Last Tuesday night in Cologne, the inimitable Geoff Keighley stood on the Opening Night Live stage at Gamescom and premiered a trailer for a gorgeous indie game (I won’t name it… yet). He gave the game the ole’ Keighley treatment in front of 1.74 million players, blasting its trailer on the big screen and pumping its music through the big speakers, and even brought the lead developer on stage afterwards. The next morning, that game’s SteamDB follower count read 214. Yes, you read that right… just three digits.

Now, that studio did nothing wrong, exactly. They cut a gorgeous trailer and landed a spot on a stage that most developers would gladly sell their grandmas to the salt mines for. But clearly, nobody ever gave them a beat map; it was apparent they had no idea what to promise, and in what order, to an audience of what size. So as a result, they popped their ultimate with nobody on the point, and now it’s on cooldown. You only get one announcement per game, after all.

Earlier this summer, as part of Ready Check, I dedicated a whole piece to (hopefully) convincing you that you should start marketing your game early (specifically, way earlier than it’ll feel comfortable). And judging by my inbox, a lot of you took that advice and immediately hit a wall:

“Okay, I started early… now what do I actually do in the 18 months until launch?”

Well, I’ll answer that question today. Grab a coffee and your prod calendar, because it’s time to go to town on both!

Marketing Is a Sequence (Not a Stream)

When founders hear “start marketing early,” they usually hear “start posting early.” And so the studio dutifully cranks out screenshots every week, devlogs each month, and puts out a slow but steady drip of content. It keeps everyone busy, so it feels like it should work, right? Well, imagine the shock and dismay a few months later, when almost nobody who saw those posts converted into either wishlists or sales (and there are many such cases). That’s because the studio treated marketing as a stream. And to be clear, streams are fine! They do have their uses! But a stream is not a campaign, and unfortunately, approximately 99.95% of studios mix them up (vibe-concocted number, totally unscientific… but come on, am I really that off-base here?). And that’s how you get into situations like the 411-Day Problem.

In case you missed it the first time around, the 411-Day Problem (which I covered back in the Ready Check piece on Marketing Timing) refers to data from GameDiscoverCo that found underperforming games sat on Steam for a median of 411 days before launch (hence, the “411” in “411-Day Problem”), whereas the games with the highest conversion rates averaged just 214.

As we covered before, it’s easy to draw the wrong lesson from that figure. You know the whole thing about not confusing correlation for causation? Yeah, that’s exactly what’s going on here. Those games flopped not because they had a long runway, but because they didn’t do anything with that runway. Time on Steam was never the problem, in and of itself... rather, it was empty time on Steam.

Because guess what? Wishlists don’t age. The one and only Chris Zukowski dug through the numbers on Song of Iron and found that wishlists added in 2020 converted at roughly the same rate as wishlists added the month before launch, hovering at ~8% regardless of how long ago it was wishlisted. Your audience, as it turns out, doesn’t rot (or, to use a famous Zukowski-ism: “It’s not bread”).

So no, the people using the 411-day figure to argue you shouldn’t announce early are wrong; you should announce whenever you’re ready to be seen. But only when you’re ready… because while your audience doesn’t expire, each beat certainly does. Your beats are like rounds in an ammo clip: once they’re spent, they’re spent. After all, you can’t re-announce your game, and you also only get one Next Fest per game (Valve’s rule, not mine). Can you reveal a release date more than once? I mean, technically, sure… just don’t expect anyone to believe you the second time.

Get the picture?

So, with all that in mind, here’s the proper way to understand campaigns (specifically, the kind that actually works): throughout the course of a campaign, you’ll make roughly seven promises, in a very specific order, and you’ll make each one to a slightly bigger audience than the last.

Quick gut check before we move on: can you name the beats you have left on one hand? If you just winced a bit, keep reading.

The Beat Map’s Seven Promises (in Order)

1. The Announcement

Sadly, this is the single most common wasted beat in indie marketing. So… how do you not waste it? Well, for starters… Valve’s own guidance says to put your Coming Soon page up as soon as you’re ready to start publicly talking about your game, and remember: there’s no penalty for a long runway. But what does “ready to publicly talk” even mean? Well, it means you have something to show that your target player would consider worth wishlisting: at the very least, a hook and an optimized capsule. You want to show players a page that you’re proud of!

And there’s the biggest lesson here: it doesn’t matter when you make your announcement, as long as you give your audience something to react to. It doesn’t have to be a full build, or even a trailer! Sometimes, a compelling enough hook and some killer capsule art is all you need. Just make sure it’s something you’re actually excited to show (after all, if you’re not excited, why would anyone else be?). Otherwise, you’re unveiling an empty room (hence why I call such cases an “Empty Room Announcement”).

2. The Trailer (and Every Trailer After)

Trailers are the only pre-launch beat you can use more than once… but only if each trailer makes a new promise: maybe Trailer 1 shows off a key mechanic, while Trailer 2 reveals a new co-op mode you’ve been keeping under wraps, or even adopts a completely different tone. There’s a word for a second trailer that simply restates what the first trailer showed: a rerun. Avoid this.

Oh, and if you’re eyeing a showcase slot for your shiny new trailer, it helps to know what you can reasonably expect to get for it: Zukowski’s survey (the one I mentioned earlier) pegged the median increase in followers after 48 hours for major showcases, and the results are… well, here, just see for yourself:

• +889 followers for the triple-i Initiative

• +395 followers for the PC Gaming Show

• +336 followers for the Future Games Show1

Eeeh… doesn’t quite seem like such a silver bullet anymore, does it? Zukowski himself described a showcase as “one leg of a 3-legged stool,” and if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you already know I completely agree with him. Showcases amplify an audience; they do not conjure one out of thin air.

3. The Demo

This is the trust-building beat, the one where you prove your game is for real. Ship it early and leave it up: in fact, Zukowski advises that you release your demo “months and months” before Next Fest, and his June data shows that around 19% of demo players will end up wishlisting your game. There’s absolutely zero evidence that exposure “wears out,” so don’t worry about leaving it up for too long — as long as your demo is good, there is no such thing as too much exposure. But the flip side of that, however, is that bad news travels fast… so don’t ship it before you’ve got something that’s actually fun to play!

4. The Fest

Next Fest is one of the big ones, and you only get one shot at it: Valve has decreed that each game can only participate in ONE fest, ever, so you should choose the Fest closest to your launch date (absent truly extraneous circumstances or exceptionally compelling strategic reasons). Like with showcases, what you’ll get out of it almost entirely depends on what you bring into it. In February’s fest, games with under 1,000 pre-fest wishlists gained a median of 322 wishlists; games with 1,000 to 9,999 gained 1,006; and games in the 10,000-plus bracket gained 5,215. There’s a startling correlation between pre-fest and fest gains, at r=0.825. In case you don’t speak math, that means the audience you built with your last beat determines what your next beat pays out. Beats don’t add… they multiply (and that includes by zero).

5. The Date Reveal

This beat might well be the most mechanically valuable one in your arsenal. Since Steam’s June refresh, the new Personal Calendar feature surfaces upcoming games to likely fans, starting roughly one or two months before launch (reports differ on the exact window2), and the click-through rates are nothing short of absurd: one of Zukowski’s examples netted a 33.83% CTR, versus 0.81% under the old Popular Upcoming.

Valve’s docs are blunt about the flip side, too: undated games appear on lists behind all other games, so it really does behoove you to set a date! Zukowski currently advises you to set your date as early as the game’s development honestly allows.3 The catch lies in that word “honestly.” If you don’t keep this one promise, it’s really hard to get your audience to believe any promises you make after.

6. LAUNCH

Steam gives each launch a fortnight of grace: the post-launch Discovery Queue will drive nearly half of your page visits in those two weeks, and for the first couple of days, every game gets a broadly similar 24,000 to 35,000 impressions before the algorithm starts judging you on day three. The stakes are higher than you think, even if you already (correctly) treat launch as the highest-stakes moment in your game’s lifecycle: the median game’s first year brings in about 2.64x its first week, so if you have a weak launch, that will directly and massively eat into your long tail revenue.

7. The First Update

So, so, SO many studios forget to schedule this beat, which is wild, because Valve literally schedules it for you! Every game gets five Update Visibility Rounds, each worth up to 30 days or a million homepage impressions, which unlock once your launch visibility winds down. That’s five FREE encores, sitting in your back pocket, ready for you to use! So go ahead and plan the first one RIGHT NOW, before you launch. Don’t wait until after your reviews start to slow down.

So, that’s the beat map! Now let’s audit yours.

The Beat Audit: Four Questions for Your Calendar

Question 1: How many beats do you have left?

