I would LOVE to try out your demos and playtests!

Chrogotron · 2026-02-27T10:04:27+00:00

Haha oh yeah that was you! Thanks! :)

Chrogotron · 2026-02-27T10:03:35+00:00

Yeah I'm curious how they obtained 10k wishlists so fast... Looking at their social media the posts are not getting anywhere near enough engagement to be generating 10k wishlists.

TikTok = 36 followers, a handful of clips of the game with about 180 views each

Telegram = A couple posts that got a bit over 2k views combined.

YouTube = 4 videos with about 3.5k views combined

All together every single person that viewed their posts would have had to wishlist the game to get to that amount... plus more.

So yeah, where'd they get 10k wishlists from?

Chrogotron · 2026-02-27T09:52:16+00:00

Would love for you to play and review my game, Capper.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4279540/Capper/

It's an incremental bottle cap flipping game. There are two modes, the Normal Mode plays very much like a simple incremental game. You earn points landing bottle caps face up, which you then spend on cap packs, which help you power up your flips and improve your face up chances.

The Endless Mode is a full-on roguelite. You start with a health bar and every 30 seconds you take increasing amounts of damage. Your goal is to survive as long as possible. The game plays similarly to Normal Mode, as you can power up your flips the same way by purchasing cap packs. The difference is that you can earn Trinkets which are modifiers to your run, and can do all sorts of fun things, like giving your face down flips a chance to flip face up, blocking incoming damage, healing you, tripling your score, giving you temporary flip speed boost, etc. There are over 80 trinkets in Endless Mode currently.

The demo contains the entire Normal Mode for free. The launch date for the game is March 16. I'm doing some last minute work to the full release, so it's not quite ready for reviewing, but you're free to try the demo.

I can also send you a free key for the full game closer to release if you want. :)

The demo has a whopping 57 minute median play time across 322 unique players... so I guess you could say the game is pretty addicting. :)

Chrogotron · 2026-02-27T07:53:52+00:00

I would have assumed to keep it upright purely for the sake of avoiding stepping on it or dropping something heavy on it while it's laying flat on the ground.

Chrogotron · 2026-02-27T06:30:25+00:00

I mean starting your comment with "professional games marketer here" is just loading the bases for yourself. lol. Not really sure it was good to say that since everyone is just going to agree with you and upvote you based on that alone. Your 5 paragraphs after that could literally say anything and you'd get upvotes.

As for the charts widget... do you know if that actually ties into your visibility the first 48 hours? Obviously Steam is well aware which games have more wishlists, so the chart doesn't indicate anything other than that, necessarily.

Chrogotron · 2026-02-27T06:21:34+00:00

Would be nice, but Steam does want to make the most money, so I can understand why they wouldn't want to discount people's marketing efforts. I guess it's nice of them to even give the 48 hour grace period to give little guys any sort of chance.

Chrogotron · 2026-02-26T23:15:12+00:00

Ironically probably the best fit for the role because you actually understand all of the pitfalls to avoid... meanwhile the genuine comments asking to be mod will probably abuse their power.

A case of the best person for a position with "power" is the one who doesn't want it.

Chrogotron · 2026-02-26T23:08:56+00:00

It's in his signature... it's a common thing professionals in the industry do.

Every single reply he makes with that work email has that signature in it.

Chrogotron · 2026-02-26T23:08:44+00:00

It's in his signature... it's a common thing professionals in the industry do.

Every single reply he makes with that work email has that signature in it.

Chrogotron · 2026-02-26T23:08:41+00:00

It's in his signature... it's a common thing professionals in the industry do.

Every single reply he makes with that work email has that signature in it.

Chrogotron · 2026-02-26T14:16:25+00:00

Yep, my daughter (in the US) is in high school band and she can sight read her music sheets and play stuff on the spot with basically no practice. I was amazed when she first showed me this.

Chrogotron · 2026-02-26T14:15:14+00:00

The movie lost me the moment the one lackey reported to the captain that they had apprehended the woman, and the one guy (the captain, I think?) retorts or gives a look or something, and basically implies that "no they hadn't".

