this article, let’s define virality as a post that gets over 1000 likes even though that’s a pretty low bar.

73/126 (58%) of Indie Game Joe’s posts got over 1000 likes. Of those 73 posts, 45 of the devs have a Twitter account I could find easily.

Prior to the Indie Game Joe post, 16 of those accounts had a post with more than 1000 likes. Only 26 had a post with more than 100 likes.

This isn’t perfect science, but what can we glean from this? It seems that Joe really did take most of these games out of Twitter obscurity and give them a viral post.

My takeaway is, despite their games clearly having some viral potential, most of these devs would never be able to make their game go viral on Twitter without Joe’s help.

With that in mind, my sentiment on Twitter has not fundamentally changed despite the success of the Indie Game Joe posts. My initial recommendation stands. If you’ve given it a good try and your game hasn’t taken off on Twitter, then deprioritize it. Your best bet is to make limited posts, network a little, and hope to take advantage of someone else’s audience instead of trying to build your own.

This really is a core tenet of game marketing - it’s easier to leverage someone else’s following than build your own.

So, unless you’re one of those clearly viral games, get off Twitter and get back to working on your game. Unless you’re following my account of course, you can still do that 😉

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Even if you created your Steam page a long time ago, it’s easy to second guess whether you chose good tags.

Steam only lets you choose 20, but you probably see a lot more that could apply to your game. Should you choose them?

I’m going to break down exactly how to choose your tags and why it’s important. I also built a free simple tag analyzer tool to help you create an optimized tag list and grade your current tag list if you’re curious how you did.

Why Steam Tags Matter

Why does Steam have tags? It’s the only way for Steam to categorize your game and show it to players who might be interested in it. Since they like Game 1 they might also like Game 2 because it has similar tags.

The Steam algorithm is very smart, and it wants people to buy and play games on their platform. It is in Steam’s best interest for your game to be tagged accurately.

That’s part of why they created the Steamworks Tag Wizard. In an ideal world, Steam would have an automated way to tell you what the perfect tags are.

Sadly, they can’t do that because the algorithm can’t look at your trailer, screenshots, and description and determine exactly what your game is. Only you know the ins-and-outs of your game.

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How To Choose Your Tags

So how do you decide what tags to use? The best way is to look at other popular games that are similar to yours and copy their tags as long as they apply to your game.

It’s not cheating. It’s working smarter, not harder. It turns out you’re allowed to copy work in many cases, despite what your elementary school teacher said.

The main reason for this is obvious: you want the Steam algorithm to say, “Hey, this player likes this popular game, let me recommend your game to them since your tags tell me it is similar.”

Chris Z details one strategy to do this in his free course on how to create your Steam page. He recommends choosing 3 games similar to yours, with one being your ‘anchor’ game. Identify the tags that show up in multiple games. Prioritize them by whether they show up in 1, 2, or all 3 games and also by what order they are in.

The first 5 tags are the most important to the Steam algorithm, so it’s vital that these are right. Choose the highest priority tags from those games.

There may be some themed tags that you should disregard. For example, if your game doesn’t have zombies in it, you probably don’t want to use the ‘zombies’ tag even if all 3 similar games have that tag.

Chris also highlights a couple of tags that he recommends avoiding in general. In the course, he mentions avoiding the ‘indie’ tag. He says it’s too general and doesn’t tell Steam anything about your game.

I don’t know that I completely agree with this because most of the successful indie games I see have that tag, so it clearly doesn’t hinder them. My suggestion would be to avoid having it as one of your top tags; keep it at the bottom.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a variety of streamers, press, and even AI programs look for the ‘indie’ tag when filtering for indie games.

The other tag Chris says to avoid is the ‘casual’ tag. He doesn’t mention it in this course, but in other talks and Steam page teardowns since then he recommends against that tag.

The reason is he doesn’t believe the majority of Steam gamers are casual gamers, so that tag sends the wrong message. A lot of times, devs confuse casual with cozy. I don’t disagree with this.

This whole process can take a couple of hours, which is why I built the free tag analyzer tool to get it done in a few minutes. The tool is based on Chris Z’s approach and makes it easy to review the tags of other games if you have more than 3 in mind.

How Tags Affect Discovery

But how does Steam recommend your game to these players? It’s through a number of the store widgets that you probably see all the time but don’t pay much mind to.

One important widget for confirming your tags are configured the way you want is the ‘More Like This’ widget located at the bottom of your store page. After finishing with the tag wizard, go to your store page and make sure the games in that widget match what you expect. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but this is a good indicator of the quality of your tags.

Steam made a change a few years ago where, typically, only pretty popular games will show in the More Like This widget.

