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My first indie game was highly reviewed on Steam but sales were declining. A whole 3 years after launch, I committed to a marketing strategy that netted me 10+ Million Views on social media and new 40,000 sales. However, the exact same strategy is failing to produce good results for my second game, and I think I know why... My first game, Spellmasons, is about spellcrafting, similar to Noita, but turn-based and multiplayer. It's rather unique to the point where Steam's "More like this" panel on my store page doesn't really make any sense. Over 18 months, I learned a ton about video editing, script writing, pacing, scene composition, etc which lead to several viral shorts on the big 3 social media platforms and all those sales I mentioned earlier. When I was ready to market my second game, "Some of You May Die": a roguelike autobattler, I applied the same strategy to my videos. But the average views for my content are ~20,000 as opposed to the millions I got with Spellmasons. 20k is nothing to be ungrateful for of course, but I was shocked to see the exact same strategy perform so much worse on a game with the same art style. So here's what I've learned and what I'm going to do next: Every game has an "edge" - something special about it that becomes it's selling point and the primary motivation for customers to check it out. For Spellmasons, that edge is spellcrafting, which is very visual and satisfying. You get to see the spell being built and then see it trigger as the effects pass through the chain of linked spells. For Some of You May Die, it's an intricate autobattler with a deep synergy system but these synergies are not very visual. Sure I can show how my hero has wicked fast attack speed or is contaminating all nearby enemies with poison but it doesn't really carry the viewer along. There's no visual build up and payoff and this makes it really hard to make compelling short form content. Also, the Autobattler genre, by it's nature, is rather chaotic and inconsistent. My scenes are a bunch of heroes fighting in various configurations. It's hard for the viewer to focus in on one thing that's happening even if I reduce the number of heroes on screen. So I have to try something radically different. I've learned that content being legible is super important (viewers have to be able to know - at a glace - what is happening) and it's also extremely important for scenes to pull viewers along as they watch something unfold. Watching a spell play out does this. Watching a frantic battle with 8 heroes does not. These two aspects of good content are kind of elusive. It's not as simple as balancing audio or having good framing. You have to get creative with it. So here's an example of this principle in action: my most successful "Some of You May Die" shortform video earned 143,644 views while the others do ~20,000 views. That's a 7x outlier. I believe the reason is legibility and action that pulls the viewer along. In that short, I explain how the Summoner is a unique hero that creates units the whole time he's alive and if you protect him long enough he can create a massive army that snowballs. This is a process and viewers get to watch that unfold as the army grows larger and larger. Each game has a different angle, even if they seem similar on the surface. What works for one may totally fail for another. Find your angle and then figure out how to frame it so that it is clear (legible) to those watching and so that it carries viewers along. I plan to implement this in future content and so we'll see if I'm right. I talk a lot about game dev marketing so if this post has been useful to you, you can follow me here for more.

İzmir'den 4 kişilik bir ekibin geliştirdiği, denizin derinliklerinde kazı çalışmaları yaptığınız roguelite bir oyun olan The Subminer 🇹🇷 2026'da Steam'de yayınlanacak