My Game Got 5,000 Wishlists in 3 Big Jumps

This is the story of implementing what I've learned into a gridless, interactive, world-building sandbox game called Minor Deity. Minor Deity on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3876240/Minor_Deity/ Minor Deity Discord Server: https://discord.gg/2NEb4HxwhF 3,000 wishlists in two weeks. That’s more than my first game got in a year. And that was just one of three big jumps that took Minor Deity past 5,000 wishlists. One year ago, I launched the Steam Page of my second game. After my experience developing, marketing and publishing my first game, World Turtles, I deliberately decided that I would take a different approach this time around. Here’s why and how it turned out so far. For World Turtles, I was very excited about all the new things I was learning, and shared my work often. Let’s take Reddit as an example, since that’s where I was most active. I probably posted something at least once a week, to various subreddits. And it wasn’t just hit and run posts – I always engaged with whoever was there and showed an interest in the communities I was posting in. While this was fun for the time, it also took a lot of time and was at least a bit spammy, although I did try to avoid places where my posts weren’t welcome. Here you can see the wishlist graph for World Turtles’ first year. The big jump was my first Steam Next Fest – in those days you could participate more than once. That changed soon after, but I got a bonus entry. If we ignore that jump, you can see the slow burn of dozens of mostly Reddit posts accumulating about 2,000 wishlists over a year. So, this time around I decided I would spend more time improving the game, and only go for larger marketing beats once I had something more impactful to show. 00:00 My First Two Games 00:28 My Previous Approach 01:24 My New Approach: The First Event 02:09 The Second Event 02:52 The Third, and Biggest, Event 03:55 The Future