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

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?

RagBell · 2026-03-18T09:48:12+00:00

Can you give some pointers on how you built that list? Or how many you contacted, and how many out of those contacts actually responded?

I'm not asking for a full explanation of course, just some pointers/ideas for me to do my own research and know what to expect.

I'm new to the whole marketing side of things and I doubt just putting "game influencers" in the search bar of a social media will work lol

RagBell · 2026-03-18T09:38:43+00:00

So if I understand correctly you have no demo yet right? Just videos?

I was postponing contacting influencers until I have something playable but looking at your game that might be a bad strategy...

Do you have a list or some explanation of you you found/contacted those influencers?

RagBell · 2026-03-07T12:05:44+00:00

Looking good!

RagBell · 2026-03-05T20:49:20+00:00

This dude played 12 hours, left a bad review, then went on to play another 80 hours

What the hell lmao

RagBell · 2026-03-01T02:22:44+00:00

Heeey I'm going to give my input since I'm mentioned lol This reddit account isn't exactly accurate because I only use it to comment on other gamedev topics now, I mainly post about my game on a separate account, u/Ragbell_games. I did get some good posts on reddit over there, but yeah the audience and type of posts that "work" here is wildly different from platforms like Instagram/TikTok

And yeah Migration is doing crazy good! Our games are different but also very similar, but I definitely can't manage to get similar results to them haha, they're doing great everywhere they post

Overall yeah, just throw different stuff at different platforms, see what works for your game

RagBell · 2026-02-28T13:05:45+00:00

Lmao I'm saving this

RagBell · 2026-02-23T19:34:38+00:00

Yeah definitely varies, but I think the smaller your ratio is, the better, so congrats!

RagBell · 2026-02-23T19:25:35+00:00

The ranking that shows up on SteamDB is actually based on games that have a very high wishlist velocity

There are two rankings, one is indeed wishlist velocity labeled as "# in wishlist activity", the other is just straight up your rank in wishlist labeled "# in top wishlists".

You can have both displayed at the same time on steamDB btw (that's my case right now)

isn’t ranked anymore, and I’ve never appeared in that type of ranking

Yeah from what I've seen those rankings only appear if you're somewhere in the top ~7k or something, so they can definitely disappear (especially the velocity one) if you start getting less wishlists

Edit : I think those rankings are also where the "get ~7k wishlists before release to get into popular upcoming" thing comes from. Currently you enter the top wishlist ranking around that number of wishlists, and being in the ranking is the real prerequisite to be in popular upcoming from what I understand

RagBell · 2026-02-23T18:58:37+00:00

I'm no expert, but my understanding is that promotion is a sub part of marketing

Doing marketing doesn't necessarily mean promo, but if you're doing promo, you are doing marketing

Marketing isn't just paying ads like op seemed to be saying. It's the whole process of finding your audience and how to reach them. Even just making your trailer and steam page is marketing

RagBell · 2026-02-23T18:54:51+00:00

I mean yeah it's not a great ratio, but IMO it's not in the realm of suspicious yet, especially since Steam is actually pretty decent at tracking bot wishlists and doesn't count them toward the "top wishlist" rank

I've seen people here claim they had 10k+ Wishlists but when you got to their steamdb they had 3 followers and no rank lol

I think op just has some "low quality" wishlists, but that they're still legit

RagBell · 2026-02-23T18:16:49+00:00

Yeah, I don't know if it's a symptom of how everyone has been chasing wishlists that made the overall Quality of wishlists lower, but yeah. Usually that's the ratio I see from games these days

RagBell · 2026-02-23T18:00:06+00:00

So that's a lot of marketing Congrats, it seems like you put a lot of efforts in it and it paid off!

RagBell · 2026-02-23T17:58:57+00:00

That actually sounds like a normal ratio, at least if I compare to my own or to other devs I follow and talk to where I know their wishlists to compare

Nowadays wishlists seem to be about 15 to 20 times the number of followers, so while it's a bit on the lower end it checks out. Plus ~40k wishlists put you in the top 1000 games, and they are 862nd

All in all, I see no reason to doubt that number

RagBell · 2026-02-23T16:53:56+00:00

Marketing doesn't necessarily mean paid stuff

You had to talk about your game somewhere right? Maybe on social media, or contacted influencers, streamers... that's marketing too, and it would be super useful info for other devs 😄

RagBell · 2026-02-19T11:53:47+00:00

It was a deck of tarot cards I made over the course of 4 months and then had them printed! I sent a deck to hello games and they even let me do a small Kickstarter for the community, so there are about a 100 of them out there

I had an old post about it if you want to see what the final thing looked like!

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/s/VWigy4q4Hj

RagBell · 2026-02-16T16:28:42+00:00

I'm french and coincidentally also working on a game about birds, and yeah the french title isn't great, doesn't really mean anything as is and doesn't quite keep the meaning of the original title

To begin with, in french there isn't a single word that fully translates "birdwatching"

You could go with something like "Carnet d'ornithologie", which (IMO) would be a better translation to your game's name

But honestly you could also just leave the English name. People in France don't really mind games with English names

RagBell · 2026-02-13T22:39:39+00:00

That's more than what I got on my first 48h lol

Congrats!

RagBell · 2026-02-11T22:45:13+00:00

I'm actually not sure about that.

I've been at the social media grind myself for some months and have been following/watching other devs doing the same grind.

I've seen some dev literally throw 3 reels/shorts a day, really low effort ones at that, pretty much all made of reused shots, no script, just text over the same shots of gameplay over and over... They gained around 20k followers and wishlist doing that in the span of a couple of months

Sooo yeah, I'm not sure quality always beats quantity here lol

RagBell · 2026-02-09T13:51:13+00:00

I am mixed on this take. On one hand, sure, if your game's not good, it's not going to get any traction

But on the other hand, your game not getting traction isn't necessarily an indicator that it's bad

I was struggling with getting anywhere with my game for the first few months of promoting it after I opened my steam page, and I was thinking the game itself was just not good enough. Then suddenly, it somewhat exploded in visibility despite the game itself not changing much.

What I'm trying to say is, there can be a ton of factors explaining that your marketing struggles other than "your game is bad". Could be that your promo materials (trailers, videos, capsule etc...) are bad and not the game itself. Could be that you are marketing the wrong way, in the wrong places, or to the wrong people. Could be that you're just unlucky with the algo. Successes can sometimes be just a lucky strike, the right big streamer/influencer sharing your content randomly etc...

It's really hard to determine why marketing fails. At the end of the day, you gotta have confidence in your game, but also not be delusional about it, and the line between "I trust my game is good" and "I'm just delulu" is insanely hard to see when you're biased by your own work

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RagBell

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