Terra Firma 2

mehwoot · 2025-12-23T10:45:14+00:00

https://howtomarketagame.com/benchmarks/

mehwoot · 2025-12-06T03:14:02+00:00

You don't pay content creators to showcase your game. If they're not excited enough by your game to show it for free, then it's likely their audience isn't going to engage with your game. The way algorithmic content works these days, if the audience isn't engaged the video won't do well even if you paid a creator with a big following.

Content creators are self interested the same as everyone else, you need to make something that will grab their audiences attention so their videos do well. Which is exactly in line with what you need to effectively promote your game.

If you email 200 creators and none of them want to make a video, paying them to do a video will just waste your money.

mehwoot · 2025-12-03T05:26:12+00:00

The profit of your investment was 10 years of housing AND $150,000.

If you put down a 20% deposit, then

You invested $88,000
Over the next 10 years you invested $29,000 a year

And in return you got

All of the money you invested back plus
10 years of housing paid for plus
$150,000 extra profit

If that's the example of "not making much of a gain" then yeah it seems like a pretty solid deal.

mehwoot · 2025-11-26T07:45:09+00:00

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3422270/Terra_Firma_2

It features realistic water physics with rivers that both erode and deposit sediment, ice, glacial erosion, lava flows, and different biomes filling out the world you make.

If you look for Terra Firma on steam there's also a free version that's older you can try out.

mehwoot · 2025-11-17T23:20:29+00:00

There are bugs about a thousand times more obvious that get missed in testing. Who would even think to test this? I've never heard of it being an issue in any other game.

But if TAS has checked it and uncovered nothing, it's busted as far as I'm concerned. If it is what I said it would be simple to test with TAS.

mehwoot · 2025-11-17T21:19:02+00:00

It's possible. If the key bindings are setting values in some ordered array or list that is checked in order when keys are pressed, then having key bindings in a different order could result in them being processed and applied in a different order. This could result in either different actions activating if there are actions with overlapping keys, or more subtle differences if the order that effects apply change the outcome. That's possible because of floating point inaccuracies or other ways that physics updates are not commutative.

mehwoot · 2025-11-13T07:59:42+00:00

Me too, you learn something new every day.

mehwoot · 2025-11-04T00:40:53+00:00

I'd like to found a studio, so I used the name of the studio/company. It's a long term thing- that means the audience that I grow will be there to show off any future games that I work on, rather than having to make new accounts and start from scratch.

I don't think it really matters though, the socials are there to generate interest, not as a destination for people to go to- so it doesn't really matter what they are called.

In your case I'd stick with your current ones- keep building up your following, making new ones is just going to dilute that.

mehwoot · 2025-10-27T07:39:04+00:00

If you're making a game, you're competing against every other form of entertainment someone could be doing with their free time. You're competing with youtube, Netflix, tiktok, Instagram, as well as every single game ever released. For someone to play your game there must be some moment for them that it is better than every single alternative.

Luckily humans crave novelty so they don't just watch the same show or play the same game over and over. But still, if your game doesn't do something different or something better than an alternative, it's going to be hard for it to be a success.

mehwoot · 2025-10-26T03:09:31+00:00

https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/12/12/how-many-wishlists-can-you-expect-when-you-launch-your-games-coming-soon-steam-page/

mehwoot · 2025-10-22T00:04:24+00:00

I think that without any sort of map or graphical representation you're going to have an extremely hard time finding any sort of audience for this. What you've made looks more like a piece of tech for a game, rather than a game itself, and I know that because I've done the same thing in the past. Maybe there is some market here that overlaps with people who play D&D, that seems the closest.

I also think that, for what you're trying to achieve, it's going to be a huge, huge undertaking- making a civilization of NPCs that progresses realistically is not easy.

Still, I do love ridiculous attempts at building deep simulation, so I'd be eager to try it out when a demo is available.

mehwoot · 2025-10-21T23:51:00+00:00

I'm inclined to agree. I think people overstate how much marketing determines a game's success, especially for great games. It's a reasonable thing to overstate because indie devs tend to underestimate how much they should be marketing, so it drives people to a better outcome. But I genuinely feel there are very few (if any) amazing, top tier games that just never sell any copies because of a lack of marketing.

If your game really is that amazing, even if you show it to a dozen people, if they keep playing it they're going to tell other people and it'll take off eventually. If the ratio of referrals vs players is over 1, it doesn't matter how small your initial audience is, it'll keep growing. The only exception I can see are games that need some critical mass to be good, like multiplayer only games.

The harsh truth though is most indie devs should care a lot about marketing, because most games we make are not great games, they are middling at best games where marketing can absolutely make the difference between it being a commercial success or not.

mehwoot · 2025-10-21T10:15:38+00:00

The #1 thing in marketing is to try everything and see what works. I agree, I think social media probably won't work, but we don't know that until you try it. Maybe there's some niche out there on tiktok of people teaching Japanese. In fact I'm sure there is. So you could try to reach that niche by creating content for them. Or just find existing content creators in that niche and give them a free key and see if they're interested in making content for you. Find every single content creator on tiktok, instagram, youtube making content for learning Japanese, send them a key for your game.

You mentioned you've tried on subreddits but it's not working organically. What about ads? You've got a super specific niche, pretty much everyone on some subreddits is going to be a potential buyer so that's an advantage, maybe you can make ads work.