Count them (like, actually count them, one by one), and mark which are one-shots (announce, Next Fest, date, launch) and which are renewable (trailers, updates). A studio 14 months from launch with six unspent beats is in a much better position than a studio four months out that has already announced, demoed, and fested (usually on autopilot) and is therefore down to two.

Question 2: What does each remaining beat promise?

And actually write what you’re actually promising, as a full sentence, next to each beat, right there in the calendar. If two beats make the same promise, congratulations, you’re airing a rerun; give one of them a new job or cut it entirely.

Question 3: Is anyone in the room?

Match each beat to the audience it needs. If you want, you can use the Next Fest brackets I listed above as your cheat sheet: if you bring 1,000 wishlists, expect to gain about 1,000 more; if you bring 10,000, expect about 5,000. For later beats, the ladder from my Wishlist Momentum piece still applies: publishers target roughly 30,000 wishlists as a cushion, you can much more reliably predict conversion at 100,000 wishlists, and Steam’s new Personal Calendar now gives games nearing launch a new discovery surface that doesn’t strictly require either, but which you should still aim for anyway.

Question 4: Are your beats far enough apart to compound?

Each beat needs its own news cycle and enough time to work Steam’s machinery. To get an idea of what effective spacing looks like, study games that sold well. For instance:

• Balatro put its page up, got discovered by creators, released a demo, entered Next Fest, set a launch date, and then actually launched, all across roughly nine months, and it announced its date about a month out from launch.

• Bills Must Be Paid speedran the whole sequence in five and a half months this summer (page up in February, demo in April, Next Fest in June, launch in July at 61,000+ wishlists).

• Conversely, How Many Dudes? stretched the whole thing out across a year and launched at 308,000 wishlists.

As you can see, each of these games gave each beat enough time to breathe. They also kept each beat distinct, made sure their audience could receive them, and made each beat bigger than the last. And sure, Balatro had a publisher and got discovered by Northernlion and you can’t exactly copy-paste that, but the principle applies nonetheless.

“But Jay,” you protest at me, yet again, “Peak put its Steam page up four days before launch and sold 4.5 million copies. Explain that with your little map.” Gladly! Peak leveraged an enormous co-streaming engine in lieu of the early beats, and even then it launched with 29,384 wishlists. So somebody was still in the room! If you have a machine that fills rooms on command, awesome! Go forth and prosper; you may skip beats with my blessing. But if you don’t (and come on, now, who are you kidding… you don’t), that map is how you fill your room.

You just mentally rearranged your calendar while reading that, didn’t you? Good. But hold that thought for a bit, because we’re going to examine the excellent, live cast study that Gamescom just gave us on its main stage.

Gamescom, Audited

Now, take all of what I’m about to say with a little pinch of salt. These numbers are a snapshot I took the morning after Opening Night Live, and they’re SteamDB followers rather than Valve’s actual wishlist counts (which aren’t public data). Furthermore, since my verdicts are so fresh, they’re provisional by definition. So treat this section as theorycrafting (educated theorycrafting, with numbers to back it up, but theorycrafting nonetheless). Also, I’m not trying to dunk on anyone for failing; just pointing out that the two teams who succeeded just happened to have a beat map (what are the chances?!).

Mariachi Legends (Halberd Studios, self-published) came to Gamescom with bad news: the launch was being delayed to April 27, 2027. But they played it as a date beat: they committed to a new, firm date, announced the game would be on Game Pass, dropped a sparkling new trailer, and promised one thing to their players (that the game will come out on that date). The morning after, they were up to 18,558 followers and snagged the #141 spot on Steam’s top wishlist chart, the best standing of any indie I tracked from the show. As we’ve covered before in these pages, a delay is a broken promise… but the flip side of that is: a delay with a new date attached is a renewed promise.

Pony Island 2: Panda Circus (Daniel Mullins) was first announced at the Game Awards back in 2023, then went quiet, and returned at Gamescom with a concrete launch date: April 27, 2027… the same day as the mariachis, which should make for a fun calendar collision. Two and a half years between beats sounds like marketing malpractice… until you notice each beat promised something new to the game’s existing audience. As a result, they’re up to 11,554 followers, and sitting at around #247. The lesson? You can survive long gaps between beats. (You can’t however, survive if those beats are empty).

Acornia: Mirror Worlds (Splashteam, publisher The Arcade Crew) did everything right… if you’re a member of the press. They dropped a pre-show reveal, and coordinated previews for Game Informer, TechRaptor, and half the enthusiast web. But the morning after, they were at only 653 followers. They also don’t have a demo, and haven’t set a date (other than a vague “2027”). They did get a lot of press, so it may yet pay off… but right now, there’s no beat scheduled to cash all that coverage out.

Lofsöng (Unrelated Studio) is the one… well, you know the one. Yes, this is the one from the intro. The developer got on stage, showed an artsy trailer that absolutely charmed the critics… and then got only 214 followers. Also, didn’t set a date, or a demo… really, didn’t promise anything on that stage. This game got a spot on one of the biggest stages in gaming, and burned it on an empty beat. Textbook Empty Room Announcement, and I say that with utmost sympathy because that outcome was eminently avoidable.

Notice how the two games that popped off used the occasion to spend a date beat, and aimed it into rooms they’d already built. Meanwhile, the two that evaporated spent an announce beat that didn’t promise what came next. The stage didn’t change the outcome, and neither did the night. Geogg Keighley certainly didn’t change it, either. What changed the outcome was having a map (or not having one).

What You Do Today

Simple: print out the seven beats, then cross out the ones you’ve already spent (no take-backs, this isn’t a roguelite). Then, next to each one still left, write the promise it makes, the audience it needs, and the date you’ll spend it. Then check the spacing between them: does every beat get its own news cycle, enough time to work the Steam discovery algorithm, and its own room? If you haven’t announced yet, follow this one rule above all: be sure you have something set up to capture the attention you generate (ideally, your Steam page… but a landing page, though not ideal, can also suffice).

And most importantly: if the audit turned up an ult you were about to waste, move it! That’s an easy fix… and it could save your launch down the line. Indeed, this is why you audit your calendar now, instead of in a post-mortem.

Want to know how launch-ready your campaign actually is? Take the full Launch Readiness Scorecard here. And if you’d like a second pair of eyes on your beat calendar specifically, send it over and I’ll run this audit with you on a Speedrun Strategy Session.

GG,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

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NOTE: Since this is a breaking news story, I’m posting it ahead of our regularly scheduled time slot. As such, there will be no new Spawn Point Marketing post on Monday; we’ll return to our regular posting cadence next week. Enjoy!

Well. That didn’t take long.

Just six days ago, I told you (yeah, yeah, I know, I hate to be that guy, but seriously, I friggin TOLD YOU SO) that at some point, something will go badly, terribly, horribly, and publicly wrong for your studio, and that one of the six ways it’s most likely to go wrong is a security breach. And I even warned you that this particular type of crisis is particularly nasty, because you have to run your comms and your technical response in parallel, and therefore you often can’t really say much for the first day or two, because you don’t know much.

So now, barely a week later, here we are: one of gaming’s biggest names, getting ready to release THE hottest game of the year (if not decade), has given the whole world a live demonstration!

In case you’ve been living under a rock (or maybe you’re not as unhealthily plugged into this industry’s goings-on as I am, if you want to take the glass-half-full view): this past Tuesday, some hacker group calling themselves “Cyberleek”1 started posting leaked GTA VI gameplay.

Now, I know I just came off all grandiose and high and mighty just now, but let me assure you I take absolutely no pleasure in this. On the off chance that one of you reading this is on Rockstar’s PR team, know that you have my utmost sympathy. I’m sure you didn’t wake up on that fine morning of August 18, 2026 A.D. just itching to spend the rest of your week filing DMCA takedowns.

Please extend my condolences to your colleagues, too. For no matter what any of us may think about Take-Two’s business decisions (and for everyone else: don’t you worry, we’ll get to those), we realize that hundreds of you poured your hearts and souls into this game, and now you have to sit there and watch years of what’s certainly the biggest, most momentous project of your careers get dribbled out by someone hawking a shitty memecoin. That really sucks, and I do feel for you.

So please, understand I’m not trying to take a victory lap or anything. But I do run a marketing newsletter, and a marketing consultancy,2 and so I’d be remiss if I didn’t approach this situation for what it is (whatever else it may be, besides the obvious crummy stuff): an unparalleled case study.

