Whats your experience with releasing Indie game (Steam)

I am getting closer to release my first bigger game, which I am planning to release on Steam.

And I am now thining about experiences that other can have with it... I mean, I have now a friend, who will contact some website/players for some review of the game, so it can reach more players, so I just don't release the game and let it live by itself.

How is your experience with releasing a game? What all did you do for you increasing the audience of your game?

And in the end, how much copies of your game did you saled (first month, overall)?

 

Have you started marketing your game during development?

 

@Antypodish Not yet, but I am thinking about something when it starts look finaly nice to me, to show some in-game features.

 

When you say, you are close to release date, I assume you have at least solid playable demo, or play through, or some major features ready.
That would be good starting point.
Starting marketing just few month before release, may not give you exposure, you may want to expect.

Releasing on steam is just one shot. So you better make sure, you got followers already.
Early access may help, or harm with that.

 

Well I am not even making something big, I started in the end of august with simple arcade (which is not in the end so simple... )

But with my actual progress, I assuming about this week I could have all basic features and look, to possibly show it somehow.

 

What does this entail?

 

This is huge topic on its own. There is tons of materials and discussions. Even on this forum is plenty. So I will not be touching this subject.

 

Fair enough.

 

Have you done any devlog etc? It's a little late to start PR now :/

 

Well, I don't trying to catch up what I missed

Just curious about all the ways and experiences, that anyone have and from which I can profit next time. This one game will be very probably jumping from nowhere.

 

I have seen that goofy stuff works best, this video of ours have 95% completion rate (95% saw it to the end) its crazy high.

And its nots even in English!

 

I released my first game on Steam without any promotion/marketing prior to release (on purpose so I could see what visibility on Steam itself does for a game, and get a clear view when I use paid advertising). You get a rush of sales on day 1, about half that on day 2, another half again on day 3, and then it flat lines with the occasional random purchase every few days.

Using typical paid advertising methods (search promotions, Facebook ads, Youtube ads, etc) is expensive and not very effective when directed to your game's Steam page. My theory is because people generally make Steam purchases through the Steam app instead of the web interface, and Steam makes it a pain in the A to simply log into your account on the web to make a purchase. Too much hassle, lost sale.

After that every couple months you can put your game on Steam Sale, and you get the best results when you mark it down 90% off. If your game is $5, you mark it down 90% then its $0.50, then Steam takes their cut leaving you like $0.37 each. You get between 150 and 350 sales when on Steam Sale getting you around $100 every couple months.

Nope nope nope. You've got to promote your game ahead of time, build a bit of a community around it, and it needs to be something that the friends of the people who buy it will want to play when they see their friend playing it so it grows organically. Just posting it to Steam and thinking you'll throw a little money at some ads probably will fail.

 

Yeah building a community even without any game is probably the way to go, turing gamedev into a lifestyle type of communication can be useful when you have nothing to show, see youtuber like Zyger