Indie Devs Stressing Over Launch
Many indie developers are expressing anxiety and overwhelm surrounding game launches, particularly concerning wishlist numbers, bug fixes, marketing efforts, and the overall pressure of release. The posts reveal a common struggle with balancing development tasks and managing expectations.
SOURCES (60)
“We released the demo for Camp Manager Simulator with around 2.5k wishlists. A few weeks later we're close to 5k, so the demo basically doubled our wishlist count. The first days did most of the work. Our best day was around 700 wishlist adds, then…”
“So, today was finally the day. After two or three release report, around one year of game dev (around 1 pr 2 days per week), I finally presses that Green button to release my game on Steam! The feeling is great, but I wanted to share a little bit of my story. I first started game dev by following an online course, and within that course we had to create a small prototype of a Tower Defense game. When I was done with it, I had that simple thought «I’m sure I could make it way better if I spent a”
“As I'm preparing to release my second game, I somethimes wonder about this topic. It's all about how many wishlists you can get before launch, all about how you market the game when it's in the coming soon stage, how you launch your demo, what festivals you join, how you juggle the socials, design you capsule etc. But what if you screw all that up, or are just plain unlucky and the launch is just a bust, with <100 sales after the first month? I always wondered if a game can be sal”
“One week ago, I released the demo for my first game, Undying Soul. I started that week with 622 wishlists. One week later, I'm at 1328. I knew releasing the demo would hopefully bring some attention to the game, but I honestly didn't expect it to have this big of an impact on my wishlists. I have no idea how this compares to what other indie games see after releasing a demo, but honestly, I'm just really happy with the result. Seeing those numbers nearly double in just one week is in”
“We recently went live with our steam page for The Final Frame last week and we’ve officially hit 50 wishlists and 25 playtesters with more incoming each day! I’ve spent a ton of time already addressing feedback and bug fixing. Soon we will have the gameplay trailer ready and hope to keep growing! Please wishlist and try out the playtest if you’re interested in a unique 3D Roguelike deckbuilder with real bowling set in Hell! https://store.steampowered.com/app/4506540/The\_Final\_Lane/ submi”
“In 1 week (if nothing goes wrong), i'll be releasing my first commercial game on Steam, after 6 months of development. It's a game that i made with the primary goal to see if I could develop, complete, and release a video game all by myself. So, Continuous Imperfection is a fast-paced parkour game focused on speedrunning, inspired by games like Bloodthief, Brutal Katana and Cyberhook. It features : - 12 levels to explore and master, including alternative paths and interactive elements: p”
“In 1 week (if nothing goes wrong), i'll be releasing my first commercial game on Steam, after 6 months of development. It's a game that i made with the primary goal to see if I could develop, complete, and release a video game all by myself. So, Continuous Imperfection is a fast-paced parkour game focused on speedrunning, inspired by games like Bloodthief, Brutal Katana and Cyberhook. It features : - 12 levels to explore and master, including alternative paths and interactive elements: p”
“I’m working on Bartend With Your Friends an online co-op bartending simulator & I’m pretty new to all this. Since the store page went live I’ve been posting on all socials which has led to a small amount of Wishlist’s trickling in, some days better than others. I was happy with 10 so 100 feels quite nice but I’m wondering are these numbers good/bad/okay? And if anyone has any tips store-page wise I’d love to hear them, I’ve made some adjustments previously based on some feedback. submi”
“Hey everyone, As I explained in my previous post, our studio is in a difficult position right now and we had to change the way we make games. If you want the full story, you can read it here Yesterday we opened the Steam page for our new game, Packing Shift . Our team is smaller now and our budget is very limited, so we had to keep the scope under control. We worked very hard on this game and tried to spend our time only on things that actually make the game more fun. Now the marketing starts. W”
tbh the stepping back part is harder than the actual problems sometimes
“Steam: "You never did know when to quit, huh?" submitted by /u/Perceiving_Light [link] [comments]”
“TL;DR: A publishing deal cold-pitch turned into a paid-porting sales quote after an "evaluation" that — per Steam's own key report — never involved launching our build. Sharing the timeline and the verification method so other devs can check their own cases. When you part ways with a publisher, ban your eval keys: the report shows whether any were ever activated. Ours: zero out of five. We're a solo studio launching on Steam this November. Everything below is documented in emai”
