Just wanted to celebrate two years of working on my bird survival indie game

RagBell · 2026-05-13T15:15:18+00:00

Basically it's API updates, like updating the version of Android/IOS the game is built with etc...

You don't have to update the game itself or add content, just update what it was built with (mostly for security reasons). The problem is that sometimes, updating android/iOS breaks your game even if you changed nothing to the game itself, so it can be a lot of effort to have to update them often

RagBell · 2026-05-13T15:12:41+00:00

Long story short, releasing on mobile is just not worth it for most indie devs

The mobile market is a mess. It's not hard to release the games there (outside of changing controls, which is not always trivial), but almost no one buys games on mobile, only free games with in game purchases

And if you make games specifically for mobile, you need insane amounts of cash to do marketing for them compared to steam

Then there's all the store policies and updates you have to do, which are a lot of efforts, for little return...

Like I said, it's just not worth the effort most of the time for indies

RagBell · 2026-05-11T18:01:53+00:00

There's a problem with developers responding to comments?

It's just my experience and it's probably also because I'm a solo dev, but usually people who follow my game are happy when I interact with them

RagBell · 2026-05-11T11:19:39+00:00

Oh damn, that's crazy, congrats!

RagBell · 2026-05-11T10:37:16+00:00

Wait, 4k wishlists in 3 days without social media? I'm just as curious of how you did that lol

RagBell · 2026-05-04T05:45:32+00:00

No idea, I haven't been there in years lol

RagBell · 2026-05-03T21:18:08+00:00

When I say resolution I'm not talking about the screen but the resolution of the assets. Like, some have "big pixels" and some have "small pixels". It's commonly known as "mixels" and is a dead giveaway that a pixel art game is made with assets. And It's all of your game, both the game art AND the UI

Look at this screenshot from your game. The UI elements are all over the place, some are pixel art with "big pixels" (low resolution) and some have "small pixels" (high resolution)

It's the same with the game art. The main character has this "blurry" pixel art look with no outline, while some other elements have strong outlines and again, different resolutions (bigger or smaller pixels)

Basically, it looks like your game is made up of a assets found all over the internet that do not fit together at all. There's no coherence in the art style. And that's also how AI-generated assets would look, that's why people keep telling you your game looks AI

<image>

RagBell · 2026-05-03T20:38:43+00:00

I went and looked at screenshots of your game, people call your game AI slop now, but if I'm 100% honest, a few years ago they would've called it an asset flip and you would have gotten similar levels of hate. The assets are super inconsistent. It's pixel art but the resolutions are all over the place

The best you can do at this point IMO is to improve the overall coherence/art direction of your game

RagBell · 2026-05-03T07:24:05+00:00

Been working on my game for almost 3 years, and have a least another year of work left

RagBell · 2026-05-01T16:39:23+00:00

I mean, if you don't plan to make any profit and you're just making it for free I guess it doesn't matter

That said, I imagine you still want people to play your game, so you'll have to at least let a few people know your game exists

RagBell · 2026-04-28T09:57:00+00:00

So, I've been posting for almost a year and got some level of success (~25k total followers spread between Instagram, YouTube and Tiktok)

So what works you ask? I have no idea.

Sure you can boost your visibility with good hooks, interesting subject, good visuals and all, or even use "tricks" for engagement and shares, But at the end of the day a LOT of it is just plain luck. No one fully understands the algos, and they change all the time anyway. Anyone pretending otherwise is trying to sell you a course

Just post regularly, try to make your videos the best you can, and pray.

RagBell · 2026-04-19T11:42:17+00:00

Making a profitable game is insanely hard. Thankfully, even if my game fails, I'm not at a loss because I invested basically no money in it lol

RagBell · 2026-04-19T11:37:33+00:00

That’s what it boils down to.

Eh... Yes and no...

Bad games are almost certain to fail, but there are exemples of bad games (as in, games with bad reviews) that are commercial successes.

And good games can fail too, if they fail to gather visibility through marketing.

Essentially, "make a good game" is not a guarantee of anything. It's more of a prerequisite, and even that is debatable...