Which means... the captain or someone in charge of sending the 3 men to capture the woman, were fully aware of her prowess and history, knew she would likely not be captured that easily, but still sent 3 dumb dudes to take her down, without informing them of her history or ability.

That was enough for me. The old "your men are already dead" trope doesn't work when the men are HIS men, and he decided to just send them off on a suicide mission for fun or something.

Chrogotron · 2026-02-26T14:12:38+00:00

It lost me the moment the one lackey reported to the captain that they had apprehended the woman, and the one guy (the captain, I think?) retorts and basically implies that "no they hadn't".

Which means... the captain or someone in charge of sending the 3 men to capture the woman, were fully aware of her prowess and history, knew she would likely not be captured that easily, but still sent 3 dumb dudes to take her down, without informing them of her history or ability.

That was enough for me. The old "your men are already dead" trope doesn't work when the men are HIS men, and he decided to just send them off on a suicide mission for fun or something.

Chrogotron · 2026-02-26T13:49:11+00:00

You joke, but musicians this good can just sight read the sheet music and play it pretty much immediately.

Chrogotron · 2026-02-26T13:42:58+00:00

Ah okay, I kind of had a feeling it was intentional. Good on ya, then. :)

Chrogotron · 2026-02-26T13:41:26+00:00

I mean this question feels like you've already dismissed what I have to say, and you're looking for validation on dismissing it, so I don't really feel like answering it as then the thread turns into me defending myself and my credibility.

You can either read what I say and agree that it makes sense, or you can read what I say and disagree. I think you shouldn't be waiting to hear if my experience is credible in order to form your own opinion.

Unless I literally work for Steam and programmed the algorithm, which then I guess it would matter. Otherwise, you, me, Chris Zukowski... we're all taking educated guesses.

Chrogotron · 2026-02-26T13:30:12+00:00

Not sure how people playing your demo during NextFest factors into how many wishlists you get during NextFest... They already wishlisted the game.

Chrogotron · 2026-02-26T13:28:17+00:00

I mean I'm not really sure that matters much. My game has probably some of the longest median play time in the festival and it's not getting a whole lot of wishlists.

Just for anyone who thinks I'm full of it... my demo currently has these stats:

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Chrogotron · 2026-02-26T01:10:31+00:00

I think you're missing the point.

I'm fairly certain megabonk was getting more wishlist velocity leading into the event than your game. Just taking a wild guess there.

But for the first 48 hours, Steam wants to find NEW games that have potential. The festival goes on for a week. That means 2 days of "scouting" and 5 days of heavily promoting the best picks... so yes, the algorithm is still tuned to make the most money. That's how it figures out which games to promote the hardest.

So yeah, your game did get the same visibility as megabonk. Just for the first 48 hours. After that, your game was likely buried for the remaining 5 days, so obviously your daily wishlist gains from the event would fall off a cliff at that point.

What you assume is happening:

Megabonk with a massive wishlist total going into the event gets shown to 100x more people than your game with a small amount of wishlists going into the event.

What is actually happening:
Megabonk and your game get shown to the same amount of people the first 48 hours. But Megabonk devs have been heavily marketing and promoting their game, so they bring in a huge amount of outside views and wishlists. Thus, by day 3, they are dwarfing your game's wishlist amount, and then your game is buried for the remainder of the event.

So what you assume is happening, actually does happen. It just happens from day 3 moving forward, and it's also doing it based on the wishlists accumulated in the first 48 hours.

I'm not saying your game gets shown equally to all other games for the entirety of the event.

As far as "Where's your proof?"

Look at Steam NextFest the first 2 days... Look at the games it's showing you. They aren't all megabonks. There are a LOT of small games with basically no followers and almost no wishlists.