“Over the past two weeks, we’ve been trying to figure out how to improve our Steam performance. We’ve been sitting at around 370 wishlists for quite some time, so we decided to start making some changes, both big and small, within what we can realistically do as a VERY small indie team. Here’s what we did: 1. We completely reworked our Steam page. We tried to make the page better communicate the experience we’re going for: a puzzle-filled adventure game. However, we still haven’t replaced our tea”
“Over the past two weeks, we’ve been trying to figure out how to improve our Steam performance. We’ve been sitting at around 370 wishlists for quite some time, so we decided to start making some changes, both big and small, within what we can realistically do as a VERY small indie team. Here’s what we did: 1. We completely reworked our Steam page. We tried to make the page better communicate the experience we’re going for: a puzzle-filled adventure game. However, we still haven’t replaced our tea”
“We planned to release our game in Early Access the 23rd September and put a lot of effort to have many streamers on day 1. It was all wasted due to a late approval from Steam. This is not our first release. We released 6 games on Steam before that one. Yet we did not anticipate this would go this badly. How we got there We submitted our build 3 weeks before the release date. After 8 days, we receive a message from Steam that our build was no good because the discord button on the m”
“Hey! How’s it going? The Kickstarter campaign I launched to fund my game is entering its final 24 hours! The game has already reached its initial goal ($666) and is now really close to hitting the first stretch goal ($1.3K). B.O.D.E. is a hellish roguelite with chaotic movement mechanics, where you shoot not only to kill enemies, but also to move around! If you like the project and are able to support it, I’d really appreciate it! And if you can’t, sharing the campaign would also help a ton. htt”
“For years, I dreamt about making and releasing my own game. Like a lot of you here, one day I just started. I spent over two years of evenings building the tower defense I always wished existed. Now my first game is out and people are playing it. I still can quite believe this feeling. I've posted several times in this sub and everyone here was always extremely kind and offering help and advice. So THANK YOU! https://store.steampowered.com/app/4525520/Jarred_Defense/ Yuki is a cat trapped in”
“I totally appeciate $100 while it might be nothing for something, for others it is still big. I am also not convinced raising it will improve things as much as some people think, after all a lot of these games are burning hundreds on tokens so the steam fee isn't much relative to that. Instead if you had a threshold of verified wishlists because you can launch (kind of like greenlight but not visible to consumers and lower requirments). Verified wishlists are from accounts with payment metho”
“Hop Slasher on Steam this is the game. I'm thinking of finishing around December but the next nextfest is february. Edit: Alright think I got my answer, thank you submitted by /u/Digitaldude555 [link] [comments]”
“Hey again! A couple of weeks ago I posted here because SOMNIUS got 14 wishlists in its first 24 hours. Eight of them were friends. Then I came back when we finished our new gameplay trailer. At that point we had a little over 250 wishlists. Today we finally released the game. We went into launch with roughly 800 wishlists. I genuinely don't know whether that's enough for Steam to pick the game up, whether we'll sell 50 copies or 5,000, or whether the whole thing will disappear into t”
“Going in with 1857 wishlists at the time of posting - Steam is doing wonders in the finish line, it pushed me about 150 extra wishlists in the last 2-3 days. Wish me luck! https://store.steampowered.com/app/4525520/Jarred_Defense/ submitted by /u/Mikolas3D [link] [comments]”
“Hey everyone, My game Redhowl just passed 2,000 wishlists (+1,400 over the last 4 months). With 9 days left before launch, I wanted to share a very transparent breakdown of what worked and what completely failed. For context: no publisher, zero connections in the industry, no events, no marketing skills, and a $0 budget. The timeline August 2025 (90 WL): I realized I actually needed to start promoting the game (which I had started in early 2024...). I launched a very unpolished Steam page and sp”
“So I took a look at our visibility data today and was rather shocked to notice that we're sitting at a 54% CTR. I decided to do some research to see if this is as absurd as it seems, and from what I can tell an average CTR is somewhere around 2%. Here is our Steam page for context. We hired a very talented artist to do our capsules, and I'm very happy with them, but I don't think they're anything groundbreaking. Is there any kind of explanation for these kind of numbers or is thi”
