Wishlists: 0 to 10.000 in just three weeks! 🎉🥳

Back in February Bossforge and I were looking for a game jam, found none we liked, and shrugged, “Let’s just jam on our own.”

We both love idle and incremental games, so the genre was quickly decided and cool pitch was quickly found: "Click a coin, earn money, buy another coin - repeat"

Just a little bit later we had a prototype, but we were not exactly sure if that game is something anyone would enjoy at all and we had it idling  around on our disk from then on. Both of us had other on-going projects and todos in our private lifes, but after some time we eventually just tossed it on itch with no description, no trailer or steam-page and went on with our lifes. We honestly just released it on itch.io so we could call it "finished".

That little prototype immediatly got picked up by the itch-algorithm and gathered a lot of views. In reaction we quickly posted a little gif on r/r/incremental_games to use that hype for more traction. (Reddit-Post)

It then just went up with thousands of views. Most views were from the tags we used (incremental, idle, clicker) and the fact that it was (also) for web and free. We celebrated for some seconds, but then panicked because we had no steam-page to actually capture the hype.

I slapped a Discord link on the page to at least have something to capture the traffic. But Bossforge and I immediatly started building a Steam page, but that took some time to finish as we waited for the capsule-artist, created a trailer and had to sit-out the verifcation process. While we waited, views dropped from thousands to hundreds.

Every day felt like watching a balloon deflate as you could only stand by and watch:

On April 27th the trailer, the capsule art and the verficiation process were finally finished - almost one month after the release of the prototype on itch. Argh! That took so long! Are we too late? We set the page on Steam live, posted some reddit posts to r/incremental, r/gamedev and r/godot and then anxiously hoped that we at least get some of the traffic back. "Please, even 20% would be more than we even expected ..." we thought. And then it just frickin' exploded.

About 75% of those views where from itch.io because we just hit #8 on the popular tag.

And about 10% were from our reddit posts.

But I think the most important push was that initial reddit traffic (violet) we gained on the first day. It must've given us a big push in the itch-Algorithm, causing the big spike in the day after. But that is were assumptions begin and facts stop - we can't really determine whether that was the case or not, as most algorithms are black boxes to us developers.

Here is the parallel steam whislist data. Funnily enough, the relation of itch-views to steam-wishlists is not really coherent at all.

But to date, we always found significant spikes in wishlists when a YouTuber played our game.
In fact, here is the wishlist-chart with markers for when Youtubers with more than ~30k subscribers player our game.

Funnily enough, if you refer back to the itch-chart ... That does not at all correlate to itch-Views. Maybe this means that YouTube-users don't really use itch.io if its not explicitly linked in the description? As most our steam views come from direct searches I can only assume that most YouTube-users watched the video and immediatly searched the game - not majorly on google, but instead directly on Steam.

In fact, we can filter our recent views by youtube.com and see that the traffic from YouTube is only a minority of the views, despite some videos reaching over 350.000 views on YouTube - except for select days. On these days, youtubers that uploaded have created direct links to the itch-page instead of putting "just" the name into the description or directing to the steam page.

But that is only my amateur interpretation of the data - feel free to correct me if you think otherwise!

Fun "side quest":
Several pages stole our prototype from itch.io and uploaded it on their own page with ads. Initially, I was furious about this, but this actually seemed to work in our favor. Previous to that, we added a big wishlist-button in the lower half of the screen which immediatly linked to the steam page. So no matter where people played the game - even on a page that stole it, they would always get linked back to the steam page if they enjoyed it. Some of these stolen copies displayed the views and had garnered views in the thousands!

Yesterday we reached a major milestone: 10.000 wishlists!
From 0% chance for wishlists due to missing steam page and then to 10.000 wishlists in 18 days is something we could never have dreamed of and we are incredibly happy.

Here are the main points we took from this:

• Prototyping with itch.io is a great way to proof your concept and test for interest, but be ready to quickly whip out a steam page if you actually gain traffic! In contrast, my other game Matchblade did very poorly here on itch. And after gathering feedback the concept just didn't seem to be interesting at all. Stings, but better than using several years to release something into the void.
• You and I have no idea what a good or fun game is. Let the masses decide. We may think we do, but we really do not. I've been developing games for ten years now and I really thought I'd know whether something does actually seem fun to play or not, but I (and many others) have been proven wrong repeatedly. Refer to the first point to really find out whats fun.
• Your steam page should look polished and promise for more. It took the time that it took with our steam page because we really wanted to make good impressions for visitors - and I sincerely believe that this worked in our favor. The screenshots are not monotone, the capsule art is professional (Thank you Naiaru!) and the page is translated in many languages. It may be tempting to print generate art with ChatGPT or even try your hands at it yourself. Don't. I've been drawing and making pixel art for several years and I could't do close to the great job that Naiaru did.
• While your steam page SHOULD look polished, I don't believe the same is true for your itch-page. We gained a lot of traffic even when we only had a blank page with the web game.
• Speaking of web game, a major success factor was having a web-demo. If you take anything away from this: If your gameplay, performance and engine allows for it: Export to web!! So many views came from "free" and "web" it isn't even funny anymore.

That's it for now - and we are extremely excited to see whats yet to come.