Other tag-based widgets are the Featured & Recommended widget on the Steam home page, the ‘Because You Played This’ widget, and the Discovery Queue to name a few.

Also, when Steam hosts a themed sale they will invite you, or you may qualify, based on your tags. This is a big reason to have high quality tags.

The last tag-related thing to be aware of is users can apply tags to your game that you don’t necessarily want. Steam calls them ‘user-defined tags’.

You can find them by clicking the ‘+’ icon beside the tags underneath your short description. Be sure to keep an eye on these and remove them every once in a while.

The takeaway here is that tags are important, so don’t neglect them, but they don’t have to be hard. Use Chris’s method or find a tool that can save you some time so you can get back to making your game.

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On March 21st, the Retro Rewind devs announced they sold 100,000 copies. For reference, they launched their game on March 17th. That’s 25,000 copies per day! I estimate as of this writing, they’ve very likely sold well over 200,000+. Wow. Every indie dev’s dream.

So, how did they do it? Especially when there’s a bunch of other similar shop simulation games that haven’t done so well. Using Steam’s API, I pulled every game similar to Retro Rewind and broke them down by pricing, revenue estimates, demo timing, early access, and more.

Along with those objective measures, I’ll identify some subjective characteristics that Retro Rewind has that the others may not. Broadly speaking, I think it comes down to nostalgia and polish. But more on that later.

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What Makes a “True” 3D Shop Sim?

Let’s start with an objective comparison of Retro Rewind to other similar games. But how does one determine what a ‘similar game’ is?

Broadly speaking, Retro Rewind is a simulation game. Is Farming Simulator a good comparison? What about American Truck Simulator? Or even Fast Food Simulator? I would say no, no, and probably no respectively. Here’s why.

I think Retro Rewind is distinct from these games. I would classify it as a 3D shop simulation game. For the most part, you know these games when you see them. They have a similar art style, a cash register, and shelving where products tween from open boxes in a very satisfying manner.

Although it wasn’t the first, the hit game that seems to have defined this style of the many games that came after it was, of course, Supermarket Simulator. Examples of obvious successful follow-ons would be Grocery Store Simulator and Supermarket Together.

These were actually preceded by popular titles that I would also put in this bucket such as Gas Station Simulator and the lesser known King of Retail.

Without taking anything away from Retro Rewind, I would describe it as a themed adaptation of Supermarket Simulator. We have seen a number of these before, the first big themed hit being TCG Card Shop Simulator.

So, I decided I wanted to figure out why a game like Retro Rewind is so successful while these specifically similar games, like little old Record Shop Simulator or DVD Store Simulator were not. Steam gamers are like the Goldilocks of shop simulators. Records are too old, DVDs are too new, but VHS is just right.

How I Built the Comparison Dataset (1,008 to 107 Games)

Anyway, here’s how I decided to pull the data I needed. First, I used Steam’s API to pull any game released after January 1, 2020 that had the name ‘Simulator’ in the title. Anyone familiar with these games would suspect that would capture the majority of recent similar games. There are 556 such games.

Then to catch any stragglers, like Supermarket Together or Roadside Research, I pulled any games with the ‘shopkeeper’ tag, but went ahead and filtered out any with the ‘2D’ tag. This yielded a lot of false positives, but I wanted to cover my bases. This search added 452 additional games to my list.

I quickly realized many of these games would not be helpful to compare to Retro Rewind. A lot of them were easily removed because they clearly were not similar to the games we’ve been talking about. But I had to make some hard decisions about games that were on the fence.

For example, on their face you might say that Recycling Center Simulator or Parcel Simulator would be good comparators because they have a similar art style and some similar mechanics. But I consider these primarily management sims rather than shopkeeper sims.

But what about Fast Food Simulator? It’s got a cash register and everything, right? It sure does, this was the hardest decision. I decided to remove any games that were primarily food/restaurant related. I don’t think it would have been wrong to keep them in, but I think there’s a slightly different appeal with these mechanically than with the true shopkeeper sims.

Basically, if there weren’t shelves with products on them that customers can purchase, I removed them from the list.

I can hear the naysayers now, “what about Laundry Store Simulator?? You included that one and it’s a laundromat, not a shop you troglodyte!” This is true, but take a look at the pictures on the Steam page. Do you see customer-facing shelving with purchasable products? I rest my case.

After manually filtering through the 1,008 games, I was left with a list of 107 true 3D shop simulation games. You can see the raw data set in this Google sheet.

I’m sure if you dig through it you’ll find some games that aren’t perfect candidates, but I did my best. While it may not be every game in the last 6+ years to fall in this category, I believe it is the vast majority.

