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One poorly understood aspect of the modern games industry is the question of how players find new games. Particularly for smaller indie devs with little or no advertising budget, it’s sort of miraculous that any game can go from 0 players to thousands, let alone millions.
Most people give the credit for breakout hit indie games to streamers and YouTubers, and those are definitely important. But for PC games in particular, I believe strongly that the #1 place people are finding games is through Steam itself.
Valve’s platform is thought of primarily as a storefront, but it’s also a vast, algorithmically-powered discovery engine.
When you build a game on Steam, you get access to metrics that show where your store page traffic is coming from. The platform tells you whether people clicked in from an outside link, or whether they searched for your game directly. Maybe they heard about it from a friend, or a content creator. Some of this stuff is fuzzy. But other stats are easier to follow, especially the ones related to the promotion that Steam itself does on behalf of your game. I’m referring to things like the Discovery Queue, the More Like This promo slots on store pages, and even that little pip that pops up in the bottom corner of your screen when your friend boots up a game.
All of those display surfaces are effectively ad slots for promoting games, though Valve (to their great credit) doesn’t allow developers or publishers to buy up ad space in these channels. Instead, you have to earn it. You’ve gotta have strong metrics, namely by making money,1 earning good reviews, and keeping players engaged. If your game can do all that, the Steam algorithm decides it might have a hit on its hands and works overtime to show it to more people who might like it.
For the last game I worked on, Omega Strikers, something like 70% of our store page traffic came from Steam itself promoting us. Some devs give me a surprised look when I say this, because we had outsized success with content creators and pulled off some wild marketing stunts (particularly our Studio TRIGGER-produced trailer that Nintendo promoted). But the data doesn’t lie: Every marketing tactic we ever did combined brought in fewer Omega Strikers players than the Steam algorithm alone did. Many millions of people found out about OS just because Steam showed it to them.
So if you want to sell millions of copies of a PC game, you’ve gotta get picked up by the algorithm. The twist, of course, is that somebody has to find, buy, and play your game before that happens. So how do you find those first players?
This week I reached out to four successful indie game devs to ask where they think their first 1,000 players came from, as well as the tens or hundreds of thousands after that. Each of their games have at least a couple thousand “overwhelmingly positive” reviews—very successful projects, given the small size of their dev teams.
These teams all took very different paths to get their first 1,000 sales, but there are some clear common themes in their responses as well.
First up, an adorable game about cleaning up the ocean and raising alien critters:
TikTok brilliance with Loddlenaut
My four-year-old son is already a serious gamer, and when I showed him Loddlenaut he immediately fell in love. After trying it once, he’s continued asking me when we can play “that really nice game where I don’t have to fight any bad guys.”
And that’s a pretty accurate description of Loddlenaut. It’s a peaceful game about cleaning up the ocean and also raising weird little creatures inspired by axolotls. The closest comparison point might be the Chao Garden in Sonic Adventure 2.
“I’d say our first 1,000 sales almost entirely came from wishlist conversions on Steam,” says Ricardo Escobar, cofounder of Loddlenaut studio Moon Lagoon.
The game had around 55,000 wishlists when it launched, Escobar says, with most of those coming from either the game being featured in Steam events or from the popularity of the Moon Lagoon team’s Tiktok account, which had a number of viral posts.
So that accounts for the initial wave of sales. And after that? Mostly Steam.
“During our launch week, we were lucky enough to earn a spot on Steam’s ‘New & Trending’ tab, which gave our game enough traffic for Steam’s algorithm to start putting Loddlenaut in people’s Discovery Queue,” Escobar says. “That got us on Valve’s radar, and they later offered us a front page midweek deal slot in January 2024, which ended up being our biggest month of sales.”
Since then, the Moon Lagoon team has been discounting Loddlenaut as frequently as possible (which sends a notification to everyone who has wishlisted) and participating in every Steam event they’re eligible for.
“In our experience, organic Steam traffic is by far the biggest driver of sales and wishlists,” Escobar says. But he still thinks there’s a place for social media platforms in terms of driving sales and wishlists. His ranking in order of effectiveness: TikTok, Instagram Reels, X, and Reddit.
Popping off in France with Chants of Sennaar
The first game from French developers Rundisc was a local multiplayer arena shooter called Varion that earned just 17 reviews on Steam. But the followup, Chants of Sennaar, has over 17,000 reviews, implying something like half a million copies sold on Steam alone.2 For a $20 puzzle game, that’s a major breakout hit.
“I don’t think we had any problems reaching the first 1,000 players very quickly,” says Julien Moya, Co-founder & Creative Director at Rundisc.
Moya says that the game launched with a “fairly large” number of wishlists, which he credits in large part to the team’s decision to release a demo version of Chants of Sennaar on Steam. “This demo had been tested by several French journalists from the video game press, who had given it very good feedback, so our game was already somewhat anticipated by a part of the French public that loves puzzle games,” Moya says.
In recent years it’s become unusual to hear devs say that press coverage made a big difference for them. But Moya has another even more contrarian hypothesis for why Chants of Sennaar took off shortly after launch: launching alongside a much bigger game.
“We were released the day before Starfield,” Moya says, “which could have been a disaster, but paradoxically we think it actually helped us: since nobody wanted to release during that week, there were very few indie games announced, so we climbed very high on Steam’s “Popular upcoming” list. That gave us a lot of visibility, which really helped to boost our international wishlists.”
There’s evidence to support this theory. I watched some content creator coverage of the game, and Canadian streamer NorthernLion explicitly says in his video about CoN that he found out about it through “the Steam new releases list.”
Getting enough traction on launch to make it into Steam’s new and trending charts is huge, but it doesn’t guarantee hundreds of thousands of sales, especially for a $20 puzzle game about decoding languages.