Here we have a practically textbook crisis situation is now unfolding in front of our eyes, in real time, at a scale so massive it’s already testing each principle I laid out in my last piece to its absolute limit. As this situation continues to play out, we’ll get to see which ones bend, which ones break, and which ones hold (and more specifically, which ones hold generally and which ones hold only because Rockstar is Rockstar).

So, grab your coffee, everyone. Let’s go through it, beat by beat.

The Story so Far (As of Friday Evening)

Ok, first, let’s get all the facts on the table, as they’ve been reported. Remember what I said last week: facts before narrative. But, keep in mind that this is an actively developing story, and the situation is unfolding quickly enough that some of this might be stale by the time you read it.3

Anyway, got it? Good. Let’s proceed.

Starting around August 18, gameplay clips and an image of what appears to be the game’s full map started circulating under the “Cyberleek” alias. The footage linked to a website, and came with a “manifesto” (the leakers calls it an “Edict”, which… sure). The leakers also plastered a memecoin across each video. By Friday, IGN counted six different gameplay videos, the most recent ones include a bit where Jason (the protagonist) shoots the word “LEEK” into a wall with bullet holes. As such, both the press and the gaming community at large suspect that the leakers have gotten their hands on an actual playable build and not just a cache of old clips. Oh, and the leakers even ran a poll on their site to let people vote on which footage they’ll drop next (as long as they pay them in memecoin first… naturally).

As for the manifesto Edict, it lays out three demands, aimed at both publishers in general and Rockstar specifically:

1. No digital preorders

2. No “fake” single-player DLC that’s already sitting in the game files

3. Guaranteed single-player offline access after they eventually shut the servers down.

The leakers closed their manifesto by threatening the rest of the industry, basically warning them (and I’m paraphrasing here) “you better behave… or you’re next.”

In response (so far), Rockstar and Take-Two have filed a flurry of DMCA takedowns, and on Thursday, August 20, they also filed multiple subpoenas in the Southern District of New York, asking Microsoft and Discord to hand over any and all account records, IP addresses, device identifiers, and OneDrive content that’s tied to this “Cyberleek” persona, as well as several associated Discord servers, giving both companies until September 4 to comply.

But wait… what about actual public communication? Well, let me check… *fires up Google* Oh yeah, here you go:

Yup, that’s right! Absolutely nothing… no tweets, no statements (not even a "we’re aware” holding statement of the type we covered last week), zilch, nada, nothing. Indeed, none of Rockstar’s official channels have posted anything in 48 hours (as of Thursday). IGN has asked the studio for comment throughout the week, but as of this writing, hasn’t gotten any yet.

Oh, and I should mention that all of this is going down six days before Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look premieres on Netflix (on August 27, in a timed exclusive before it hits YouTube six hours later), and three months before the game itself launches on November 19.

So there you have it, that’s the state of the board. Now, let’s talk about the moves.

Grand Theft Boss Gauntlet

So, in case you didn’t read last week’s piece (and you really should, by the way… all the concepts and analogies I call back to throughout this piece will make a lot more sense if you do), I likened the six most common types of crisis in the games industry to different flavors of boss fights, and I even mentioned that sometimes, they stack. Well, here you go! This is a textbook example — in fact, I’m counting at least three of them (standing on top of each other while wearing a trench coat, obviously).

Obviously, one of them is Boss 5 (The Security Breach). However this all went down behind the scenes, the bottom line is that somebody got their hands on something they shouldn’t have. Did they Ethan Hunt their way into Rockstar’s servers and make off with their internal build? Or did a contractor leave their laptop lying around at Starbucks while they were in the bathroom (or even sold it for Bitcoin)? Who knows! Certainly not us. Nor does the press… and neither, apparently, does Rockstar, given that (per Kotaku) the company STILL doesn’t know who’s behind all of this.

Ah, but if you put on your Sherlock Holmes hat and look at the manifesto, you can find CLUES in it that shed more light on the situation! Check out those three demands again… no digital preorders, no fake DLC, offline single-player… AHA! Elementary, my dear Watson! Rockstar is also fighting Boss 2 (The Business Decision Backlash), and notably, the leaker is explicitly weaponizing the very dynamic that spawns this boss.

Recall that GTA VI won’t launch with a physical version. Remember how angry everyone was about that? And sure enough, what do you think the leakers are taunting Rockstar about? If you guessed “not launching with a physical version,” congratulations, you’re right! (“No physical discs? Then more leeks!”) Alas, I can’t offer you a prize, though.

So the leaker’s trying to recruit the Stop Killing Games crowd as a sympathetic audience. And honestly, it’s not like it’s that far-fetched of a moonshot. After all, most of us have been burned by a greedy publisher who once delisted a game we purchased, with our own money, back in the halcyon days of the early digital era, when we were naive and idealistic enough to think we actually owned the games we bought. And sure enough, if you skim the IGN article’s comments section, you’ll see a somewhat sizeable cohort (“somewhat” being the key word… it’s not a huge contingent, but it’s also not a trivial number) of gamers saying some variation of “ha, serves them right for going all-digital!”

And finally, you can also spot a stealthy Boss 6 (The People Problem) lurking in the subpoenas themselves. In one of the subpoenas, Take-Two named a Discord server that reportedly belongs to DarkViperAU (a popular GTA V streamer)’s editing team. Confused, he went on X to say that not only does he not know anything, but Rockstar hasn’t even emailed him about it. So… good job, Rockstar. Your legal response to the leak has now dragged a well-known and well-liked pillar of your community (as well as his audience) into this mess. Remember what I said last week about spawning a second crisis? Well, now you know what that looks like. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

So, there you have it. Three bosses are now staring down one of gaming’s most storied brands, with the biggest launch in the entire history of the medium on the line. Now, how is Rockstar fighting the boss gauntlet?

What Rockstar’s Getting Right (Yes, Really)

I know what you think I’m about to say: “REEEEE, they’ve said NOTHING for four days, EPIC FAIL, boooo Rockstar!!!”… and we’ll get to whether that’s our ultimate verdict or not. But I do want to give credit where credit is due first, because believe it or not, Rockstar IS actually doing some of this by the book.

They established facts before narrative

Or at least, they’re certainly behaving like a company that doesn’t have all the facts yet and thus refuses to create a narrative. As far as we know, nobody at Rockstar has confirmed whether the footage is even real, or how old the build is, nevermind how it all got out — if they said anything now, they’d just be writing fanfiction.

From a crisis comms standpoint, they’re showing remarkable restraint. There are compelling strategic reasons for saying nothing for as long as they have! Consider that so far, people generally think of Rockstar as the victim in all this. If they’d rushed out a statement last week saying the leaker has an outdated build from all the way back in 2023, and the leaker then posted a cutscene that proved otherwise, then as far as the public is concerned, they stop being victims and instead become liars. Remember, the latter is a much harder boss.

And Rockstar, to its credit, has refused to take the bait.

They’re publicly fixing it

Yes, for real! Just not in the way you’d expect. Last week, I said that fixing things is, in and of itself, a message. Well, Take-Two is fixing things… in federal court, by filing subpoenas. Remember, court documents are public record — and sure enough, Kotaku picked them up within hours of Take-Two filing them, and dutifully spread the message to the gaming public, without even a peep from a Rockstar or Take-Two spokesperson. That’s how the company has chosen to narrate its response — we’re just so used to seeing studios respond to crises through a community post or YouTube video that we forget the court docket is just as valid a channel.

This also clues us in to which audience the company’s actually communicating to, the one that matters to them far more than the players right now: the next potential leaker. These subpoenas are a statement of intent: they’re telling any and all potential and future aggrieved employees (and other internal stakeholders) not to get any funny ideas, lest they yank their device telemetry and their OneDrive via legal discovery.4

They’re holding one channel of record

It’s just that their channel happens to be the U.S. District Court. I don’t see any Rockstar developers arguing with people in their replies… do you? To my knowledge, no execs have gone on any podcasts to vent about it, either. Whatever you think of Rockstar’s silence, they’re certainly very disciplined in maintaining that silence. Remember: one studio, one voice, one channel. And sure, Rockstar may have chosen their legal counsel as their voice, and some PDFs as the channel, but they’re still following the principle.

They’re not apologizing for something they don’t own

The manifesto makes it patently obvious that the leakers want a debate about digital preorders. But Rockstar, to their credit, ain’t having it. I wrote last week that you should only apologize for what you actually did wrong… and whatever you may think of digital-only distribution and how it harms game preservation and limits consumer choice, it still doesn’t justify you getting robbed. Rockstar isn’t confessing to anything when it says its rights were violated in their DMCA filings; only an idiot would claim otherwise.

