We got over 60k wishlists in 6 months. This is how:
Hello,
My team and I are about to release our game Duck Detective on this Thursday 23rd May, and I wanted to share with you all the process of announcing to releasing a game in a 6 month time period
This is me procrastinating from doing real work because I’m nervous 🥲
The TL;DR:
- We timed all our big announcements with events
- People really really love ducks
- TikTok converts surprisingly well
Here is the graph of our wishlists each day:
Announcing the game and putting the steam page live happened simultaneously during the Wholesome Snack Showcase during the Game Awards.
It’s hard to know how the steam algorithm truly works, but I believe this strong start gave us a boost to our baseline wishlists each day.
You can see from the graph, but any time we have a big spike, there is still a 2-3 day period afterwards where daily wishlists slowly return back to the baseline amount, and that really can add up to a few thousand extra wishlists.
Steam Next Fest has been by far our largest event for gathering wishlists and you can see how long the tail was afterwards, lasting almost the whole of February, which was entirely steam driven. I would say that we think that our success during Steam Next Fest was hugely helped by coverage from the press. You can see how halfway through the event we lost a lot of discoverability, but it increased again after the press coverage. Talking to other devs, they experienced a sharp drop-off with no recovery, so I think that Steam Next Fest is becoming increasingly difficult to do well in, as everyone is improving at gaming the steam algorithms for the event.
Most of our wishlists are from events, so I would say it’s important to keep an eye out for events and to apply to them when you think they suit your game
Our game contains a recently divorced detective, who happens to be a duck.
It felt natural at the time to combine the serious nature of a Noir detective, with the most lovable of the waterfowl, but we now realise it made it much easier to market the game and quickly get people interested.
It doesn’t mean you need to start cramming your game with cats, dogs, frogs, and everything in between, but I think it has made our team realise the importance of having a very clear message as to why your game stands out in what is a very crowded space.
TikTok and even Twitter does actually seem to convert to wishlists?
This really surprised us as we’ve failed to have any traction on TikTok for years before this, but we managed to have a TikTok that surpassed over 1M views which is labelled on the wishlist graph, and you can see it was close to 1000 wishlists a day for a few days, which is sizable! Most of the small bumps you can see in the graph are also from posting other, less successful, TikTok videos.
It’s a lot of work making videos for any social media, so we’ve found that it’s better to make content true to ourselves and also lower effort as we still need time to make the game. We don’t do any voice over or show our faces in these videos. It’s mostly some gameplay footage cut together with an amusing caption and a bunch of relevant hashtags.
Hopefully this is useful to some people!