“Currently at 3,500 wishlists, but I was expecting more organic traction at this point. Steam Page has been up since November and 95% of my wishlists have been through paid reddit ads. Social media didn't take off and I stopped posting. YT devlogs didn't take off either. At what point did you all start to see more organic traction with wishlists? submitted by /u/Beginning-Visit1418 [link] [comments]”
“Currently at 3,500 wishlists, but I was expecting more organic traction at this point. Steam Page has been up since November and 95% of my wishlists have been through paid reddit ads. Social media didn't take off and I stopped posting. YT devlogs didn't take off either. At what point did you all start to see more organic traction with wishlists? submitted by /u/Beginning-Visit1418 [link] [comments]”
“I'm writing from my personal account but not the studio account, because I know I will get some hate, and my game doesnt deserve it. i'm just totally frustrated at how VERY bad my demo is doing. It's I think an objectively good game, but I just can't find a way to market it correctly or effectivly. i'm even more frustrated seeing games that are REALLY bad doing WAYYYY better. I put so much heart, commitment, polish, litterally my blood sweat and years of work into it. I feel”
“This is my first Steam game, and so far I've only released the demo. I've been posting around here and there, and my wishlists have slowly grown over time. Not by a lot, but they keep climbing, and I feel lucky for every single one. Then today I was scrolling Twitch and found a streamer playing my game live. I honestly don't know how to describe it. Watching a stranger play something I built alone, in my evenings and weekends, is the best moment of this whole journey so far. Thank yo”
“My game was supposed to launch on July 30. I got the localization setup wrong, the build didn't pass review, and the release moved to August 6. The fix itself was quick. The corrected build still had to go through review again. I ended up launching with English only, despite having planned a multilingual release. For the next release, I want to check every language listed on the store page in the exact build I'm submitting. Launch it, go through the opening, check the menus, then restart”
“https://preview.redd.it/eyzlatd3e8qh1.png?width=670&format=png&auto=webp&s=429c7403469ddff3140d12c54bc5a46d513aed97 My Steam page has officially been live for one week now and I’m currently sitting at 15 wishlists. The problem is... I’m pretty sure almost all of those are from friends/family lol I’d guess maybe 0-2 came from actual random people. Steam shows around ~600 visits so far, which made me wonder how much those numbers normally correlate with wishlists. Is there any rough co”
“My Steam page has officially been live for one week now and I’m currently sitting at 15 wishlists. The problem is... I’m pretty sure almost all of those are from friends/family lol I’d guess maybe 0-2 came from actual random people. Steam shows around ~600 visits so far, which made me wonder how much those numbers normally correlate with wishlists. Is there any rough conversion rate you guys look for? Like how many wishlists would you expect from 100 or 1000 store page visits? Or is that basical”
“Tomorrow, September 18, we’re finally releasing Too Many Balls. We're a 3-person indie team, and after months of development, we just hit 5,000 wishlists. We’re currently sitting at 5,019 wishlists, which is honestly something we never expected when we started working on this game. (Our initial goal was 2k Wishlists) I wanted to share our wishlist graph and give a quick breakdown of what actually caused the major spikes. Here’s our wishlist journey from the beginning: Trailer Our first signi”
“Tomorrow, September 18, we’re finally releasing Too Many Balls. We're a 3-person indie team, and after months of development, we just hit 5,000 wishlists. We’re currently sitting at 5,019 wishlists, which is honestly something we never expected when we started working on this game. (Our initial goal was 2k Wishlists) I wanted to share our wishlist graph and give a quick breakdown of what actually caused the major spikes. Here’s our wishlist journey from the beginning: Trailer Our first signi”
“Yeah, you know those posts about people getting tons of wishlists in 2 weeks after releasing the Steam page. This is not one of those. Every single wishlist was painfully earned. After : a trailer , a demo release, 2 showcases , 1 festival , a post from IndieGameJoe and 70+ short content on socials : my game just reached 1000 wishlists. But luckily, I still have my SNF token to blow up 🚀 Here's my game if you're curious : https://store.steampowered.com/app/4108300/You_Remembered/”
“Steam does not publish wishlist numbers for anyone. It does publish an ordering of every unreleased game by wishlists: 5,587 of them, positions only, no counts. So I fitted a curve from position to count on 1,051 posts where a studio published its own figure. The panel keeps the marks apart instead of averaging them. Here the developer said 1.7M, but that was January, so it gets carried forward and weighted down to 15%. Followers times a published ratio say 1.6M. The ranking itself says 1.3M and”
