I had released Home is Where One Starts in May of 2015, and it did... OK. It was a simple exploration game that took 30 minutes to complete. I did no marketing whatsoever, expecting Steam to do that for me, and I sold 1,000 units at $2.70 a pop for the week. Which was great for a hobby project, don't get me wrong! But you can't raise kids or pay a mortgage with it. It was bonus income that allowed me to build a new computer and save a bit for a future game, but that was it.
I think a lot of devs back then came to same conclusion I did: the age of a game automatically finding an audience was over. Everyone called it the "Indiepocalypse", but in retrospect, it was a natural side effect of the democratization of game development. Unity, GameMaker, and Unreal Engine had made it possible to release a commercial game by yourself. It still blows my mind when I think about it. My first game was a super simple, short experience made with Playmaker (i.e. no code) without a team or publisher, and it made me about $10,000 lifetime total. That was impossible a few years prior.
But of course, the marketing thing was a bummer. It wasn't until I watched a talk by the creator of Hacknet, Matt Trobbiani, that something clicked.
Seriously, you gotta watch this.
Of course Steam still marketed games. But you had to prove yourself first. Screen real estate on the front page was finite and valuable. If a game no one was interested in was taking up a spot on the front page of Steam, it was costing Valve hundreds of thousands of dollars. Why take a risk on an unknown indie if they could promote GTA IV on sale again and make a guaranteed profit?
For my second game, The First Tree, I told myself I would prove to Valve my game was worth promoting. It meant building an audience over the course of a year. It meant gaining enough die hard fans who would buy my game the first hour it came out, so the Steam algorithm would say "hmmm, what's this thing over here? Wow, 550 units sold in three hours, interesting. Let's put it in the New and Trending tab and see how it does." Little did I know how important that Steam marketing would be. It was quite literally the difference between financial success or failure.
Proving yourself is how you can secure a spot in the coveted Daily Deal slot
There's a lot left to the story, but I'll save that for another post. I also wanted to share a Game Dev Unlocked update: all of my videos for the early access release are FINISHED! I'm preparing the website, Discord stuff, game asset bonuses, workbooks, etc., and I'm looking forward to opening it up to you guys. Thanks for tuning in, I'm excited to show you all the stuff coming soon. Right now I'm getting ready to board a plane to Disney World (really), but just know March is gonna be awesome!