Hey everyone,

I’ve been posting daily (clips, memes, mini-trailers) on YouTube and TikTok for our game, but most of them get very few views. A few reach around 1k, but that’s pretty rare.

I’ve tried experimenting with different formats, titles/descriptions, and tags, but nothing seems to improve performance.

At this point, I’m not sure if the issue is:

• the clips themselves
• weak hooks
• music choice
• bad thumbnail
• or something else entirely

I’d really appreciate some honest feedback.

Hey everyone! I’ve been grinding away as a solo dev for two years now, and I'm finally reaching the "polish phase" for my first project, ZombUs.

It’s an open-world survival game, but with a twist: your home is a customizable truck and trailer. You use it to navigate different regions, finding schematics to upgrade your mobile base. It’s less about pure horror and more of a tragicomic social satire of our modern world.

The game launches in Early Access on April 25th with 3 out of 10 planned chapters. Since I’m a one-man team, I’m really looking for honest feedback to refine the experience. It can be tough at the start, especially depending on the difficulty, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on the mechanics!

Steam wishlists are open if you want to support a first-time dev. What features would you love to see in a mobile-home survival game?

Launching a game as a solo dev is not just challenging, but it's also overwhelming as you need to think about how to market your game, get visibility and generate traffic (preferably free traffic) as we're all poor solo devs, right? :D

I wanted to share a couple of things that helped me generate free traffic & visibility when I launched Mad Snake:

1. I signed up to Product Hunt, created a profile, then participated on their daily product of the day competition. I shared my link with family, friends and work colleagues and asked them to upvote Mad Snake. I ended up on position #18 and managed to drive some traffic to App Store to download and play my game :-)

2. I did the exact thing above on Peerpush, and I ranked #3 which I was surprised and super excited. This gave a pretty good boost in visibility and free traffic to my app. Tip: interact with other projects, comment and vote on others as this also helps with your own ranking.

The other not so obvious benefit is that your game website is now linked to two high domain authority websites which may help you with SEO and traffic in the long run.

Hope this can help you :-)

It looks like the way we find new things to play has officially shifted. According to the Steam Fan Snapshot for this year, short-form content is now the top discovery method for 36% of players, surpassing both community forums (29%) and traditional news outlets (28%).

Based on recent industry observations, here is how the different ecosystems are functioning for gaming in 2026:

Platform-Specific Trends

• Instagram: Currently a massive hub for horror and cozy aesthetics. The algorithm here favors shares over almost any other metric. If a title has a strong visual "vibe," it tends to circulate here much longer than on other apps.
• TikTok: Reaches the most mainstream audience. It is often the first place people encounter titles they’ve never heard of before. Co-op and social titles (often called 'friendslop') are the dominant meta here.
• YouTube Shorts: Attracts the most technical/hardcore players. There is significant overlap with the Reddit community here. Because the audience is familiar with gaming mechanics, complex or niche titles actually perform better here than on more casual platforms.

3 Content Styles Gaining Momentum

1. Fast-Paced Gameplay: Concise clips often sourced from longer sessions. Puzzle titles are performing exceptionally well right now because viewers like to engage with the solution in the comments.
2. Hook-Focused Showcases: Creators who analyze a title's unique "hook" or the developer’s journey (e.g., solo-dev stories) using cinematic footage.
3. Setup/Atmosphere: Content that focuses on the physical gaming environment (desk setups, lighting) where the game is showcased as part of a specific lifestyle.

TL;DR: Discovery is moving away from text-heavy forums toward visual, short-form feeds.

Hey everyone!

I run Zeitgeist Gaming Magazine, a community-driven, retro-futuristic publication available both online and in print.

One of my goals for the magazine is to produce demo or trailer discs for indie developers to showcase their work. It'd be an extra that people can purchase alongside the magazine.

My question is, has anyone got any experience doing anything like this? I'm just in the research phase (obviously), but I'm just putting the feelers out.

Cheers! x

Hi everyone.

I’m not a professional game marketer, just helping my husband with his indie game, so I’m still learning.

He’s developing a first-person simulation game in Unity, but we currently have a few wishlists, and we’re trying to understand where we should actually focus our marketing.

What are the best platforms or communities to promote a simulation game and reach the right audience?

If you’ve worked on a sim game before, what actually worked for you in getting early wishlists?

Any advice would really help. Thanks!

Wishlists are not all equal and I think a lot of developers find that out too late.

The conversion rate from wishlist to purchase varies pretty significantly by genre. I spent a while digging into publicly available SteamSpy data and developer postmortems. This is roughly what the numbers look like:

• Action/Adventure: 10-16%

• RPG: 14-22%

• Horror (especially first-person): 18-28%

• Puzzle: 8-14%

• Strategy: 12-18%

• Roguelike: 16-24%

• Simulation: 11-17%

Horror buyers convert at high rates but leave reviews way less often than other genres. So if you're making a horror game and your wishlist-to-review ratio looks off, that's probably why. The game isn't underperforming, the metric just looks weird for that genre.

Puzzle is kind of the rough end of the deal here. Lower conversion rate means you need a lot more wishlists to hit the same launch revenue as someone making a roguelike. Worth knowing before you set your pre-launch targets.

The most useful piece of data I've come across on wishlist conversions comes from GameDiscoverCo, who surveyed 100+ developers and have been tracking Steam launch data since 2022. Their numbers for games launching with 10,000+ wishlists:

• Median week-1 conversion sits around 15-17%.