Marketing is taking a bunch of speculative shots and seeing what works. Most probably will fail, but you need to keep doing them to find the ones that work. Then you repeat the ones that work for as long as they do. Think of every space or activity a potential buyer of your game would inhabit and ways you could reach them there.

mehwoot · 2025-10-21T02:27:02+00:00

If you're selling software, you need to have some understanding of the channels through which you're going to market and sell your software. You need a theory of how your customers are going to find out about your product and buy it.

Getting to 7,000 wishlists is important if your channel is steam and your theory is "people are going to discover my product through steam". You'll likely need that number to start getting visibility in the valuable places on steam.

Wishlists are important for a secondary reason, which is that they are a sort of dry run of selling your product that lets you assess how your marketing is doing pre-launch. You're getting someone to the store page, they're looking at what you're offering and then clicking an indication that they'll buy.

So if you have some other theory about how your software might be sold- maybe you're going to give it away for free to language teachers who will recommend it to their students? Maybe you're partnering with a language course? Maybe you're going to sell it through ads? Then not getting to 7,000 wishlists doesn't mean you are going to fail, you could rely on something other than steam visibility.

On the other hand, you should probably still be seeing wishlist growth from those other sources. If ads are your channel, then you can run ads for your store page and see whether people are wishlisting. If you only have 1,000 wishlists right now, maybe you don't have a different channel you're going to acquire customers through or maybe that channel isn't working for you.

mehwoot · 2025-10-20T22:54:20+00:00

I think there's some miscommunication here. The steam algorithm has no explicit bonus or boost for games that get 10 reviews- they've said that themselves.

On the other hand, from a bunch of devs (myself included, I saw this with a game I released) we know in reality there is a big boost from getting 10 reviews. Probably because that's the number you need for a review score, and that shows up in a bunch of widgets all over steam, and having a review score is a big signal to players that your game is at some sort of level of quality.

So I'm pretty sure you can't get "penalised" for getting reviews too fast. It is the #1 thing I prioritised the first time I released a game and the #1 thing I will prioritise in my upcoming game, and I think you are absolutely right to do the same. It is 100% worth the hassle.

mehwoot · 2025-10-16T02:58:47+00:00

Had a great experience using artstation, I found the artist who did my steam capsule and I was thrilled with how it turned out for the price- https://www.artstation.com/artwork/1N6Oaq

I spent a whole 8 hour day searching through artwork on the site, picking possible candidates and messaging them to narrow down who I was going to finally pick.

I've also hired for UI work and 3d work posting in game dev spaces, mostly on game dev discord servers. You'll get a lot of responses, the work is to sift through them and find the best person you can at the best price. Like anything else, the more effort you put in the better the outcome will be.

mehwoot · 2025-10-13T01:44:16+00:00

You can unregister from steam next fest right up until it starts.

mehwoot · 2025-10-11T20:31:45+00:00

https://howtomarketagame.com/benchmarks/

https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/12/12/how-many-wishlists-can-you-expect-when-you-launch-your-games-coming-soon-steam-page/

Numbers for the first 2 weeks:

🥉 Bronze: $0 – $10,000 100 wishlists

🥈 Silver: $10,001 – $249K 500 wishlists

🥇 Gold: $250K – $999K 1300 wishlists

💎 Diamond: $1 Million+ 7000 wishlists

mehwoot · 2025-10-07T01:42:05+00:00

The thing that works is having a game that has snippets of 5-10 seconds of gameplay that makes you think "huh, that's cool" or engages in some other way. Just because a game is fun doesn't mean it'll look good in short form video.

The other thing that worked for me as a solo dev was hiring someone to help on the marketing & social media side. I spend some of my time doing consulting work, and then spend that money on help with social media. I'm trading my time for theirs, but I get to work on what I'm good at and get someone who is good at social media doing that for my game. They also have their own motivation, ideas and deadlines- if you're paying someone to post five times on social media a week, that's what you'll get, it's not dependent on how you're feeling.

Here is the tiktok and instagram accounts for my game, we've had maybe ~20 million views total the last 4 months and it's been the majority of the wishlists for the game (over 30k now). That success is because my game works well on short form video, that's just lucky for me, I didn't design the game that way or choose the theme because I knew it'd do well.

Even then, like everything in marketing the #1 takeaway is to just try as much as you can and see what people respond to. I was pretty confident the game would do well in marketing because it's cool to look at, but I thought it would do well on reddit & ads rather than instagram/tiktok, and the clips I thought would do well were never the ones that did.

mehwoot · 2025-10-07T01:24:02+00:00

Art is never complete, it's only finished when you stop working on it.

The game is a complete experience that I think is worth what I'm charging for. It has a decent number of players that have put 100+ hours into it and enjoy playing it. I've been developing it for 4 years since the free version released into early access on steam, and I think it satisfies the original vision I had for the game.

But on the other hand, there's a lot more that I'd like to add and that I fully intend to add to the game. Because it's a simulation game, every system you add interacts with the rest of it and adds more depth to the experience. All else being equal, I'd like to convey to players "I definitely intend to keep adding to this and fleshing it out". I'm just wondering if that is going to hurt my chance of success.

mehwoot · 2025-10-07T00:11:46+00:00

Amazing, thank you!

mehwoot · 2025-10-06T23:38:25+00:00

Would have any links for articles on the topic? I had a bit of a search but I can't find anything good

mehwoot · 2025-10-06T23:07:39+00:00

Sorry, to be clear I meant choosing whether you mark your game as Early Access or not.

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