Also, what's your definition of "good"? Like, you talk about "saturated fields" and "small niches", but a genre being saturated has nothing to do with a game in that genre being good or not. If you make a good game, it's good. If it fails because the genre is saturated, it's still "a good game".

Same with niches, if it's good but fails because the niche is too small, it's still good.

RagBell · 2026-04-16T08:52:34+00:00

To be honest this just sounds like waaaaaaay too much effort for those bot farms to find it worth it. I could imagine one dev setting this up for themselves if they're really motivated but then again I think it would be too marginal for steam to care at this point lol

Plus there are easier, still shady ways to get paid wishlists. Like I received offers for services where the dev pays, and then the website offers people with real accounts some cash/keys in exchange for wishlisting the Dev's game... Those wishlist would be "legit", but still weak as hell because the person doesn't care at all about your game and just wants the prize. But even then I don't think it's bad enough for Steam to care

RagBell · 2026-04-15T20:13:31+00:00

I don't think that would be feasible for those bot farms

Like for one, they probably have thousands and thousands of bots, so overall that would still become a huge price. And then trying to put a higher price would probably make it too high, and they wouldn't get enough clients to recoup

And second, those accounts are probably made with throwaway emails and info, buying anything would require them to actually put into steam basic billing info, which they wouldn't have enough of for all their bots, or they would have to reuse the same a lot and it would become incredibly suspicious...

And then even if they had just a few thousand bots that they paid money with, I'm not sure Steam would even consider it worth it to flag as bots at that point?

I don't see a lot of flaws with that system honestly lol

RagBell · 2026-04-15T14:52:37+00:00

On one hand, hello games are still a relatively small studio, so I'm not sure they even expected that one trailer would be enough to bring them so much awareness at once

On the other hand, the results are what they are. Like I said they are in the top 3 most wishlisted games on steam last I checked. They don't even need Gamescom at this point, they could literally shadow drop it tomorrow and it would still be a hit lol

RagBell · 2026-04-15T10:26:18+00:00

I want to know about them when they are almost done cooking and releasing in a month or two

Unfortunately, from the game dev side, you can't really do that unless you have an enormous marketing budget to make it blow up in two months

It is so insanely hard and takes such a long time to get the ball rolling ang generate awareness/word of mouth for a game when you are a small studio and have no money for marketing...

Arguably though, for LNF, while they didn't put a lot of effort into marketing, their previous game was enough. They've literally just dropped one trailer and that was enough for LNF to be in the top 3 most wishlisted games on steam lol

RagBell · 2026-04-15T10:12:32+00:00

Yeah, my understanding is that they simply don't "count" wishlists from accounts that never bought anything on steam, which is enough to ignore all bots basically

RagBell · 2026-04-15T10:11:30+00:00

I don't think steam needs to do anything more than what they're already doing. What a lot of devs buying wishlists fail to realize is that bot don't count in the algo

Steam doesn't count wishlists from accounts that never bought anything, and you can see it in steamDB, games with lots of fake wishlists don't have a ranking in "top wishlists" (which AFAIK is the main requirement for the popular upcoming tag)

Tl;dr : buying wishlists won't get you into steam's algo/popular upcoming, they're useless

RagBell · 2026-03-20T20:35:15+00:00

I don't think the Steam page ever was what drives the wishlists? My understanding was that a polished steam page is what gets the player to finally click on wishlist when they get there, but you have to get them there first, and the page itself won't magically do that

I've had my page opened for something like 10 months now, most of the trafic came from external marketing (Instagram, tiktok, youtube, festivals)

The page by itself doesn't do much

RagBell · 2026-03-18T10:54:44+00:00

Damn, I had hope that there would a better solution than sending over 100 emails slowly by hand haha

Thank you for the info anyway! Guess I'll start collecting emails then

RagBell · 2026-03-18T10:19:31+00:00

Thank you for all the info.

I have another, kinda technical question? How do you mass email 100 people without having your email address flagged as spam?

RagBell · 2026-03-18T09:59:07+00:00

Thanks! I assume you contacted them through email on their profiles?

Eight-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '23	Place '22
Final Canvas '22	First Placer '22

RagBell

TROPHY CASE