My first thought was, “wait, that’s it?” If Reddit is to be believed, you would think there are thousands of Supermarket Sim clones out there, but only 107? That may sound like a lot to you, but do you know how many pixel art platformers have been released in that time? According to SteamDB, 4,642. That’s a lot more competition. Despite this, I guarantee that more people reading this are making pixel art platformers than 3D shop simulation games.

How to determine revenue

I digress. Now that we have a list of similar games, let’s take a closer look at them and extract the secret Krabby Patty recipe for success that the Retro Rewind devs clearly know. We’ll start by looking at units sold and revenue.

These are not statistics that Steam gives publicly. The best way to estimate them is by looking at the number of Steam reviews and going from there. It’s not a perfect science, but since this data is from 2020 and on, it’s best to use the “New Boxleiter” method proposed by GameDiscoverCo back in 2020.

Basically, they took data from 237 games to determine a sales-to-review ratio. Per their data, games released in 2020 had an average sales-to-review ratio of 41:1 (41 sales for every review). But the range was 20 to 60 sales per review. For the sake of this article, I went with 40 sales per review.

Then we have to determine revenue based on the estimated number of units sold. The gross revenue is easy. (Units sold) x (game price) = gross revenue. The problem is, that number is very optimistic. In reality many units are sold while a game’s price is discounted. Then you have to account for the 30% Steam cut, VAT, returns, and regional discounts. A conservative estimate is to take 50% of the gross revenue to estimate the actual net revenue - so that’s what I did.

The net revenue distribution of all the games is shown in the chart below. Note the log scale.

Retro Rewind ranks number 4 on this list coming in at $1.9 million. It was released on March 27, 2026, that’s insane! This data was pulled on April 11, 2026. For you math whizzes out there, that’s about $126k per day. It is still far behind the top 3, but the trajectory is positive for them to be in that conversation.

I think there are some other important takeaways from this part of the data. 33.6% of the games earned less than $10k. I think most devs who are trying to do this full-time would consider that a disappointment. On the other side of that coin, if you made one of these games, you would have a 76.4% chance of making more than $10k. I recognize that’s an oversimplification, but the point still stands.

The median net revenue for all these games is $24,185.40. According to Gamealytic, the median revenue for a game across all of Steam is $749 and 75.4% make less than $10k. Yikes.

So, if you’re choosing the genre for your next game and aren’t afraid of being called an asset flip or AI slop on Reddit (when you know you’re not), this type of game may be a safer bet. Who knows, after reading this article you may have figured out a way to make the next Retro Rewind.

How should you price your game?

Next, we’ll look at some choices the Retro Rewind devs made regarding pricing, early access, and a demo. That will be compared to similar games to create a framework for what is best.

Retro Rewind’s base price is $19.90 (do you get it?). Take a look at that same net revenue distribution chart, but now it’s colored by the purchase price.

Note the cluster of ‘premium’ games as the highest earners and the cluster of ‘cheap’ priced games as the lowest earners. There appears to be an easy takeaway - price your game higher to make more money. The problem is, the data is a little more muddy than that.

For starters, this represents the current base price. It’s not uncommon for a game to have an initial price when they launch in early access, and then raise that price for their 1.0 launch.

For example, Supermarket Simulator, the #1 game in revenue, had a base price of $12.99 in early access then increased to $19.99 for the 1.0 launch. This game made most of its sales during early access.

In fact, it is currently sitting at a recent positive review percentage of 68%. Way down from its overall positive percentage of 92%. This appears to be due to some recent greedy DLC tactics.

This is a good reminder that the revenue estimates are just that, estimates. Even if they aren’t 100% accurate, the comparable trends are what we care the most about.

A number of other games mirrored Supermarket Simulator by having a lower early access price with a lot of sales, then a higher 1.0 price with less sales. Here’s a breakdown of the top 10 game’s price changes, if they had one. Some did not do early access and some are still in early access.

Along with the price change issue, there is of course the quality of the games to consider. It’s likely that a game in the ‘cheap’ pricing category priced their game that way because that is how the devs perceived the quality. The lower quality led to lower sales.

But I firmly believe that as a general rule, indie devs should price their games higher. AAA game prices have increased at a much higher rate than indie games. This chart from an HTMAG article about how indie games are too cheap demonstrates that.

Retro Rewind did it right. They knew their value and went with the full priced $19.90 without early access from the jump.

Should you do Early Access?

Next, let’s talk about early access. You probably noticed in that price change table that 8 of the top 10 games initially launched in early access. So should these games be doing early access? Retro Rewind didn’t, did they make a mistake? Below is that same net revenue chart colored by whether or not they did early access.

60 of the 107 games (56.1%) did early access. 61.7% of the games that did early access made more than the median net revenue. This data leans slightly towards early access, but it doesn’t make a strong case either way.

