Small game, big fest.
This blog post is a bit of a sequel to A beginners journey through indie marketing. In that post I talked about what I'd learned about how to market indie games as well as the small amount of marketing we did for our first two games.
Today I'll share the exciting results of our first Steam Festival; Debut Fest.
Pre-festival
Debut Fest was another festival found through the How to Market A Game Discord community + spreadsheet. It was a festival aimed at studios who had or would be publishing their first game on Steam from 2024 to 2025 (or later). It was shared in the Discord on July 23rd with a submission deadline of of August 1st. It's a short window for submissions, only 9 days. It wouldn't have been a challenge except that they wanted a presskit as part of the submission.
I had already put together a presskit for Precinct 27 a few months ago as a web dev exercise. So I at least had a template ready to go. So gathered up some art assets, updated our logo and got the presskit of Love in the Time of Spellphage ready.
We submitted a request to join a few days before the deadline and waited. Rejection emails aren't common but acceptance ones are. The HTMAG Discord was pretty chatty from the end of July to the start of August with people asking if anyone had heard anything back or if anyone knew any more information about the festival itself. Debut Fest had never run before, this was the first time it was organized, so no one new what to expect in terms of featuring or coverage.
A few days before the submissions closed someone said that they were accepted because the event had shown up on their Steam account (Steam provides a calendar view of upcoming and ongoing festivals you're a part of). No acceptance email but if you see an event show up in your calendar it means that you're game has been included. So I logged into Steam and saw the event was also listed in ours!
The festival
No more information was learned about Debut Fest until it started. I spent the day monitoring the Discord and refreshing our Steam store page. This was our first festival and I felt like I had to be doing /something/.
The event went live at 2PM EDT.
And it was here that we saw how many games had been accepted. Over 1000.
Steam Festivals are one of the best ways to get discovered. They take your game from the pool of 132,358 (and more) games that are already on Steam and present them with a fraction of that amount. Making it so that a regular person browsing a festival is much more likely to actually see your game. But 1000 is still a lot of games to be just 1 of. People in the Discord were getting worried about this number, knowing that the odds weren't in anyone's favour. Another complication was that Debut Fest didn't have front page coverage (It wasn't promoted on the Steam landing page that everyone sees when they launch Steam).
There were two other festivals going on at the same time, Tiny Teams(7th-14th) and Wholesome Games Celebration (7ths-14th), and Tiny Teams had front page coverage. Debut only ran from the 7th to the 11th. So there was a lot going on on Steam that weekend.
Due to all this chatter I kept my expectations low on wishlist numbers. I scrolled through the games on display on the Debut Fest sales page and never even managed to find Love in the Time of Spellphage. Making it seem unlikely that others would either.
It turned out that Debut Fest wasn't going to be our only exposure that weekend.
Concurrent events
We were interviewed for the Baby Ghosts newsletter introducing studios of Cohort 5 the same week as Debut Fest. Kind of magical timing to have two marketing beats happen at the same time!
The newsletter interview: Love in the Time of Witchcraft - Meeting Cohort 5.
Baby Ghosts also shared the newsletter across socials and gave us a shout out on Instagram and TikTok! This is a big deal because we don't even make our own short form videos because I resist using those apps as much as I can even though I know TikTok can actually be decent for promoting video games ;_;
Festival results
Steam has a very helpful dropdown to show you some stats from specific sale pages. So I can see how many impressions we got from the page and what percentage of exposure for our game that was against other sources.
Unfortunately Steam doesn't tell you if a wishlist came from a specific page. You get your wishlists and you're happy about it. But given that we average 1 wishlist a day before Debut Fest it's pretty easy to assume that this increase is due to the festival exposure. 46% of our traffic was still direct navigation, some of which could be coming from the Baby Ghosts posts.
Overall, 25 wishlists in 4 days is a huge get for us. This boost was bigger than our launch and getting our friends to wishlist the game. Now we know that all these new wishlists are likely strangers who have never heard of us!
Conclusion
Between this being our first festival and Steam releasing hourly wishlists updates, it was an exciting few days of logging in and watching number go up.
We don't have any other confirmed festivals coming up, mostly waiting on news from 4 other submissions. We really want to wait for at least 100 wishlists before releasing Spellphage (which is nothing in the grand Steam of things, but feels like a nice goal for a debut, niche game).
Would love to share what the average has returned to post-festival but 4x Fest started which has possibly paused wishlists again? My chart seems stuck on August 12th...
Fateweaver development is still in full swing and taking up most of our time. Big deadline at the end of August and September so we have a lot keeping us busy.