I’m happy to share a demo for my game Sketchy Fables. I’ll post the link in the comments.

The voice acting is by Sarah Grayson, known for Hades II as Selene and Gone Home, with music by Leafcuts.

I spent 6.5 years building an entire hand-drawn open world by myself. The demo is only a small slice of the full game world.

Wander away, get lost, and enjoy Sketchy Fables!

Reasons why I think it's a non-issue:

1. I'd rather have a player, that plays my game for $0 than somebody not playing my game at all.

2. In my experience, it seems that only a very small % of total players use pirated versions.

3. There are so many good games nowadays, I understand that not all players can afford all of them. Related to 1).

4. It's not always possible to provide a demo. Players might want to check out the game before buying something they don't like.

5. If the game keeps getting updated, it's much more convenient to buy it anyways.

6. I actually received messages like the one in the screenshot several times already and it honestly makes me feel more validated that somebody decided that the game is worth it AFTER already playing it for free.

Don't look behind you!

Making this LoFi horror game called 'Project Looking Glass'. You explore dozens of creepy and liminal spaces trying to uncover the mystery of what happened to you. Been using my dreams a lot as inspiration since most of the levels are little vignettes like this. Demo is on Steam if you're interested!

Hover over a clickable building, its light turns on and it gets an outline. I also tested a slight scale-up on the "Antique Shop" building as an example. The other buildings in the video only get the outline for now.

Would you keep the slight scale-up, remove it, or use some other kind of hover feedback?

Our Diablo-inspired incremental game Horde of Distraction recently passed 20,000 wishlists. And we achieved almost all of that with barely any marketing budget.

So I thought it would be interesting to look back and understand what actually worked well… and what didn’t.

Each point includes:

• the date
• wishlist count BEFORE the event
• what happened

1. 09.11.2025 (0 WL) Steam page launch
   https://store.steampowered.com/app/4167640/Horde_of_Distraction/

If I could do it again, I would treat the announcement much more seriously and try to reach as many people as possible right away.

Back then, we simply launched the page and posted it in a couple of places.

2. 23.12.2025 (245 WL)
   Released demo on itch.io
   https://static-feed.itch.io/horde-of-distraction

itch.io did not bring much traffic for us. Probably because most incremental games there have a web version, while ours only had a downloadable build. However, this site unexpectedly became a really good traffic source for our itch page: https://www.incrementaldb.com/

3. 09.01.2026 (550 WL)
   Idle Cub made a video
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5osG8xj8RY&t=939s

We never contacted him. He found the game himself on itch and decided to make a video about it. The video got over 130,000 views and brought us more than 5,000 wishlists. This was our first real traffic explosion. But moments like this are impossible to rely on as a strategy.

4. 25.01.2026 (6,744 WL) Reddit post about the Idle Cub video https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/comments/1qmnbv3/our_oldschool_rpginspired_incremental_game_horde/

We realized the Idle Cub video was a perfect opportunity for a Reddit post. We shared the game on the Incremental Games subreddit and got a noticeable wishlist boost from it.

5. 16.02.2026 (8,830 WL)
   Steam demo release
   https://store.steampowered.com/app/4407700/Horde_of_Distraction_Demo/

We released the Steam demo and sent emails to a carefully selected list of influencers. 138 relevant channels contacted. 23 of them made videos. Pretty solid conversion rate, but honestly - you need WAY more contacts. Thousands. Peak CCU on demo launch day was 159 players.

6. 23.02.2026 (13,210 WL)
   Steam Next Fest started

We managed to get a decent position among the top demos during Next Fest.

If we had known development would take longer, we probably would have participated in the June Next Fest rather than the February one.

7. 01.05.2026 (18,775 WL)
   GFR festival
   https://store.steampowered.com/developer/blackbalancegames/sale/gamesfromrussia2026

We participated in the GFR festival. It gave us a solid wishlist boost. Festivals are awesome!

8. 02.05.2026 (18,866 WL)
   Streamer Mel discovered the game during the festival
   https://www.twitch.tv/melharucos

He challenged himself to kill the boss during the very first phase and replayed the demo over 20 times in a row. More than 2,500 viewers were watching simultaneously. That day both demo CCU and wishlist growth spiked hard.

9. 10.05.2026 (20,150 WL)
   Started our first paid marketing campaign on Twitter/X

We began actively experimenting with paid traffic channels to acquire wishlists. Right now we’re testing Twitter/X ads. So far we’re getting wishlists for around $0.20 each (mostly Tier 1 countries). More on that another time :)

If you have any questions, feel free to ask - I’ll try to answer everything I can.