And Rockstar’s right (both strategically and morally) to keep them separated. If they’d instead engaged with the demands in the leaker’s manifesto, they’d only validate the notion that the leakers are activists instead of merely thieves on multiple levels (you know, because not only did they steal the build, they also grafted a crypto pump onto the whole thing). The moment you do something like that, you let the leakers set the agenda and the narrative. So good on Rockstar for not giving the leakers what they want.

…

Ok, so far, so good! Now, let’s look at the other side of the coin…

What Rockstar’s Getting Wrong (Or Are They?)

Ok, NOW we’re getting to the part you were expecting. Because (believe it or not, after reading the above section) Rockstar isn’t exactly executing a perfect, no-hit run on this boss gauntlet. So, how are they fumbling (or at least suboptimally running) their response?

There’s no holding statement

As I mentioned before… none, nothing, dada, zilch, zero. This is the biggest blind spot in Rockstar’s response, the place where they most depart from my framework, and if this were literally any other studio, I’d be shouting at them through my monitor until I’m all hoarse in the throat.

Put out a holding statement as soon as you have the facts. Again, you don’t need to write a novella here! Just something to the effect of:

“We’re aware of the footage that’s currently circulating, and we’re investigating. We’ll share more when we can.”

Like, a junior PR coordinator can write that sentence in less than a minute! But apparently, it’s beyond Rockstar’s ability or dignity (not sure which would be worse), and as a result, the leakers have had the only voice in this conversation for four straight days. Cyberleek has framed every news cycle this week the way they want; now the whole world is talking about what they posted, what they’re demanding, and what they’re threatening to do next. In the absence of an official statement, Rockstar has completely ceded the narrative to Cyberleek and their shitcoin scam.

There’s no update cadence (because there’s no update)

I also really hammered this last week: say when you’ll check in, and then actually check in. Rockstar hasn’t checked in… but they also haven’t promised to check in, which I guess technically counts? I mean, sure, the cleanest way to not break a promise is not to make one to begin with… but it also means the GTA community has nothing from the studio to hold onto.

Remember, nature abhors a vacuum… and in the Information Age, it abhors information vacuums even more so. Everything except Rockstar’s own two cents rushes into that vacuum: not just the leakers’ leaked videos and manifesto, but also myriad fake Cyberleek accounts on X (which the leakers themselves had to debunk, and I CAN’T BELIEVE I just typed that sentence), AI-generated fake leaks mixed in with all the real ones, and comments sections rife with speculation about ex-employees going rogue after being fired for trying to unionize.

Rockstar could’ve defused (even if only partially so) every single one of those threads by putting out a simple, one-paragraph statement. But they chose not to, and so here we are.

The subpoenas may have caused collateral damage

You know, the DarkViperAU thing. Whether or not his server had anything to do with the leak (and I’m a big believer in “innocent until proven guilty”), Rockstar’s legal team sweeping up a popular creator’s Discord data (as well as that of every member who posted in those servers since June 1) makes for terrible optics, especially for a company that lives off its fan ecosystem to the degree that Rockstar does. Rockstar made a huge withdrawal from its Trust Reserve by doing that, and unlike the crisis itself, they did it all to themselves.

They’re not addressing a spoiler risk that’s growing by the day

If the leakers really do have a playable build, then Rockstar’s exposed through yet another attack surface, and for a game that’s spent nearly a decade in development, it’s not a small one: GTA VI’s story is now in play.

Furthermore, remember that we’re only three months out from launch, and every day brings with it the nonzero possibility that the unimaginable could happen and the entire game’s narrative, plot, and key moments get spoiled long before anyone has a chance to experience it for themselves. The longer Rockstar says nothing about it, the more the fanbase is going to freak out over whether anyone at the studio will stop that from happening.

…

Now. I’ve just laid out a pretty damning list. Not good! And last week, I would’ve told you (and implicitly did tell you) that any one of those could torpedo and sink a studio. So… sayonara, Rockstar? Is the ship that brought us GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Bully, and Manhunt going to go down like the Titanic?

Honestly?………Nah. Rockstar is going to be fine.

“BUT JAY, WHY—”

ALLRIGHT! Pipe down! I’ll tell you… geez, hold your damn horses.

Rockstar Is Playing on God Mode

“But Jay,” you say, more reasonably this time, “you literally just told us last week that speed is critical and staying silent will only get you a second crisis. So… what, are you saying the rules don’t apply to Rockstar?!”

No, I’m saying something different (if only slightly): yes, the rules still apply, but Rockstar’s situation is so utterly different from that of literally any other studio, on practically every level, that this will play out much differently for them because they’re functionally operating in an entirely different universe.

For starters, let’s go back to the Trust Reserve. I told you a crisis is a forced withdrawal, and that you survive it by having a big enough balance when you walk into the boss chamber. Rockstar’s balance is… heh, let’s just say it’s not something you or I could ever hope to achieve. You know how some people are so insanely wealthy that the very concept of money basically loses all meaning to them, and they don’t even flinch at casually dropping $100,000 on a night out in Vegas? Yeah, let’s just say Rockstar doesn’t measure its trust on the same scale you do.

If you don’t believe me, remember these guys released just two trailers across the game’s entire ~8 years in development, and each one stopped the internet dead in its tracks. When the first trailer leaked in December 2023, they shrugged and posted it early. Strauss Zelnick later said it was disappointing, but he didn’t think it hurt them. Similarly, when over 90 videos leaked earlier (in 2022), they likewise took the hit, and people only got more excited for the game.

The bottom line is, Rockstar has overdraft protection on its Trust Reserve, of the kind nobody else in the industry has. But how did they get that protection to begin with? I’ll tell you how: by shipping game after game after game after game that people lose their goddamn minds over for 25 friggin years. This is one of the most beloved brands in all of gaming; last week’s crisis is a large withdrawal in absolute terms, but it’s absolutely minuscule relative to them. It’s like stealing $10 million in Dogecoins from Elon Musk.

Furthermore, they’re already going to release the mother of all counter-statements. Remember, the Extended Look drops on Netflix this Thursday. Whatever Rockstar has to say about last week, at the end of the day no press release will beat six minutes of official, highly polished footage in its proper context and precision-engineered to GET HYPE. It’ll make every one of Cyberleek’s leaked clips look like grainy bootlegs in comparison.

Seriously, why the hell would you issue a statement on Tuesday, when you’re about to put out the only statement that actually matters on Thursday? They chose to stay silent until the 27th, and dare I say, it’s the right choice. Reportedly, Rockstar is moving ahead with the Netflix reveal as planned, because of course they are… why wouldn’t they? That’s the boss-killing combo!

Like, here’s (roughly) how it’ll go down:

“Oh, you’ve got some footage? That’s cute… HERE’S THE REAL THING!”

*mic drop, crowd goes wild*

Also, consider that they have to remain silent in order to pursue their legal strategy. If Rockstar publicly says so much as a single word about the footage, opposing counsel can then use it against them in court later. “B-b-but confirming it’s real also confirms it’s infringement!” Ok, sure… but it also confirms details about the build, their timeline, and all sorts of uncomfortable implications about Rockstar’s internal security that they’d much rather not validate in a public statement.

If you’re going to respond to a crisis by filing a federal subpoena and possibly press charges, then your legal team, not your comms team, will have the final say in what goes out and when. And frankly, they should (oh man, I’m about to get crucified by my fellow comms veterans). Oh, and keep in mind that the guy who leaked the videos back in 2022 eventually ended up locked in a padded cell… so Take-Two can take its time, because they know how these things end when they play the long game and everything goes their way.

But wait, there’s more!

There’s a branding angle at play here, too! That’s right… if you’ve been around long enough, you know that silence is Rockstar’s brand! This studio is famous for saying absolutely nothing for years on end, and then suddenly dropping a trailer that short-circuits the brains of every gamer alive. Rockstar has trained their community for decades to expect radio silence, and in a weird way, four quiet days just feels like… Rockstar being Rockstar! If you normally post daily, you’d give your community an aneurysm by going dark for a week. But if you post almost never… well, then that same quiet week feels as unremarkable as the sky being blue.

And finally… the leakers are already hoisting themselves by their own petard, all without Rockstar having to so much as lift a finger. Forget, for a moment, the inevitable legal consequences that will follow this fiasco as sure as the sun will rise in the morning. As far as the reputation game is concerned? The leakers’ credibility is already in freefall, and it’s all because they’ve turned off A LOT of would-be sympathizers by shilling their shitty memecoin. If you scroll through those IGN comments again, you’ll see that a lot of those same people who agreed with just about everything Cyberleek said in the manifesto still calling the whole thing a crypto scam. Some fans have even deputized themselves as private investigators for Rockstar — one of these pro-bono gumballs has even (reportedly) traced the group’s wallet to a Seychelles-based crypto exchange. At the end of the day, Rockstar doesn’t have to win this battle because the leakers are already losing it, all on their own accord.