“Trying to see how people optimize my game (TANGENT), so I'm running a $25 speedrun contest — fastest time posted to YouTube from now to October 1st wins a $25 Steam gift card. Nobody has submitted a run yet lol. I really want to see what happens when other people start figuring out routes, skips, and movement tech that I didn't anticipate. So I figured putting $25 on the line might give people some motivation. At the moment, though, you could literally submit one completed run and be #1,”
“Thank you everyone, we've reached 1,000 wishlists. And thanks to everyone who played the demo and wrote a review. https://preview.redd.it/ca14y3wgcjph1.jpg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4264509371a1d6f710903ca81ce1e68129950b64 submitted by /u/RegisterSuch7208 [link] [comments]”
“I just go into personal calendar yesterday (6 weeks away from launch), and the first day I got: 200 impressions 10% CTR Felt it was quite low, since on 'search suggestions' and 'more like this' I usually hang out at around 20% CTR. Would love for use to share some metrics to see what's normal. What is your CTR on various sources, and how many impressions did you get on the first day 6 weeks out on the personal calendar? submitted by /u/QuietHovercraft4725 [link] &”
“I am writing this after a month on steam. Released professionally now with one bad review blocking my games success! I get how bad it was back then but now it's 10 fold better and a playable game on both windows and linux... The problem: how to get curators' attention after a bad review? Marketing is genuinely hard for me due to social anxiety. So I'm kind of stuck until someone helps or someone reviews my game in a favorable way. Any websites I'm missing? I'm using Keymailer”
“Posted here a few days ago about my very first pre-order — one total stranger, out of nowhere, and I stared at that email for ten minutes. https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/1wdbfd3/got_my_first_ever_preorder_today_solo_dev_first/ Checked analytics today: 25 pre-orders. Conversion rate went from under 5% to 19.2%. Still small numbers against any real benchmark, but the trajectory is what's actually getting me - this is the first time in the whole process it's felt like somethi”
“Solo dev, first Steam release. Store page went live in May, currently sitting at 185 outstanding wishlists. Most of that came from Reddit and short-form social, basically zero from Steam's own discovery surfaces so far. Current plan: demo in Next Fest Oct 19-26, launch Nov 13. The thing I keep going back and forth on is whether launching three weeks after Next Fest makes sense at this wishlist count. November is packed, and if Next Fest only gets me to 1,000 or so, I'm launching into not”
“Ok so we have a 2D multiplayer game that we have been working on for over 2 years now - lot's of ups and downs with having to do things like rebuilding the game and people taking advantage of us because we were new to game dev and easy money I guess *shrug*. Had to learn how to do a lot of things ourselves. Anyway, we now have something that's good enough for playtesting now and will be a solid demo by the end of September/first week of October. Next Fest is the 2nd week of October. Prob”
“We set our KPI at 3,000 wishlists in the first week, based on what similar indie devs and publishers around us had hit. At the current pace, that's looking tough, but not hopeless either, so I wanted to share what we did before launch. If any of this resonates, we'd love it if you checked out our page too. We put a lot of work into the trailer and capsule art. The trailer especially leans on actual in game footage so people understand the game clearly, we tried to avoid artificial motion”
“What do you think about this? Is it acceptable for developers to announce a release date and promote a FOMO bundle - despite being aware of the risks - only to delay the game later? The game is *NRFTW - No Rest For The Wicked I want to clarify right off the bat that I’m not against polishing games - in fact, I’m all for it - but not using methods like these. submitted by /u/Alarming_Performer58 [link] [comments]”
“A month ago I posted about our Steam demo reaching around 3,000 unique players. What caught people's attention was that we had around 2,600 wishlists at the time — roughly an 86% wishlist-to-demo-player ratio. Well, a month later... 🎮 4,489 Unique demo players ❤️ 4,480 Wishlists So we're now sitting at roughly 99.79% wishlists relative to unique demo players. 😂 I genuinely didn't expect the ratio to keep climbing like this. For context, the game is Too Many Balls, a small indie gam”
“Over the last two weeks, my game gained a little over 2,000 Steam wishlists , and I wanted to share how it happened and get some opinions from other developers. During the first week , all of the growth came from organic social media marketing. I was regularly posting gameplay clips and short videos and trying different types of content to see what people reacted to. For the last 7 days , I started running jestr.gg campaigns as well, mainly by pushing videos on Instagram and YouTube anmd Twitch.”
