After 20 months on Steam, my game finally hit 20k wishlists!
As a solo developer handling everything from art to coding, reaching this number feels surreal. Because when I first launched my Steam page about a year and a half ago, I knew nothing about Steam’s algorithm or how to optimize a store page.
On day one, I only got 46 wishlists : (
For a long time after that, I was only gaining 1 or 10 wishlists a day. It was discouraging, to say the least. Yes, of course!
The turning point is Demo & Steam Next Fest.
The real shift happened when I released the Demo (last June) and participated in the Steam Next Fest (last October).
After the demo/Next Fest: Even now, months later, I’m seeing a steady "long tail" of new wishlists every single day.
(And yes, people do delete lots of wishlists every day too... but let’s not talk about that! lol)
To be honest, I’ve had almost zero time for international marketing. I did some posts on Chinese social media because I’m more familiar with that, but as a solo dev, most of my energy goes into the art and code.
So...my advice is: Don’t panic before your demo.
If you are currently looking at your Steamworks dashboard and feeling anxious about low daily numbers, here is my takeaway: Don't over-stress before your demo is public.
If the quality of your game is there, the demo will do the heavy lifting for you. Once people can actually play it, the algorithm starts to pick up, and you’ll see a much more consistent flow of interest. (I did participated in the Steam Next Fest, but I had only 12k wishlists after the Steam Next Fest. )
Keep grinding! It’s a slow crawl, but you’ll get there.