Sometimes, the smartest move in comms is to let the other guy talk.

…

So… does all this silence make sense for Rockstar? I think mostly yes, but there’s a bit of nuance to my stance. First, they totally blundered in subpoenaing that streamer, and they could’ve avoided it had legal and community had simply touched base about it for 15 minutes before they sent it out (even if narrowing the request was a non-starter, they could’ve at least given the guy a heads-up). And if the leakers DO start dropping story content, they’ll immediately nerf Rockstar’s “wait until Thursday” strategy, because what’s the point of watching a trailer if you already know the ending?

But as a default response, for just one more week? Yeah, that’s totally reasonable. Dare I say, it might even be the best response! Time will tell whether or not I eat crow in a few months.

Ok… But You’re Not Rockstar

Now that I’ve shown you how the stars have aligned for Rockstar, I hope it’s clear why they’re not aligned for you. But just in case, I’ll spell it out for you. Here’s why you should absolutely NOT go silent during a crisis like this, and why it’s different for you than for them:

First, you don’t have a 25-year-old Trust Reserve. If your studio is on its first or second game, you’re the pauper to Rockstar’s prince. All you have in your Trust Reserve is whatever you’ve deposited so far through all the devlogs and Discord replies you’ve posted over the past 18 months. If a crisis hits and you ghost your community for a week, that Reserve will drain out fast. Unlike Rockstar’s, your community doesn’t expect silence… they expect (hopefully, thanks to you!) a founder who actually talks to them. If you go dark on them now, they’ll think something’s wrong behind the scenes… or worse, that you actually did something wrong.

You’re also not dropping a big, hyped up Netflix premiere on Thursday. If the dung hits the fan, you won’t have such an overwhelming counterstatement up your sleeve. YOU have to type your counterstatement to your community, and you have to type it yourself. The longer you wait to type it, the more the leakers (or the review bombers, angry subreddit, or whatever) will define both you and the situation.

You don’t have a litigation budget, either. Especially if you’re a solo dev or a small team, you probably can’t afford to take anyone to court. So I’m sorry to say, nobody is gonna subpoena Discord on your behalf. You don’t have the option to let your lawyers handle your messaging, because, as we’ve just established, there are no lawyers. It’s just you and your co-founder handling this mess, plus a community manager who’s been awake since 3am and is barely holding it together. For you, a legal response is off the table… which only leaves a comms response.

And finally, you don’t have the luxury of letting the leakers self-destruct on their own, because with a studio as small as yours and without Rockstar-tier trust reserves, nobody’s going to scrutinize the leakers’ wallet… they’ll scrutinize YOU instead.

…

So yeah, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you’re an indie or AA studio (and hell, even most AAA studios), the framework I laid out last week still applies to you. If your hotly anticipated gameplay build ever gets leaked, your marching orders remain the same: release a holding statement within the first few hours that promises an update at a specific date and time, which you’ll actually follow through on, speaking with one voice and on one channel, and then actually go and fix the thing while making sure people can see you fixing it (note: you don’t have to say what leaked, just that you’re aware and you’re looking into it). If you’re working with your platform or your hosting provider or, yes, even a lawyer to get a grip on and fix the situation, then say that too.

Just give your people something to hold onto while you figure out the rest.

Oh, and if players are mostly hyped for your game’s story, then directly acknowledge their fear of spoilers. If you’re building a narrative game and the build leaks, your community won’t be mad (at least, not at first), but scared. In the worst cases, they’ll be despondent to the point of literal grief. You owe it to them to reassure them. Again, you don’t have to compose a Homerian epic, just write one quick line, something like this:

“We know some of you are worried about story spoilers. Please be careful what you click, and we’ll do everything we can to protect the experiene we’ve been building for you.”

Writing that one sentence will do more to keep your Trust Reserve full than filing a million takedown notices.

Risk Register DLC

Remember the Risk Register exercise from last week? To recap: you sit down with your leads, list all the possible ways something could blow up in your face, then score each of them based on how likely it is to blow up and how much it’d hurt. Yeah, you remember, don’t you? Because you went ahead and did it, just like I asked… wait, you did do it, right???

Well, no worries. Now’s a good time to actually do it, for real. And if you did do it (yay), I’d now like you to go add another row.

To set this up, let’s consider the last line in the leakers’ manifesto (or Edict, or whatever we’re calling it): a warning to “all big corpo” that if Cyberleek can hit Rockstar where it hurts most, no one is safe.

Now, sure, I doubt you’re on that list (last I checked, running a studio of 14 in a converted dentist’s office doesn’t quite qualify as “big corpo”). But take a look at which business practices the manifesto specifically calls out: digital-only preorders, DLC content already in the files, and always-online single player. Plenty of indie and AA studios do these things. Often, they only do them because their publisher or platform asked them to… but the Cyberleeks of the world won’t care enough to make that distinction. And besides, you don’t need a memecoin operation in the Seychelles to come after you. Sometimes, all it takes is one disgruntled contractor with an axe to grind about your DLC policy… and your build on their laptop.

So go ahead, add the following row to your Risk Register:

• Someone with access to our build decides our monetization [or DRM, or other platform/publisher requirements] makes us fair game.

Then, score and rank it. And write the holding statement for it now, while the sea is calm and the sun’s still out, so you don’t draft it at 2am on a Tuesday while the biggest game in the world shows the rest of us that it doesn’t have to.

So, there you have it. Rockstar can sit out the comms fight, because they’ve already won it by grinding for it over the past 25 years. You, however, haven’t. So go and fight the boss.

GG,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

As a wise person once said: Life is full of surprises. And as another wise person also said: life comes at you fast. So it’s not paranoid to acknowledge what I’m about to tell you, but simple prudence: at some point in your studio’s life, something is going to go badly, terribly, horribly, and publicly wrong.

What, exactly, goes wrong will depend on your studio, your team, your game, your community, and how much the stars are misaligned when it finally happens. Maybe you shipped a broken launch build, or you priced your game $5 more than your Discord thought it would (or should) be. Or maybe it has nothing to do with your game at all: maybe your engine vendor changed its licensing terms on a random Tuesday, blowing a big hole in your business model.

What specifically happened will vary with each studio and each game, but stripped to its core, it often comes down to your community, which up until now has fully trusted you, has found out something that’s making them question that trust, and now everyone is pissed off — your players are canceling preorders and deleting wishlists, and oh noes now the press is running clickbaity headlines about you and now whole communities that have nothing to do with your game are piling onto your social accounts, review-bombing your previous games, and even (in the worst cases) harassing and doxxing your team.

Now, all eyes are on you, the founder who now has to steer your studio through this minefield, while sustaining heavy fire from the entire internet. All your stakeholders — your players, your team, your investors, the media, the YouTube commentariat, and the wider gaming community — are attentively watching and anticipating your next move.

Congratulations: you’re now neck-deep in a full-blown crisis situation. But... what do you do about it? How do you make it go away? Can you make it go away, when everyone seems so furious at you? Can’t everyone just forget about it and move on?

Well, that entirely depends on how you handle it. But don’t worry! I’ve navigated quite a few crises throughout my career, and they need not I’m about to impart my wisdom and insight on how to emerge as unscathed as possible… and if you play your cards right, maybe even emerge better for it!

Now, if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you already know how I like to think about community: as a Trust Reserve. Your community’s trust is like a bank account, and whenever you do things that are good for them and that they like (like posting devlogs, updating them frequently, fixing bugs they’ve been bugging you (har har) about, or forthcomingly announcing bad news like a delay), you deposit trust in your Trust Reserve, one little bit at a time. Conversely, every time you ask you community for something (usually things like wishliting your next game or leaving a review for your current game, or even just asking them for patience while you squash a particularly stubborn bug, etc.), you make a withdrawal — you take trust out of your Trust Reserve. The bigger the ask, the more trust you withdraw.

A crisis is a forced withdrawal. And often, it’s a big one. Sometimes, you didn’t even authorize the withdrawal! But nevertheless, it cleared… at the worst possible time, at the lousiest conceivable exchange rate, and now your Trust Reserve is overdrawn.

