u/kotgedev

/j I don't think the timing had much to do with my trailer's success. However, I'd still like to share how I maximized my wishlist potential with my trailer.

First of all, I initially failed to get IGN to post my trailer for me (they did end up uploading it, 3 days after I did), so I had to post it on my own channel, which at this point had like ~10 subscribers. Basically nothing.

When the trailer first went up, I got what I expected. I couldn't even break 500 views in the first day. Even still, I decided to share the trailer across relevant subreddits in an attempt to artificially boost the view count. The trailer was received very well across all of them, namely the spacesimgames and cassettefuturism subreddits. (My game is a 1970s-era spacecraft simulator, so it aligns very well with both.) This fueled my first thousand views.

And then, out of nowhere, near the end of day three, the algorithm decided to pick my video up, pushing it to nearly 15k views.

I'm unsure if sharing my video in relevant subreddits helped the algorithm at all, but at the very least, it definitely didn't hurt. As of right now, the trailer is closing in on 17k views (+2k if you count the IGN GameTrailers version).

What surprised me the most was the amount of wishlists I got. Since the launch of my trailer, I've gained over 2,200 wishlists, and it's still growing since the trailer is still gaining views. 1,200 of those came in a single day, beating my previous record for the highest amount of wishlists in a day, which was when I was running Reddit ads (you can read about that here, where I gained around 3k wishlists from just 500 USD).

This means, doing the math, I got around 1 wishlist for every 8-9 views. I don't have a whole lot to compare this to, but at least from the other postmortems I've read, this is on the higher end.

To be honest, I don't think I can learn too many concrete things from this, nor can I make absolute conclusions since the YouTube algorithm is quite hard to understand. But, what I can say is:

If you have a good quality trailer with a specific target audience in mind, you can succeed even if your YouTube channel has basically no pre-existing audience, and still gain a considerable amount of wishlists from it.
It might help the algorithm if you share the trailer on relevant subreddits with an audience that is very likely to watch and enjoy your trailer. At the very least, it doesn't hurt.
A YouTube video isn't "dead" if it doesn't blow up in the first 48 hours. Those initial slow days of Reddit traffic likely acted as a seed phase of sorts, giving the algorithm the data it needed before confidently pushing the video to a broader audience on day three.

My trailer if you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RiPo-RlyiM

Pilot 6174 has reached nearly 10K wishlists in just under 3 months. This subreddit was the first one to take notice of my game, and where I got my first wishlists - so, Thank You!

I earned 1200+ Wishlists in a SINGLE DAY by timing my space sim trailer launch with Artemis II. Here is how I did it.

KSP's Orbital Mechanics meets FTL's Ship Management. My Hard Sci-Fi Survival's Gameplay Trailer is Out Now!