An increasing number of players on Steam

[Soulrender]

I'm struggling with a problem like million of indie game devs, not enough players. I'm thinking of posting my project on steam, I know that posting the game there will require a "small" fee, If I recall it's 100$, so my question is, is it worth to release it on steam?

 

[Indinera]

What's your game?
It costs zero to release it on my website

 

[caethyril]

I think it's more about visibility: people need to know your game exists to even consider playing it. Steam has a lot of users, but also a lot of products.

 

[Soulrender]

@Indinera - here's the forum link and itch.io link however I'm still working on it (even now while I'm writing this post).
@caethyril - I know about that, and I'm considering it in risk calculations, but this is the major problem, the visibility you mentioned.

 

[Indinera]

Looks great and incidentally, possibly a good fit to my website.
How long is it?

 

[Soulrender]

@Indinera, at this moment (patch 1.1H) gameplay, is approximately 4 hours long (5 full chapters), but in the evening I'll be releasing patch 1.1I which contains non-linear dialogues, so gameplay will extend, maybe 6~7 hours, or to just 5 hours long if someone skips optional dialogues.

 

[Indinera]

Not bad at all.
For steam will be definitely enough.

 

[Soulrender]

@Indinera so you say it's worth a try?

 

[Indinera]

Definitely
(but of course better release on my website first )

 

[Soulrender]

I shall not hesitate to do so

 

[peq42_]

I'm struggling with a problem like million of indie game devs, not enough players. I'm thinking of posting my project on steam, I know that posting the game there will require a "small" fee, If I recall it's 100$, so my question is, is it worth to release it on steam?

The more places you publish it on, the more possible players. Trick is: you gotta have patience and persistence.

Even Minecraft, the most popular game in history, took an entire year after release to start gaining popularity.

 

[Soulrender]

@peq42_ You're right about Minecraft, but patience is what I'm running short on recently.

 

[woootbm]

No idea if my results are typical, but I got up to like 19k downloads on Steam. Granted, my game is free. But I also did like zero promotion and am a nobody. Also, it's my first game on the platform.

I consider $100 to be crazy cheap. If this was some fly by night rando platform I'd understand the hesitation, but we're talking about the absolute biggest PC platform out there. For reference, my understanding is that it costs several thousand dollars to release a game on a major console (I've heard as high as $50k, but that might be an old number as all three have made easier paths for indies to get on).

 

[Arctica]

Obscure games, especially RPGs, tend to gain traction by word of mouth as well. Gamers talking to other gamers about X game they played and it's like "ohh never heard of X (while talking about the big game the whole galaxy is playing), maybe I should check it out", of course as a dev you got no control over whether or not that happens.

 

[AeroFunk80]

I'm working on my first commercial game too, but my focus right now is putting out my free demo. I'm going to use that as a way to get an idea if people will like it, dislike, etc. How my demo does will determine if I actually make my game commercial. If I do, I will 100% be putting it on Steam and Itch. Still looking at other sites. I'm pretty far away from releasing it, though. I still need to put my demo out LOL

 

[Ellenor]

Do you use twitter or reddit?
Both are pretty good to get a buzz

 

[Soulrender]

@Ellenor, No. I don't have one, but It's hard for me to imagine this:
- I'm registering an account on Twitter and the first thing I write "Hey! Check it out, I'm making an RPG game!!". Is that supposed to work? Of course, I appreciate you answering my problem and I'll consider it too, but as I said, I don't see how it would work.

 

[Ellenor]

Well, On twitter you just post screenshots or anything releated to the game, then hashtag it with things like #gamedev #pixelart

So something like.
"I've been working on this the entire week"
*picture*
#gamedev #screenshotsaturday
To try demo go here > link

People then can find you based on those tags.
My team use it and our reach depends a lot of what we post obviously but it is anything from a few thousand up to 100k but it can take a while to get the numbers up.

Our first post on our team page was the video of the earlier version of our game.
So yeah it was kinda like you said "HEY CHECK US OUT!" =P

 

[Soulrender]

@Ellenor Please note I'm a man of old dates so those social media portals are something new for me. Honestly, I didn't know it works that way... Quite interesting. Slightly offtopic, I was wondering for quite a lot of time why people post in their socials keywords with # at the beginning. I always thought a good choice of keywords in tag fields would be enough. Huh, and I thought, an old prick won't learn anything new...

 

[Soulrender]

@Ellenor Your advice with Twitter is slowly taking effects!