Again, this will happen. It happens to every business if they’re in business long enough. Think about it — nobody sets out to create a crisis! Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks “Hey, you know what I want to do today? Completely blow up my launch prospects and my studio’s very survival!” So no, don’t think it can’t happen to you, too. If your studio is around long enough, it will happen, in some form or another. It’s practically a law of business.1

So if you can’t avoid it, what the hell should you do?! Well, that’s what this article is for. Since some form of crisis is inevitable, you should instead think about crisis prevention (note: this is not the same as “avoidance”), management, and recovery. Or, to continue the Trust Reserve analogy, you should know:

1. How to build up your trust balance enough before the withdrawal hits,

2. How to keep said withdrawal as small as possible so you don’t overdraw, and

3. How to refill your Trust Reserve afterward.

Think of it as a boss fight — specifically the fight against Chronos in Hades 2. You can’t skip it, you can’t outrun it forever, and you definitely can’t pause it... but you can absolutely walk in overleveled and decimate the old sod’s health bar.

Know Thine Enemy: The Most Common Types of Crisis

Before we talk strategy, let’s learn more about the types of bosses you might face. After all, you can’t determine (much less execute) a strategy if you don’t even know what you’re up against! Fortunately, because crises are public by nature, we can learn from the mistakes of all those unfortunate studios the boss shredded. We can learn its phases, discover its weak points, and exploit its patterns, all of which are highly documented in the annals of video game PR. Barring a few odd outliers, nearly every studio crisis takes one of the following six forms:

Boss 1: The Broken Launch

You’re probably most familiar with this one: your game ships with severe performance issues or game-breaking bugs, or it’s missing features that players were expecting… but either way, you’ll know, because players will let you know exactly what’s broken, in their scores of negative reviews, within hours of launch (which, if you’ve been reading me for a while, you know is the most critical moment in your game’s lifecycle; Steam’s algorithm renders its verdict on whether or not to bless you with visibility based on how your first 48 hours perform).

This is perhaps the most common type of crisis that studios face, but fortunately, it’s also the easiest to survive; players can be surprisingly forgiving of technical issues if you have a full Trust Reserve, and even more so for small indie teams. In any case, they’ll forgive you for jank much faster than they’d forgive you for lying to them… but only if you respond correctly. More on that in a bit.

Boss 2: The Business Decision Backlash

Let’s say that you (or your publisher, or your platform) made a call that seemed to make sense at the time, but really rubs your players the wrong way. Increasing the price is perhaps the thing that most triggers this response, but it’s by no means limited to that. DRM is another, as well as overly aggressive monetization (particularly if it feels like pay-to-win). Woe be to you if you make players create and sign into a separate account to play your game. Point is, you’ve now positioned yourself as anti-player.

Helldivers 2 serves as the most useful recent example. In May 2024, Sony announced that Steam players would have to link a PlayStation Network account to play the game, and the community went ballistic. Proving that hell hath no fury like a gamer scorned, players responded by review-bombing the hell out of the game, reportedly to the tune of over 300,000 negative Steam reviews in roughly three days. Things got a little too hot for Sony, and they walked the requirement back within a week. We’ll come back to this one later, because it’s highly instructive… yes even if your studio is 100x smaller than Arrowhead.

Boss 3: The Review Bomb

Speaking of review bombs, sometimes these come with Boss #2 (crisis situation boss gauntlet, woohoo!), but sometimes you fight them solo: whether you pissed players off because you decided something that rubbed them the wong way or if your studio gets tangled up in a controversy that has little (or nothing) to do with the game itself, either way, players rise up and organize to bombard you with negative reviews. Their grievance might feel trivial to you, but that doesn’’t really matter... because to the players, that grievance is real enough to go through the trouble of both coordinating the review bomb, and taking the time to crash out on your review page.

Now, I’m not going to touch on what caused this or that particular review bomb (no thank you, there are plenty of other places online where you can get that type of content). But speaking purely from a business and marketing perspective, you really do have to ameliorate your players as fast as you can. Your game’s review score hugely factors into how much Steam’s algorithm shows your game to your players, and review bombs damage it fast. Don’t think you can rely on Steam’s off-topic review tool, either; that only partly blunts the damage.

So it really doesn’t matter if you think your players (or whoever’s coordinating the review bomb) are being a bunch of babies. The bottom line is, they’re your customers, and they hold the power. Your game’s review score is a HUGE factor in both whether players see your game, and whether they buy it. Protect it with your life. At the end of the day… would you rather be right, or would you rather remain in business?

Boss 4: The Platform/Partner Shock

This one comes at you from outside your studio: maybe your engine vendor raised its price or wants to take a bigger cut of your revenue, or the platform you’re launching on scrambled its algorithm and now your game’s invisible in recommendation lists or being buried in search results. Ok, you might say, that sucks but we could still survive that… but what if your publisher goes under? Or a payment processor gets spooked by the type of game you’re making and strong-arms platforms to de-list you. While it’s not an exact 1-to-1 to the other examples on this list, a good example of this crisis comes to us via Unity‘s Runtime Fee, which they announced in September 2023 and fully canceled in September 2024 after developers revolted for almost a year.

Note that unlike the previous examples, this wasn’t a reputational crisis for game studios (though it certainly was for Unity), but a direct financial one. You’ll notice this is an infinitely more dangerous type of crisis; game studios already run on razor-thin margins as it is, and many studios literally can’t afford if Unity (or another vendor equally critical to building the game) ups its runtime fees.

Some studios accounted for this and either ran sufficently lean ships or had other contingencies in place, so they were able to weather the storm far better than the ones that didn’t. Those studios couldn’t do much except try and switch to a different engine (costly in just about every way) or else mauld out on social media to try and change Unity’s mind (which worked in this instance, but from a branding perspective it’s not the best look [understandable as it is], and in any case they’re still at the mercy of a third party, which is always a precarious position you want to avoid to best of your ability).

Boss 5: The Security Breach

Ruh roh... looks like some salty and bored basement dweller hacked into your social accounts and won’t stop spamming racist NSFW furry memes! Or perhaps your team’s data (or, God forbid, your players‘ data) got leaked, and now some Russian operative is demanding Bitcoin before it goes up for sale to the highest bidder on the Dark Web’s finest stolen identity markets. What happened??? Did you ship a compromised build? Or one of your team members fall for the fake FBI scam email and send over your database’s login credentials? In any case, it matters not… however it went down, you’ve now proven yourself untrustworthy to handle your stakeholders’ most sensitive information.

Small studios often assume hackers don’t care about them because they’re too small… a huge mistake, because that attitude actually makes you more enticing to them! Feeling complacent and relying on “security through obscurity” only renders you a softer and easier mark. This particular crisis is quite nasty and tricky to navigate, because by its nature you have to run your comms and your technical response in parallel, and therefore for the first day or two, you often can’t really say much about what’s going on and how you’re responding (because you don’t know much).

Boss 6: The People Problem

Oh dear, oh my, looks like someone’s been a very bad boy! Here’s another one that has nothing to do with your game... instead, you are the story behind the crisis. Or if not you specifically, then someone at your studio, whether it’s the founder, a developer, or someone else on your payroll. Oh, what did this person do, you ask? Literally take your pick! Maybe a fan, subordinate, or ex-significant other lodged an allegation against them — anything from actual public misconduct to simply being too much of an asshole. Or other times, someone left your team on really bad terms and is now airing your studio’s dirty laundry to the press or (heaven forbid) to commentary YouTubers. Either way, it’s not a good look for you!

Again, I need to tread carefully here; these situations are often tied up with broader culture war issues, and thanks but no thanks, I have no intention whatsoever of adjudicating those here. But what I will say, strictly from a business perspective, is that these crises tend to hit hardest at small studios, because when you only employ 12 people, the public will see no practical difference between any individual employee and the studio at large. So whenever you’re mulling whether to bring on a new hire, don’t just think about whether they can ship your game… consider if they’ll also ship some other unnecessary baggage along with it.

Anyway, there’s the tier list! Did you notice how only about half of these boss fights spawn from inside your studio? This means that you can do everything right on your end, and still pull aggro from the public. That’s why you can’t stop all crises from happening! Sometimes, you really are at the mercy of the universe, and when a crisis hits will be completely out of your control. So with this in mind, “prevention” isn’t about avoiding crises... but about being ready for them.