So where did all those hundreds of thousands of players come from?
“There are so many factors that it’s hard to summarize,” Moya says. “The biggest driver was obviously the player reviews, which were dithyrambic.3 On Steam, it’s very much a ‘critical mass’ thing: when something starts to get attention, it gets pushed out and attracts even more players. That’s what happened with us.”
Moya also specifically credits Stephen Totilo of Game File and Jason Schreier of Bloomberg as journalists who helped raise awareness of the game in the US. Schreier “published a very positive review of Chants of Sennaar on Bloomberg calling it one of the best games of the year,” Moya says. “I’m pretty sure that article helped a lot to get us known in the US.”
Ultimately, the release of the game “went much better than we’d hoped,” Moya says. “We thought we’d made a good game, but we expected it to be more divisive. The fact that it appealed to virtually all players, including people who weren’t necessarily fans of this type of game in the first place, was a real surprise. Looking back, I’m not sure what could have gone better.”
Making streamers cry with Lil Gator Game
Another adorable, kid-friendly game: Lil Gator Game became a breakout hit on both console and PC when it launched in 2022.
“We blew past 1,000 pretty quickly,” Connor P Quinn, Game Director on Lil Gator Game. To drive wishlists on Steam, Quinn says that his team followed the conventional wisdom: “posted on Twitter pretty regularly, put together a discord community, mentioned wishlisting a lot, went to some events, gave keys to big streamers, and had a small launch discount.”
But, Quinn says, the game’s power to move people emotionally was the real difference maker. “I don’t think there’s any substitute for someone popular getting excited about you,” Quinn says. “You can be dead in the water for months and someone with a big following getting excited about you will bring a whole fresh host of customers.”
Lil Gator Game seems to be particularly good at this, as every once in a while streamers find it and post gameplay with titles like: “I Played 100% of Lil Gator Game… It Made Me Cry.”
“Having a concept that’s ‘streamable’ can be a big part of it,” Quinn says, “although I don’t love that as conventional wisdom for artists. There are niches for everything!”
Nailing a throwback niche with SKALD: Against the Black Priory
One of the hardest genres to sell on Steam are retro pixel art RPGs, so it’s impressive that SKALD: Against the Black Priory has over 2,000 reviews on Steam.
Like all of the developers interviewed in this piece, Norwegian game dev Anders Lauridsen, the creator of SKALD, says that his first 1,000 sales “came fairly quickly,” in part because the game launched with “a good chunk” of wishlists.
“You can say what you want about wishlists as a metric, but I have a hard time thinking of a better pre-launch KPI,” Lauridsen says. “It doesn’t guarantee anything one way or the other, but you certainly get a feel for how it’s going to go.”
So how do you generate wishlists?
“The main thing was many years of grinding on social media, Discord and the devlog that gave us a solid base of tens of thousands of wishlists from people who were RPG-fans,” says Lauridsen. “I have no doubt that they were the core of day one purchases.”
Lauridsen also credits his publisher, Raw Fury, who produced trailers, took the game to events, and promoted it with paid ads. “This bolstered the numbers quite a bit,” he says.
The most important thing that Lauridsen stresses however, was how carefully he and his partners at Raw Fury positioned the game.
I really love what he has to say here, so I’m just going to quote him in full:
It’s really important to note that both myself and Raw Fury always recognized that we were making a niche product. As such the most important thing was to not try and make or sell something that was “all things to all people.” Instead we made a lot of effort making sure we were talking to the people who were our target audience.
So this gets you to the starting line and day one sales, right. Then the question becomes “how do you maintain momentum?” This is where you both need a) a good product and b) luck. Fortunately “luck” is something you can plan for to a degree (Hint: a good product makes it a lot more likely you get lucky).
Having a good product will help you get good reviews (from consumers and publications) and having raised awareness of the product pre-launch will make it a lot more likely that you get coverage. This means you should have spent some time distributing press- and content creator keys.
And this, in turn, is where the luck comes in: You can only go so far in trying to facilitate people talking about (and covering your game). There are so many factors you don’t control in terms of where people’s attention goes.
For me I was lucky. We got a lot of coverage from a lot of big names in the CRPG space. Swen Vincke [the CEO of Baldur’s Gate 3 studio Larian] alone was one of the biggest drivers of early sales due to him being incredibly gracious with talking about the product. Then again, this isn’t pure luck either: Swen is a huge CRPG fan (duh) and very much part of the core demographic that we aggressively targeted.
—Anders Lauridsen, creator of SKALD: Against the Black Priory
This is golden advice for anyone making a game (or any creative work). Understanding positioning allows you to create your own luck by creating work that’s magnetic for the sort of people who’ll understand and hopefully love what you’ve made.
To recap:
- To get your first 1,000 players, try every channel and “conventional” tactic to build up pre-release awareness. If one channel works better than others, double down on it.
- On Steam, don’t launch until you’ve got enough wishlists to have a real shot at hitting the “New and Trending” chart
- Demos can be amazing for building pre-launch advocacy and excitement
- Make a game that makes people feel something
- Understand your niche and nail your positioning
- Make a game so good that famous games industry CEOs rave about it
Easy, right?
- This is a surprising disadvantage that Free to Play games have on Steam. Revenue per player tends to be lower and less immediate for F2P games, which hurts F2P games in the discovery algorithm (unless you’re a very well monetizing game like Apex Legends or the F2P games Valve itself produces).
- I wrote a little more on the art of estimating sales from Steam reviews in this post.
- I’m ngl I had to look that one up. Dithyrambic: “of or relating to an impassioned oration,” or describes a dithyramb, which refers to a wild Greek choral song or, more broadly, to an enthusiastic speech. (Dictionary.com)
The post How did these hit games find their first 1,000 players? appeared first on Polygon.