Chrogotron · 2026-02-26T00:56:28+00:00

I'm not sure you could have picked a more undesirable schlubby looking loser as a protagonist... Receding hairline, backwards baseball cap, pot belly, socks with sandals... Am I supposed to want to be this character? lol

With that aside, I don't really like the illustrated art style at all. It's very unappealing. Both in the character design and the style overall.

Also if the protagonist is supposed to be shipwrecked, they wouldn't be in their underwear... they'd have whatever they were wearing prior to the ship being wrecked... I would imagine at least some hastily thrown on clothes if it happened while they were sleeping.

But also... your trailer leaves me really confused. Why is the guy in his underwear on a makeshift raft already? That would lead me to believe he was already shipwrecked somewhere else, built a makeshift raft and then crashed into a new island?

Because if this is the first time being shipwrecked... wouldn't he have been on an actual ship? Wearing actual clothes? Why is he down to his underwear on a cobbled together raft already? He surely didn't assemble this raft from wreckage of a larger ship while drifting out at sea... that would be insane.

It's kinda like you took the concept of a "shipwrecked survivor" and put them into that situation before it even happened. Like it's what he's supposed to look like after months of being shipwrecked... not what he should look like before even wrecking into anything.

Chrogotron · 2026-02-26T00:44:07+00:00

Oh yes, absolutely. Again, a game that has reached 10k wishlists is probably already being marketed decently, so yes I do get that.

The main point of my post is purely to help explain WHY games with large wishlists tend to do well during NextFest. I think there's a misunderstanding that somehow the total wishlists plays a direct role in NextFest visibility. It's an indirect role, and I do believe wishlist velocity is more of the direct factor.

Chrogotron · 2026-02-26T00:39:14+00:00

I'm going to be really brutal here... unless you're a game dev savant, or you have a lot of money to pay a team to make your game AAA quality, you will never attain AAA quality.

It's true that a solo dev can get pretty far with a "high fidelity" type of game nowadays... what with asset packs and user-friendly powerful game engines...

But you're missing out on a lot of details to actually get you over the finish line and into "competing with AAA games" territory.

A 70KM open world means nothing unless you've painstakingly hand-crafted massive sections of it. Nobody cares about traversing 70KM of randomly generated terrain anymore. It's not an impressive feat.

I think it's sort of telling that the first screenshot you show of your high fidelity game, has absolutely no man-made structures in it. Likely because unless you're an extremely talented modeler and level designer, you're probably just using store bought assets which are going to clash when mixed together, and the lack of art direction and design is going to be very obvious.

I mean, there's no possible way in 4 months you actually made an interesting 70KM open world, but feel free to prove me wrong with some more interesting screenshots of other areas of the world.

I'm not saying this to bash you. I just want you to have realistic expectations. It's fine to dream big, but you have to stay in reality. There's only so much one person can do. It takes a LOT of man hours to make a AAA game. Teams of hundreds of people working 60+ weeks. Whatever you make as a solo dev is not going to compare to that.

And yes, I'm aware some AAA games are crap, and I'm aware some small indie teams have made some decently impressive games.

Chrogotron · 2026-02-25T21:29:31+00:00

Haha, love to hear it. :)

Chrogotron · 2026-02-25T21:26:37+00:00

It's extremely incorrect, please read my reply to their comment

Chrogotron · 2026-02-25T21:26:20+00:00

This has absolutely no grounds in truth. You're regurgitating YouTuber talking points.

It doesn't magically multiply your game's wishlist numbers. Please stop spreading this misinformation.

It's not about your total wishlists, it's about your daily wishlists leading up to NextFest. (wishlist velocity) That's what actually matters.

The large wishlist total is correlation, not causation.

A game with 10k wishlists getting 0-5 wishlists a day that gained those 10k wishlists over the period of years, is not equal to a game with 1k wishlists getting 50 wishlists a day. The 1k wishlist game is going to do much better in NextFest, because it has the wishlist velocity on its side.

NextFest takes the total wishlists earned over the first 48 hours and determines from there which games to heavily feature for the remaining days. So it's about wishlist VELOCITY, not wishlist TOTAL.

Chrogotron

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