Which brings me to…

Phase One: Prevention (Or, Grinding Levels Before the Boss)

Fortunately for you, crisis prevention for a small studio is neither expensive nor complicated. All you have to do is start and keep up a handful of easy but critically important habits, most of which take less than an afternoon to set up. In the corporate comms world, we call this issues management: setting up systems and protocols for spotting problems while they’re still small enough that you can easily and privately deal with them before they become bigger and more costly.2

So without further ado, here’s the starter kit:

1. Build a Risk Register

Sit down with your leads for ~90 minutes, and write down every plausible way that things could blow up. Here’s a short list to get you started:

• You encounter launch issues (like lousy performance, servers overloaded, game-breaking bugs, missing features, just for starters)

• People feel your price is too high

• Your platform flips a switch and breaks either your game, your discoverability, or your profitability

• Someone on your team does something naughty (especially if they’re known to your community)

• You suffer any kind of security brief

For each risk, rank both of these on a scale of 1 to 5:

1. How likely does it feel like this would blow up?

2. How badly would it hurt if it did blow up?

That’s it! You’ve now identified and mapped your studio’s biggest vulnerabilities, which puts you ahead of like 99% of indie studios! Oh, and don’t let your Risk Register wither in your Google Drive! It should be a living document, so you’ll want to review and revise it quarterly at the very least. But don’t worry, after you’ve done this first pass, touching it up should only take about 20 minutes each time.

2. Write Your Holding Statements

A holding statement is a short, sweet, and truthful message that you’ll post when a crisis is first unfolding (like, within its first few hours), before you can share (or even have) full answers. At the very least, your holding statement(s) should say some version of the following, though obviously phrase it in your own words:

1. We know that something’s wrong,

2. We’re on it,

3. You’ll hear more from us on [TIMEFRAME/DATE PLACEHOLDER].

For each of the top 3–4 risks you identified in Step 1, write skeleton versions of these statements now, while everything’s still calm. But… why now? Because if you try to write this at 2 am in the throes of a crisis, with your heart rate pushing 140 as your DMs drain your phone’s battery, it’ll sound much worse (and will likely make the crisis itself much worse) than if you just do it now. I call this particular class of terrible corpo-writing the 2 AM Statement: overly defensive and weirdly emotional while still oddly sounding like a legal disclaimer, this type of statement is all but destined to become its very own news cycle and both prolong and intensity the crisis. But if you pre-draft your skeletons now, you’ll create an actually effective first statement, far more than any 2 AM Statement could ever hope to be.

3. Designate a Voice

Decide (and decide today) who will speak for your studio when the scheisse hits the fan… and just as importantly, who doesn’t speak for your studio. This might sound silly If you’re running a five-person studio... until three of your team members panic and start stumbling over each other to explain everything in the same Discord thread, and then the other two do the same thing in the Steam forums, all of them getting defensive and/or saying wildly different things while riling up the community, and before you know it… congrats champ, now you’re dealing with two crises! Don’t let this happen to you, remember the Golden Rule:

• One studio,

• One voice,

• One channel of record.

That’s it! No more, no less.

4. Watch the Water Temperature

Or, to put it more simply: stay vigilant. Fortunately, you don’t need to shell out mega $$$ for fancy enterprise social listening software, you can spot any storm clouds brewing on the horizon with the team and tools you already have! All you need is someone who reads your Discord, your Steam forums, your Twitter/X mentions, and your subreddit every single day, and who has explicit permission to escalate any weird vibes to leadership. In hindsight, nearly every community-driven crisis gives warning signs; if you know what to look for, you can spot the crisis coming from a mile away. And take these warnings seriously! I’d bet money that if you get combo’d, it’ll almost certainly be because either nobody bothered to look, or somebody did see trouble coming but didn’t feel empowered to say anything (or felt it was futile, because their warnings would fall on deaf ears).

5. Most Importantly: Make Trust Deposits While the Weather’s Still Sunny

Besides launch day itself, a crisis situation is when your Trust Reserve becomes the most important strategic asset you own (maybe a better metaphor would be “Strategic Trust Reserve?”). But ONLY if you’ve topped it up enough to last you through the storm, so be diligent about making those deposits! Fix bugs, post devlogs, be forthcoming about delays, and admit any small mistakes before someone forces you to.3

The more honest you are with your community, the more grace they’ll give you when things go belly-up. In fact, Arrowhead weathered the PSN storm partly because its community largely understood it was the publisher, not the studio, who mandated PSN accounts. They understood that because the studio had spent months candidly and humbly communicating with them, on their level, long before anything went wrong.

Phase Two: Management (ie, The Fight Itself)

Okay. Let’s fast-forward a bit to when, despite all your preparation, your Discord has blown up, players are canceling pre-orders, and the press is dragging your studio through the mud. The boss music is playing. So… what now?

Well, you just have to follow this playb—

“But Jay!” you so rudely interrupt me, “every crisis is different! How can one playbook cover a broken launch AND a hacked Twitter account AND a publisher imploding?! It’s impossible!” Ok, that’s fair (still rude, though). And you’re right each individual crisis is different, and specific details will differ from crisis to crisis. But there is a correct way to respond to a crisis, and on a fundamental level, it’s remarkably consistent no matter what form the crisis takes.

Broadly speaking, this is the protocol you should follow once it’s become clear things have gotten way, way out of control:

1. Establish Facts Before Narrative

During the crisis’ opening hour, focus all your efforts (and all your team’s efforts) on answering these three questions (Internally! Don’t put out a response yet):

1. What actually happened?

2. Who does/did it affect?

3. What do we not know yet?

Tempting as it is to post right away, I must implore that you resist the urge before you can answer at least the first question, if not all three. If you rush to put out a statement, and you later turn out to be wrong, people will stop thinking you merely messed up and will start thinking you’re lying. You’re going to have a much harder time defeating the latter boss, and you’ll take longer to recover from it.

2. Deploy Your Holding Statement ASAP

As soon as you know the basic facts (not full answers, just facts), post your holding statement. Like, right away — speed is critical during a crisis, because without information, people will go wild and think (and say!) all sorts of crazy things about your studio. You don’t need to put out a long, detailed, or overly involved statement! Just post something simple, like this:

“Hey guys, we know you’re experiencing performance issues, and we’re looking into it! We’ll update you again in 48 hours.”

That’s literally all you need! This is a model holding statement — it buys you time and shows that you respect your stakeholders, without speculating, crashing out, or saying anything that’d land your foot in your mouth later on.

But then, after you put your statement, actually update your community when you said you would. No exceptions, without fail, I can’t stress this enough. Yes, even if the studio is on fire. Yes, even if your grandma got into a car accident. And yes, even if you have nothing new to update them on! Just say that you’re still working on it, or you’re still ruling some things out (which is true). If you said you’d check in during a crisis, and then you don’t, how do you suppose your community will react? All you’ll do spawn a second crisis (the boss will call for reinforcements) — remember, hell hath no fury like a gamer scorned.

3. Stay Focused

Remember: pick only one spokesperson to speak for your studio, and pick one channel of record (usually either your Steam announcements or your main social account), and have everyone else on your team point back to both of them. During a crisis, your community team should NOT, under any circumstances, argue with angry commenters (well, they shouldn’t do this anytime, but especially not now); in fact, I dare you to find just once where that didn’t make the crisis 1000x worse. Imagine taunting a boss during its enrage phase, and you’ll get the picture: yes, I know it’s tempting, and yes, it’ll feel quite satisfying at first… but strategically, this is one of the worst things you can do in a crisis. It’s utterly suicidal in the long run.

4. Publicly Fix It

Whatever you need to do to make your community whole again (whether that’s patching the game, issuing refunds, reversing that hated decision that made them revolt in the first place, sacking the developer who doxxed a fan, or overhauling your information security practices), make sure you visibly narrate it to your community. In these situations, the humble patch note and progress update rise up and become weapons-grade crisis communication conduits. Fixing things, in and of itself, is a message, and each small thing you fix deposits a small amount of trust back into your Trust Reserve, and yes these small deposits do matter even when by all appearances your account is hemorrhaging trust faster than you can refill it. Players don’t expect or demand instant perfection… but they do want to see you earnestly attempting to make things right.

5. Know When to Walk It Back

Now, all of that in mind, never lose sight of who’s the head and who’s the tail in this situation, and who should wag who. You shouldn’t reflexively reverse every unpopular decision you make; sometimes, players are loud but the backlash turns out to be ultimately shallow, and if you cave, you’ll only teach your community to dial up the volume instead of engaging you in good-faith dialogue. Other times, the backlash doesn’t even come from your community at all! In these cases, unless there’s significant overlap, you can usually safely ignore these people.

But if your data says your unpopular decision is actually bleeding you (say, if refunds spike, your review score collapses, and your play metrics show your actual player base churning rather than just bored spectators spewing hot air), then change course as quickly and as cleanly as possible. Sony reversed its fateful PSN decision within days, and the Helldivers 2 community rewarded this speed: a good chunk of them flipped their negative reviews back to positive after they made the announcement.

