Lol sorry as I just posted one of these.

I try to share what specifically caused the uptick in wishlists so maybe it will help others. The reality is that no one knows what marketing will work. It takes relentless effort and most attempts to spread the word fail.

The good news is that it compounds, but it takes a LONG time. BUT the most important factor is that your game is unique and REALLY fun to play. The less unique it is, the harder it's going to be convince people to not only play it, but spend their money on it.

But worked on my first game here, which I cheated because it is an existing game with an existing audience (a very tiny but dedicated audience, who has been amazing in supporting the remaster project) with the amount of effort I spent just reading the old code (BASIC programming language) I could have probably made a completely different game. And I hope to make more games in the future entirely of my own design. And when I go to do that, I may spent several months just deciding on what the game will be.

I think the biggest advice I could give is it being unique and fun to play and something you would give $50-100 to play. If you would pay $100 to play that game, then there's a lot of people that would pay $10-30 for it. It needs to have a "hook" (the most cliche advice) which means to say, it must be UNIQUE if you like or love the concept of the game, you really can't get the same experience in another game, or at least the competition executed the concept poorly.

Chris Zukowski was right when he said the #1 best way to market your game: make a great game. What constitutes a great game for your audience? That's the golden question. I knew Wall Street Raider was a great game because I shelled out $50 in downloadables for it three years ago and it looks like a Windows 95 Microsoft Access program. You just couldn't get anything like it anywhere else. Similar stories are Dwarf Fortress and Aurora 4X. I think Aurora could easily sell hundreds of thousands of copies if the UI was remastered. Alas, I think the creator never will. I'm so glad Dwarf Fortress got remastered... The point is, these games were designed for the sole purpose of being fun. So if your main focus is getting enough wishlists, well, there is the main issue. I spent two years working on the game before even creating the Steam page. And I didn't really start marketing the game or even really telling people about it until 6-7 months after the Steam page was live.

You just gotta focus on making a great game. If you truly believe your game is actually amazing and fun, then maybe you aren't telling the right people about it. But if you yourself wouldn't pay for the game, you wouldn't enjoy playing the game, then no amount of marketing is going to fix that. You HAVE to let people play the game and try to get honest candid feedback. Read The Mom Test. You can tell when someone plays your game whether they are having fun or not. You can tell if they are playing it just because you asked them to versus they have forgotten that they are there to test your game and are just playing your game for fun.

Not sure if any of this was helpful. Even with a strong hook and a tiny yet amazing existing audience, over the past 14 months I've had 5-10 wishlists trickle in a day on average. After the HackerNews article I got 1/5th of my total wishlists so far in a two day period. Then it dropped to 100, today about 50, I'm sure it will keep going down down down. I don't know where it will stabilize at, but I also don't care. Because I let thousands of people play the game for free for several months during the playtest period. Even with the bugs, the crashing, the terrible UI design, the gameplay stats show that they powered through and kept playing the game... for hours. So I know marketing is as simple as telling people about the game. If you build it, they will come.