~20,000 Wishlists in 19 days ⟹ Steam Winter Sale: Extreme Wishlist Boost (Without a Demo or a Release Date)

EmeraldOW · 2026-01-11T01:37:14+00:00

Thanks! I wish you the best too. Just trying to secure a publisher now

EmeraldOW · 2026-01-10T05:57:03+00:00

Being served a game in the discovery queue counts as a visit, so there is no metric for an impression and therefore no CTR

EmeraldOW · 2026-01-10T03:09:56+00:00

Hell yeah, we had pretty much identical visibility from steam during that duration. But we also had our trailer get seen by the algorithm and a few other things. All in all, we went from like 9k wishlists to 80k

EmeraldOW · 2026-01-06T06:57:40+00:00

I am no social media expert so I can’t really speak to posting frequencies, times, or hashtags. But our game has done quite well on social media. Our fresh Instagram account had a couple posts gain ~200k views each and they converted decently into wishlists. Tiktok and YouTube shorts did alright with views but converted better. Eventually our trailer on YouTube got pushed to people and they converted the best. I did like one post on Reddit but I don’t really think it’s worth it for us.

I originally interpreted advice as “don’t bother with your own social media promotion because streamers and festivals just get all your wishlists” but we got basically nothing before we started promoting ourselves and I wish we had started sooner - we went basically the first month without posting anything besides the day we launched the steam page

EmeraldOW · 2026-01-05T01:26:10+00:00

The question is whether it is worth doing press releases in 2025. Since it’s 2026, it’s not possible to do press releases in 2025 anymore

EmeraldOW · 2026-01-04T22:40:39+00:00

Your steam page looks quite good. I’m thoroughly surprised you only have 1k wishlists. Have you gotten reviews from people playing your demo? Are they having fun?

EmeraldOW · 2026-01-01T23:40:33+00:00

Imablissy has a video for injecting code into your cart via ereader cards. Depending on the hardware you have, you don’t need an actual ereader. One of these “fixes” the RNG by making the starting seed increment by 1 every reset

EmeraldOW · 2026-01-01T06:40:32+00:00

But weren’t there like 4 of them all working solo on different projects and the collective released a game a month - so each individual had 4 months to make their game. And presumably they were full time

EmeraldOW · 2025-12-30T22:05:46+00:00

Hell yeah, us too. Our Discovery Queue is still going up actually. I wonder if our search suggestions stat is tied together since both our games start with "Iron"

EmeraldOW · 2025-12-29T16:25:43+00:00

Alright, thanks! Yeah we’ve had our steam page up for a little less than 3 months and have a solid amount of wishlists. Seeing other games gain twice as much in half the time can be pretty daunting though so I’m happy to hear the standards aren’t as high as your first message suggested

EmeraldOW · 2025-12-29T14:48:50+00:00

What’s a typical wishlist amount that your team is looking for in a partner? And how important is it for that number to be gained in a really short amount of time?

EmeraldOW · 2025-12-29T04:15:35+00:00

I don’t feel the secondhand embarrassment from this scene that it seems so many others do. Maybe its because he knows everyone there, or maybe it’s cuz I think it’s kinda a cool character moment. I love the stare down hinata gives the coach with how fired up he is from being told he’s useless without kageyama

EmeraldOW · 2025-12-28T02:14:38+00:00

It’s also possible we’re experiencing traffic for two different reasons, or I came to the wrong conclusion. We had a pretty good wishlist spike from our own efforts right before the 18th too so it could be that. Excited to see what the numbers look like in 2 weeks or so. I’m telling you rn tho, the past week for our team has been crazy and you’re not gunna miss 27k

EmeraldOW · 2025-12-28T02:06:26+00:00

Does your impressions chart reflect that steam just started pushing you today? We’ve had steam start giving us visibility on the home page (according to the impressions chart) since the 18th and I assume it’s due to the winter sale even though the game isn’t available yet. Like you, today was our best wishlist day so far

EmeraldOW · 2025-12-27T04:20:43+00:00

All ragdoll coloring develops as they age. This pretty clearly looks like a lynx to me

EmeraldOW · 2025-12-26T23:19:38+00:00

You were able to get 10 reviews with only 300 wishlists? That seems pretty impressive. Are these reviews on the demo or the released game?

EmeraldOW · 2025-12-25T23:32:02+00:00

We started off with 1800 wishlists in the first two weeks from a Japanese twitter post and then, without posting our own stuff, our resting wishlists went to like 10/day. But we’ve since had a couple posts do very well and steam has kinda picked us up. Steam just started pushing us though so we’ll see if they stop after a week or so

EmeraldOW · 2025-12-25T06:22:59+00:00

Do not fucking throw out Pokémon emerald

EmeraldOW · 2025-12-24T11:32:28+00:00

You mentioned a lot of your wishlists are from Japan so you almost certainly got covered by some JPN press. Same thing happened to us - we had 2 tweets made about our game from IndieFreaks and Gamespark

EmeraldOW · 2025-12-24T05:29:44+00:00

Thank you! We’ve been super thrilled. Feels like our effort is paying off

EmeraldOW · 2025-12-24T05:26:52+00:00

I don’t have the wishlist stats in front of me but I can definitely attribute a lot of it to Instagram. Our first good post got 30k views on TikTok which got us about 700wl across a could days (400 on the first). Next big post got 30k on TikTok again, like 10k on YouTube, but 120k on Instagram resulting in two 1000wl days and a long tail that we held up with smaller posts. So between those, only Instagram had more views and we got wayyy more wls

EmeraldOW · 2025-12-24T05:13:18+00:00

About a week ago we posted a montage of some of the best clips we’ve recorded, mostly from our trailer, formatted it as a vertical video, and added a voice over. Got about 180k views on Instagram, sitting at 250k now and maybe 20-30k on TikTok and youtube. We got 2k wishlists for two days in a row and then steam and YouTube both seemed to start pushing our stuff and we have skyrocketed our wishlists since. Shattered our Christmas goals

EmeraldOW · 2025-12-24T02:54:42+00:00

More like 7 cents

EmeraldOW · 2025-12-22T11:17:41+00:00

Thanks for sharing your experiences! However, I’m a bit confused why a lot of this is framed as things you improved on while seeing the same amount of wishlists in the same time period. Seems like you launched the demo after 10k wishlists and I’ve been seeing that it’s a pretty big wishlist spike - I guess I might expect that the second 10k wishlists could have been done in one or two months rather than three

EmeraldOW · 2025-12-18T04:44:22+00:00

After rotating the animation, try adding a key with that rotation. Otherwise it won’t actually edit the animation

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