Sharing results from our first Steam indie game launch, data and insights, (PR, Advertising, Wishlists and Sales)

The week of January 28, 2024, we released Little Lighthouse of Horror, a very indie horror game and our first project as developers. We wanted to share some thoughts on the week leading up to and following our launch on Steam, hoping that it will be a useful read for as many indie developers as possible.

Preparing for Launch

We started by saying that for this project we attended some face-to-face events, such as Indie Dev Day Barcelona 2024, and made sporadic posts on social media, but we didn’t invest a lot of time or money in marketing, advertising, or PR until a week before the release. We also didn’t participate in a Steam Next Fest, as we had to release the game earlier than planned due to internal studio reasons, such as resource management and other projects on hold. This is something we will not let go of again in the future.

Public relations

On January 16, we publicly announced the game to the press and content creators. At the time, we had 150 people on our bucket list. Thanks to coverage in media such as IGN, especially with a publication on YouTube GameTrailers , Polygon included us in its article of “upcoming releases of the week” and Clemmy from Best Indie Games highlighted us, among other articles. This helped us grow our wishlists to 2,500 in the days leading up to launch.

We also sent review requests to media outlets such as GAMINGbible, NaviGames, Geekgasm, and OneDigital, who mostly enjoyed the game and gave it coverage.
See Figure 1 for wishlist peaks from announcement to launch.

Advertising

Because we started the PR strategy so late, our main goal was to drive sales rather than wish lists. For this reason, we chose to launch the ads only after launch, so that people who saw our posts could buy the game with a few clicks. Here are the results of our January 28 – February 4 announcements.

See Figure 2 to see the spikes generated by our advertising. We saw the most positive trends in France, Latin America, and Germany, where we used localized ad copy. We also ran global campaigns in English, which improved over time thanks to adjustments to target regions, subreddits, interests, video content, and ad opening texts.

Sales

Taking into account all of the above, the lack of participation in Next Fest and the minimal PR strategy before the launch, we can say that we are quite satisfied with the results of the first week. In total until February 20, 2025, we sold 1,216 copies, with the United States and Spain as the main markets.

Since the game is only available in a few languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian, and German), the regions with the most sales reflect these languages.

See Figure 3 to see which regions the game was sold in.

If you found this summary helpful, we’d love to read your feedback and are open to preparing a follow-up post at a later date.

Data

• Wishlists at launch: 1,500
• Current wishlists: 5,325
• Day 1 Sales: 279
• Total Sales: 1,216
• Gross Income: $3,023

Key lessons

1. PR before launch is key to building wishlists. Investing time and budget (if available) in PR can go a long way in raising awareness of the game.
2. Advertising: If you have a budget, use it, but don’t waste it. Our recommendation is to research your target audience well to maximize clicks for every dollar invested. Use a small initial budget to test different publications.
3. Steam Next Fest: Don’t miss it! We could have easily doubled our wish lists before launch, and it’s something we’ll try to leverage in future projects, in this particular case, we were interested in launching in the Future.
4. Content Creators: We sent a lot of keys, but the coverage didn’t live up to the number of keys delivered. It is important to keep track of where the keys are going and check on the Steam platform if they were activated. Also, it’s key to contact the creators again and delete keys if you suspect they were given to scammers (there are plenty out there!).