Meaning if you launch with 50,000 wishlists, you're realistically looking at somewhere around 7,500-8,500 sales in your first week at the median. That median drops to around 10% if your game is priced above $10.

The range around that median is brutal though. Some games hit 10% of the median. Others hit 10x. Wishlists tell you there's interest. They don't tell you how much.

A few things that actually move the needle on conversion:

• Review Score

It matters more than most people expect. Data shows games that overperformed at launch had a median first-week user score of 91%. The ones that underperformed were sitting at 67%. The game has to deliver on what the page promised.

• Pre-release Period

This matters too, but not in the way you'd think. Games that underperformed averaged 411 days in pre-release on Steam. The ones that overperformed averaged 214. Longer isn't better. Momentum fades.

• Wishlist Velocity

This is the thing I see talked about least. Steam's Popular Upcoming placement (which gives you real visibility before launch) is driven by how fast you're accumulating wishlists, not just your total. The general benchmark is 7,000-10,000 wishlists to start appearing there.

• Concentrated Marketing Pushes

Steam Next Fest, a demo drop, a streamer picking you up. These do more for velocity than months of slow accumulation.

The last thing worth knowing: Steam notifies everyone who wishlisted your game at launch. That launch window is doing a disproportionate amount of work. Plan for it accordingly.

If you have anything you'd like to add from your own personal experiences, leave a comment below :)

Hi!

I love the idea of bundles, and in fact I already have a little list of developers/games I would to love to bundle with once my game comes out. But I was wondering: is there any meta on when it makes sense to bundle with games? My gut instinct based on nothing but vibes is to bundle as soon as possible, as it gives visibility. But then again, a bundle is like a forever discount, right?

Would love to hear all your inputs and maybe experiences on this before I make a fool of myself haha

I handle social media for our small studio. We have a very polished multiplayer game launching soon in early access. Our project is pretty ambitious and we need more support.

The main issue is conversion. I know how to create viral shorts and get views, but those views don't translate into wishlists. Many users watch on mobile, don't use Steam regularly, or don't have the app installed, so they don't take action.

I would like to try Twitter and Reddit, but i'm not sure how to approach them. I had one post on twitter that got nice engagement, but it didn't translate into wishlists.

So my question is: how do you convert SM attention into wishlists? What strategies have worked for you? Am I missing something or am I doing something wrong?

The most common mistake I see on Steam pages is writing the description like it is an essay. You are telling the story of your game, its lore, its development history, its inspirations. Almost nobody reads it.

Here's why:

A Steam page visitor has usually already made about 60 percent of their buy or wishlist decision based on the first screenshot, the trailer thumbnail, and the short description at the top. By the time they scroll down to the full description, they are not reading for information. They are reading for confirmation.

They want a quick confirmation that this is the kind of game they thought it was. That it has the features they care about. That the developer knows what they are making and is serious about it.

This completely changes how to write the description.

The structure that works:

Line 1: One sentence. Present tense. The player is doing something. Not "a game about" or "you play as." Something like: "You are a blacksmith who accidentally discovered time travel and now your only tool for fixing history is a hammer."

Lines 2 to 4: What the player actually gets to do. Not the story. The experience. The verbs. "Craft weapons that do not exist yet. Negotiate with kings who will not remember you. Break the rules of causality with enough force."

Lines 5 to 6: The differentiator. One or two sentences about what makes this game different from everything else in its genre. Specific. Not "unique gameplay" because that means nothing. Something like: "Every item you craft can be used in ways the game did not intend. The physics system is fully simulated, which means if you figure out something clever, it actually works."

Bullet points (5 to 7): Feature-level confirmation. Short, active, specific. "50+ hours of handcrafted story" or "Full controller support" or "Procedural world generation with authored story events." These are what people scan.

Close: A single line that creates urgency or emotional connection. "The timeline is collapsing. It is up to you how much of it survives."

The words that hurt you:

• Unique
• Immersive
• Epic
• Atmospheric
• Stunning

Every game uses these words. They signal nothing. Every time you write one of these words, replace it with something specific.

Happy to do a quick critique of anyone's description in the comments if you want to share.

I'm in a very strange situation at the moment. I've been working for an indie publisher for almost 3 years now and I've come to sort of despise my job - not cause of the industry or the work, but because of the company and the projects I get to work on. I've been actively flirting with the idea of quitting and using my skills to set up my own business and do contract work!

I know I've got the know-how, the dedication, the willingness to put myself out there and, crucially, the funds to tide myself over for a while as I build up a client base. But the industry seems so precarious and gruelling at the moment, that I'm incredibly hesitant to take the plunge.

Has anyone been in a similar situation recently? If so, do you have any words of advice?

I’m looking to launch my website into a new platform having previously used Wix, but it’s just getting too expensive.

I’ve tried WordPress/Elementor which I find an absolute nightmare to navigate around. Also testing square space (meh, feels a bit naff), hostinger (way too basic). Domain sites like godaddy and ionos are terrible for site builders.

I’m after something that can provide some basic email marketing, easy drag/drop build.

Hi everyone,

I'm Jenny, the creator of Zeitgeist Gaming Magazine, a Brummie based publication available online and in print. A retro-futuristic magazine, it's community focused and contains articles by different voices coming from different gamers. If you want to take a look, download, share, get involved, whatever you want to do, my itch.io link is just below.

https://zeitgeistgaming.itch.io/

All 4 issues are free to download, with an optional donation. Feel free to email me at jenny@zeitgeistmagazine.co.uk for feedback or enquires!

Jenny 🎮