I think the choice to do early access for many of these games is heavily influenced by Supermarket Simulator. Many devs probably think, “they were successful and did early access, so why don’t I?”

Retro Rewind proved that early access is not necessary to create a hit. Gas Station Simulator is also in the top 10 list and did not do early access.

For the majority of games, I think early access is a bad idea. Instead of going too deep into the reason why in this article, I’ll refer you to a great HTMAG article to use to help determine if you should do early access.

How long before launch should you release your demo?

Next, let’s take a closer look at how Retro Rewind timed their demo to see if we can identify any trends.

The chart below shows median net revenue for these games grouped based on the time between the release of their demo and their first launch. The first launch may be their early access or 1.0 launch.

Retro Rewind had their demo out for 137 days before launch. I was able to identify 55 games that released a free demo or prologue. The new Steam meta is all about demos now, so when I say ‘demo’ I may be referencing a demo or a prologue. One caveat is this was not easily accessible data. Steam does not report the launch date of a demo in their normal API data.

I had to go through each game’s News and Announcements section on their Steam page to find the announcement of when their demo or prologue was released. Certainly, it’s possible that I missed some if they did not post an announcement about it, but I am able to evaluate all that I found.

I’m not even going to compare the success of games that released a demo versus those that didn’t, because you should 100% plan to release a demo ahead of your launch.

Looking at the chart above, having your demo out longer appears to give you a better chance to be a high earner. This makes sense - the longer your demo is out, the more streamers that can play it, the more festivals you can get in, and the more wishlists you can get.

So why was the median revenue for the games that had their demo out for less than 30 days so high? That bucket of games seems to be driven by 6 relatively high earning games. My guess is they had a lot of wishlists already heading into the demo phase and were able to ride that momentum from the demo straight into launch. I also believe that despite these games’ success, they would have been more successful had they left their demo up longer.

Framework

Now, I think we’ve established some general ideas about this genre based on this data:

1. It’s easier to be financially successful with these games than normal Steam games

2. Price your game upwards of $20

3. Don’t do early access

4. Get a high quality demo out at least 3 months before launch and ideally 6 months or more.

Why retro rewind worked

I’ll finish by talking about some subjective observations about Retro Rewind that I think made it successful. As you can see from the data, most of the games in this genre did not sell as well as Retro Rewind. They connected with players in a way only a couple of these games have managed to. Why is that?

Earlier, I mentioned what I think are the two primary factors - nostalgia and polish.

As I get older, I am more convinced that nostalgia is one of the strongest emotions. The best way I can describe the feeling is a combination of love and longing. If you can effectively evoke this feeling in a player, you are well on your way to a hit.

Nostalgia is such a strong emotion that you can be nostalgic for things you didn’t experience yourself. 68% of Gen Z adults report feeling nostalgia for an era from before they were born - which includes the 90s.

I’ve experienced this in my own life to a degree. I did not play World of Warcraft growing up, but found myself feeling nostalgia for it as an adult. I think it was after seeing a lot of other gamers talking about how much it impacted their childhood. When I played it as an adult, I enjoyed it more because of second-hand nostalgia.

Most games in this genre don’t focus their theme on nostalgia. Most people aren’t nostalgic for modern supermarkets, laundromats, and gas stations. Some have tried a theme to tap into nostalgia with board games, game shops, DVDs, toys etc. But the only two games to have done this with significant success have been Retro Rewind and TCG Card Shop Simulator.

That is why you have to have both nostalgia and polish. If you go through each of the games on the list, you can tell pretty quickly from the trailer and screenshots which are polished and which aren’t.

Retro Rewind has high quality art, good parody movies, and solid gameplay mechanics. TCG Card Shop Simulator’s overall art style doesn’t improve much on Supermarket Simulator’s, but it has high quality card art and mechanics as well as the benefit of being able to take advantage of Pokemon’s popularity in a roundabout way.

Generalizing the framework

I think a lot of these points can be generalized to other genres as well.

1. You need to choose a genre that has a high likelihood of financial success.

2. Incorporate a nostalgic theme.

3. Take the average high price of games in your genre and increase it (maybe 20%)

4. Don’t do early access.

5. Release your demo far ahead of launch.

I could go on, but you can read more about what the two-man team from Canada says about incorporating nostalgic elements and other things such as the decision to self-publish in this interview with 80.lv from December.

Now get out there and make a successful 3D shop simulation game.

[This is Game Marketing Intel, a collection of resources whose sole purpose is to help indie devs learn how to promote their games on Steam. We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide tools, such as our streamer database, store tag analyzer, and revenue calculator, that help indies focus on making their game.]