I know it is not much, but even small success is a success! Thank you very much to everyone who rated. Game is a RPG/strategy Dark Lord Simulator, available here without need to download or register: https://adeptus7.itch.io/dominion

Game Link: Crystalyn (I'm starving)

Game Link: Crystalyn

This is my nonsensical graph on itch.io

Would love to hear some feedback on our premise! :)

In Human Error, you play rounds of minigames along with AI bots. After each round, there is a deliberation round where you discuss with each other to figure out who the human infiltrator is (hint: it's you!). Survive several rounds of minigame without getting voted out.

Короткий ролик, що передає атмосферу гри «Night Record: Thin Walls» — психологічного хорору, заснованого на реальних подіях, дія якого розгортається в пострадянську епоху.
У грі робиться акцент не на раптові лякаючі моменти, а на реалістичні локації, тиху напругу та ледь вловиме відчуття тривоги.
Місце, де спочатку все здається нормальним — доки це не перестає бути так.

Якщо вас зацікавило — не забудьте додати гру до списку бажаного.

My little game's link: Crystalyn

TL;DR in the image you see in blue the values that we can calculate from the provided data next to the results that my calculator put out. The only thing which is slightly off is VAT and this is because we can only use exact sales numbers of 4 countries and everything else is averaged. Also some countries have VAT rates above 22% which is the highest my calculator uses and if sales bias toward those countries then the results are obviously different.

I showed this calculator before but people fighted it. Yet it is rock solid for what it does and I put hours and days into it validating the numbers. The error is just about 3% and I want to proof it today. Here is the link: http://steamcalculator.nubosoft.de/

It is all meant to be a reliable tool for indie dev expectations that plan to make a living out of game dev or need reliable values for their bank, business plan or publisher.

The downside is though that sales numbers and sales ratios can not be predicted, but you can estimate for example:

• Revenue of likely minimal sales
• Revenue of high/above average sales
• Sales required to reach break even
• Revenue if 20% of players buy your new DLC
• Will translating into chinese be worth it?
• What If only 10% of wishlists convert?

Errors or questions?

I had a mistake with withholding taxes but it has been fixed as it only applies to US income. Now I can't see anything that would be wrong but please point out any issues. Obviously we do not consider the Steam Share drop to 25%, you can do that manually.

I'd also be interested in feedback on the default discount ratios.
Also helpful is if this tool due to its many paramets is just hard to use, that one I get.

Share and Help

I work with facts and put some lifetime into this thing. Too many peole have simply no idea about taxes and percentages and mix up numbers all the time and that is ok. But it does not help those who seek an answer, so I ask you to bookmark and share this post or tool. This is especially true because things change. Steam payout ratios from 10 years ago don't matter anymore, taxing and currencies changed a lot.

Proof and exaplanation

Thankfully the developer of TangyTD released his sales numbers recently. Not only revenue but also units sold in the top 10 countries. They are from May and so I took all that I could and used these numbers in my calculator. I even choose the release weeks average exchange rates of every currency involved. Also the game was sold with a flat 12% discount in that time which I considered.

First we got gross price per unit, that is simply gross sales $245,123 divided by steam units 28,078 = $8,73.

The net revenue of $197,847 is what Steam takes their 30% share which is $59,354. *In fact devs also get back their $100 Steam direct fee if net revenue crosses $1,000.

This leaves the developer with a payout of $138,492. Here we need to deduct banking fees which we do not know exactly, but let it be a few hundred dollars. We are already very close to what my tool predicts calculates, which is $138,258.

But let's go to the details.

We know that we got 10,3% return rate so we can estimate a return revenue of $25,247. This is an estimation because we do not know which countries those returns came from, but they should average out most of the time.

We can calculate net price per unit by dividing net revenue by net units (25,186) and that is about $7,86, just 3 cents off from my tool.

This diference is VAT and we can get it as well. First we need "true" gross revenue by removing the refunds from gross revenue, which is $219,875. "True", because refunds are not really sales. We need net-sales gross-revenue.

If we subtract net revenue from that value we get $22,028 which is the estimated VAT that was actually paid and transfered by Steam.

So the average VAT percentage is 10,02%.

We can double check that by comparing gross and net unit prices: 1 - ($7,86 / $8,73) = 9,97%. Here is a minimal error due to decimal loss.

So my tool is off by 3 cents of VAT per unit. And that is like I said the uncertainty of localized sales which we can only average close enough. Another uncertainty is simply estimated refund rate and which prices the dev has choosen for each country. My tool uses the default table from SteamDB for each price region. If we knew the exact refunded revenue we could even be closer to the truth.