How to market an indie game
3 min read
By Eduardo Orellana ·
Marketing an indie game comes down to three things done early and repeatedly: know the one-sentence hook and who it is for; put up a Steam page that turns visitors into wishlists, months before launch; and keep sending players to it, through festivals such as Next Fest, creators in your genre, a demo, short clips, devlogs and, once the page converts, ads. Measure everything by wishlists. Start while you build, not when you finish.
By the time most indie games start marketing, it is too late
The common story: two years of building, a Steam page the month before launch, a trailer the week before, and a launch to silence. On Steam, a game's launch week sells only a share of its wishlists (GameDiscoverCo's median is about 0.15 for bigger launches), so the audience has to exist before launch. Marketing is the work of building it, and it starts while you build.
1. The hook and the audience
Write the one sentence a player would repeat to a friend. Then name the players: the five to ten comparable games they already love. Those comparables decide your tags, your price, the creators you email and the communities you post in.
2. The Steam page, early
Put it up as soon as the look and loop are settled; Valve says a wishlist from two years out converts about as well as one from two weeks out. A capsule that reads small, gameplay in the trailer's first seconds, specific tags, a clear short description.
3. Send players to it, again and again
- Festivals: Next Fest and themed fests; the median respondent to How To Market A Game's February 2026 survey gained 806 wishlists in Next Fest week.
- Creators in your genre, with keys and a clip.
- A demo, and Steam's email to wishlisters about it.
- Short clips several times a week; devlogs on a cadence you can keep.
- Ads, once the page converts.
- Steam announcements for every beat.
Doing it alone
A solo developer cannot do every channel. Pick two you can sustain (often clips and festivals, or devlogs and creators), do them every week, and let the rest go. Time-box marketing: a fixed few hours a week beats bursts.
A twelve-month timeline
- 12 months out: hook, comparables, Steam page up, first clips.
- 9 months: devlog cadence, community started, first themed fest.
- 6 months: demo, creator outreach, Next Fest registration.
- 3 months: Next Fest, press kit, trailer refresh.
- 1 month: release date set, launch discount, keys to press, final push.
Measuring it, and the usual mistakes
Measure by wishlists: daily from Steamworks, per link with UTM tags, per event against its baseline. The usual mistakes: starting too late; a page that does not convert; posting everywhere a little instead of somewhere a lot; a crowded genre with no visible difference; mistaking other developers' praise for players' interest. A good game still needs marketing; a well-marketed weak game still struggles. Both matter.
Where Flockbay fits
Flockbay builds the game and markets it from the same chat, from the first week: the Steam page as a .zip you upload yourself, trailers, devlogs and clips from real gameplay, posts to TikTok, ads on your own ad accounts that you launch, a website for the game, playtests by link, and your followers and wishlists read daily. The publishing tools are free in beta until 1 December 2026; Flockbay takes no share of sales.
Questions
- When should I start marketing my indie game?
- As soon as you can show the core loop: put up the Steam page and start collecting wishlists months, ideally a year or more, before launch.