“Before marketing my game I was running of pure passion and since joining Reddit seeing everyone’s Wishlist progress can be motivating but at the same time makes me worry about my own game. I’ve got 132 wishlists for my first game in development and I’m proud of that but social media can add some doubts. I wonder if it’s better to just block out the noise and stay on the path of creation because releasing a game is already a massive achievement. The same marketing strategy may not work for every”
“anyone else play indie games expecting theyre gonna like it way more than they do like you see some small studio made this gorgeous little game and read the description and your brain is like "yes this is exactly what i want" then u download it and play for 20 minutes and its just not clicking. not even because its bad just bc sometimes the vibe in your head about a game is way different from actually playing it. like the game can be solid but if theres even a tiny friction point the i”
“Hey everyone, About to release our first game onto steam and wondering what are some tip / (and maybe more important) pitfalls to avoid, and what to do at this point. I have around 500 wish-lists and my game is classic Zelda-like. I am thinking about putting 500USD into marketing and was wondering what was the most successful. I am a new dad so I have my hands full and can use the advise on how to market this type of game. so the marketing has been time consuming and maybe not the most fruitful.”
“https://preview.redd.it/jqzg4kwfdvoh1.png?width=1688&format=png&auto=webp&s=1d43a6268e4c961ed527bba787fbfe56b7c70208 Hi guys, it's been a 3 weeks since I've launched my steam page, and I've got 106 wishlists total. I didn't expect much, but this results kinda put me down a bit... as I believe my game doesn't look that bad and actually bringing some interesting mechanics to the plate. I saw a plenty of less effort and more niche games performing so much better in m”
“i'm still not quite sure on how this happened we thought we would barely get 8.000 wl by late 2027, and now we're at 20k... what the helly submitted by /u/Schwipsy [link] [comments]”
“Solo dev here. I revealed my game TOWERPUNK on September 1 with no marketing, no publisher, and no press. I hoped for 100 to 300 wishlists in the first week. By September 7 I had over 3,000, and it's past 4,000 now. What I'd recommend: Put your trailer on YouTube and stay in the comments. Mine went from a few dozen views to tens of thousands in under a week, mostly from YouTube's own recommendations. Replying to comments kept it in people's feeds, and it became a key driver of St”
“Still feels like a dream, also if you're releasing a game get ready for the post launch bug fixes, nothing can prepare you for what real players will find and how they will break your game, even more so than any amount of demo feedback and playtesting, I pushed out several patches in the last 24 hours to address some serious and some more mild issues that were highlighted in the forums. So definitely clear out some time for the entire release day and day after to handle and tackle issues as”
“The last couple of weeks have gone so slowly, but now I'm all wrapped up and ready for release on schedule next week. This is my first ever full release, I had a blast making it, and am looking forward to the next! submitted by /u/Poifer [link] [comments]”
“My Steam page has been live for 25 days, and in that time I’ve only gotten 49 wishlists. I see a lot of games launching their Steam pages and getting much bigger numbers on the first day, and it’s hard not to compare myself and get discouraged. But I’m trying not to let that stop me. I also think my game is pretty niche, so I’ve been posting across most social platforms, especially X, Reddit and TikTok. And so far, I honestly couldn’t tell you that there’s some foolproof strategy, or one specifi”