But if you do reverse course, be sure to do so swiftly and gracefully; thank players for their feedback and their enthusiasm, commit to doing better, restate your appreciation for them, and lead the way forward. If you revert slowly or begrudgingly, or if you don’t fully reverse course, players will see right through you and will latch onto it, which could very well ignite a follow-up crisis. TL;DR: just like in poker, you gotta know when to hold ‘em, and when to fold ‘em… but if you’re going to fold ‘em, then fold ‘em like you mean it.

How to Apologize Correctly

I’m saving this one short section for the part that everyone knows comes with crisis territory: the humble apology. At some point, players will expect an apology of some sort, but as ~95% of recent gaming crises show, almost everyone fumbles the apology. So, what are the do’s and dont’s of apologizing to your stakeholders?

Simple, actually! For an apology to actually land, you must address these three parts:

1. What happened (and name it as specifically as legal will allow you to; no euphemisms allowed!),

2. What you’re doing to fix or address it (see the above section),

3. What you’ll change to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

And that’s it! It’s really that simple. So why do studios botch it so often? Usually, by overcomplicating them. When issuing an apology, be blunt and direct; short and sweet is the name of the game here. Don’t descend into a vapid fog of mealy-mouthed passive voice, the kind where mistakes “were made” by some unnamed spectral entity that couldn’t possibly have been your studio. Also, fully extricate “we’re sorry you feel that way” (and all its variations) from your vocabulary. And whatever you do, don’t grovel, either! If you prostrate and flagellate yourself through a seven-minute apology video, players will interpret it as performative instead of you taking actual accountability. Oh yes, you better believe they can immediately tell the difference… and you’d better believe they will let you know.

Finally, only apologize for what you actually did wrong. Nothing more, nothing less. If your players are mad because of something your platform did that you had no control over, or if people are piling onto you because of something you didn’t do, you don’t have to apologize for that. Sure, you can acknowledge players’ frustration, and let them know that you understand and empathize with them. Support your community however you can, but don’t ever feel like you have to confess to sins you didn’t commit. Somewhat counterintuitively, your players will actually respect you more for this!

Phase Three: Recovery + Aftermath

Finally, the boss is down. The Twitter mob moved onto a new target, and negative reviews have slowed to a trickle. But you’re not done yet! For now comes perhaps the most important (as well as the most neglected) stage: recovering afterwards.

1. Run a Post-Mortem

Within two weeks tops, while your memory is still fresh, gather everyone in your studio who responded to the crisis and document:

1. What happened,

2. To what extent things went according to plan (you had a plan now, remember?),

3. What will change going forward.

Record everything as meticulously specific and detailed as you can, but do not blame anyone. Then, using all the information you’ve gathered, update your risk register and your holding statements. Never let a crisis go to waste; if you don’t learn from a crisis, you’ll have taken all that damage in vain. Meanwhile, a crisis you do learn from is like a trial by fire — it can strengthen and harden you, and it can serve as the most expensive and most valuable training exercise you’ll ever run. Really, you went through all that trouble, so you might as well collect the XP!

2. Rebuild Through Action, not Announcements

The gold-standard recovery arc in this industry has got to be No Man’s Sky. It’s not even close. Its August 2016 launch became an industry shorthand for overpromising and underdelivering, and it marked the start of an arduous but ultimately successful redemption arc for the studio. For the next several years, the developers shipped several substantial free updates that gradually rebuilt the game’s reputation and its review scores. Now? Players as a whole (even the ones who remember its disastrous launch) agree: it’s a good game, sir.

And yes, I know, you don’t have Hello Games’ money, and so you probably can’t fund a multi-year, multi-million-dollar recovery. But honestly, you don’t need one to bounce back from most crises. The same principle applies regardless of how big your team is: if your actions lost you trust, your actions (and ONLY your actions) will regain you that trust... on whatever budget you’ve got. Your studio might fix the community’s most hated bugs or add their most-requested features over three months, instead of shipping free expansions for six years. Just like every crisis is different, every recovery is different as well. And even though your studio’s level cap can limit the specific things you can do, the fundamental mechanic (namely, that you have to do something) applies regardless.

3. Accept that You’ll Carry Some Battle Scars

Real talk: you usually won’t make a full recovery, and things will never be the same as they were before the crisis. Even after Sony backed off and pacified players restored their positive reviews, Helldivers 2 community members were still lamenting months later that the game’s overall score never fully returned what it was before the crisis. Your Maximum HP might stay capped, and some of that withdrawn trust will remain withdrawn. There’s no use stewing on it or pretending otherwise; factor the crisis’ leftover wounds into your projections, then move forward. If you dwell on the fact that you haven’t recovered as much as you’d like, you’re much likelier to screw up the next crisis that comes along.

4. Watch and Prepare for Aftershocks

Speaking of which… like it or not, this crisis is now a part of your studio’s history. So don’t be surprised if an anniversary post, retrospective video, or “remember when” thread briefly reanimates the crisis several months or even years later. Don’t panic when it happens, and don’t relitigate either the facts or your response. IF any response is warranted at all, it’s usually enough to briefly (and calmly) acknowledge it and move on. Let the haters mauld out in the corner, and get back to building your game. Remember, you already beat this boss! You don’t need to farm it.

Your Turn!

So, there you have it! Now, you know what to do before, during and after a crisis… and knowing is half the battle. But the other half is actually fighting the battle. So, here’s your mission, should you choose to accept it: block off 90 minutes this month to build your risk register and draft your holding statements. Then you’re done! Just one afternoon of work and two documents later, and you’ve gone from crossing your fingers to actually being prepared. After that, all you need to do is keep an eye and an ear out for when the water starts boiling so you’re ready to quickly turn down the gas.

Because at some point, something will go wrong. And when it does, future-you will be very, very glad that past-you did all that grinding while the sun was still out, sparing you the indignity of mentally BSoD’ing at a blinking cursor at 2 am while your reply notifications tear a hole in your phone case.

That said… if you’d rather have someone else build up your crisis readiness plan, or if you just need a second set of eyes on it, let’s talk! Crisis protocols are just one of the many topics we can go over during a Speedrun Strategy Session – along with launch, community, creators, marketing ops, positioning, and just about any marketing need you may have. Robust, thorough, and tailor-made for your game or studio. Clicky the linky below to book some facetime and see if we’re a fit:

Tap Into My Crisis Expertise

Remember, life comes at you fast. But with a little preparation, a little vigilance, and a little courage, you can meet its jabs head-on and come back at it just as hard.

GG,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

I was reading a piece on indie marketing budgets, and the opening line in particular really inspired me to get off my rear-end and finally write this piece for you guys: “Marketing budget advice for indie games is mostly written by people who sell marketing.”

Now, dear reader… I sell marketing. Obviously. How did you know? I certainly hoped I wouldn’t have to spell that one out for you!

But regardless, it’s good to just get that out on the table, before I write another word; if for no other reason than everything you’re about to read is going to be 100x more useful to you if you know what my angle is here.

And my angle is… marketing. I’m a fractional CMO. This means I have a strong commercial interest in you deciding that strategic marketing leadership (specifically, my strategic marketing leadership) is worth paying for and investing in.

And wouldn’t you know it, agencies also have a commercial interest… only theirs is in you deciding that a 12-month retainer is worth paying them for. That’s not a knock on the agencies, by the way. Everyone does this! Hell, even the guy telling you to buy nothing but good capsule art also... wait, let me check real quick... *checks notes, Google, and ChatGPT* oh, yeah... funnily enough, he also happens to sell capsule art.

Well, how about that? What are the odds?!

Ok, enough snark. Point is, everyone’s got an angle. But hey, at least I tell you what mine is, upfront and unprompted!

(Hold that thought, by the way. It’ll become important later.)

Now — why am I writing this piece? Besides reading that headline, that is… that just gave me the impetus to actually get it done. Fact is, I’ve had this piece sitting in the back of my mind for ages now, because I keep having basically the same conversation with indie developers.

Often (oh, so very often), a studio founder will get on a call with me, usually about eight or nine months out from launch (naturally), and somewhere within the first 15 minutes they’ll ask me some variation of:

“We’re thinking about hiring a marketing agency… is that a good idea? Should we?”

And I always want to answer that question. Truly! I really do… but I can’t, much to their chagrin. And that’s because it’s the wrong question to ask! If I answered it as they asked me, I’d be doing them a huge disservice.

Come, I’ll show you why.

The Wrong Question Class

“Should we hire an agency?” sounds like a budget question, mostly because people almost always ask it as a budget question. Usually while wincing, because the founder has already run a bunch of mental math on the agency’s pricing, and so they can’t help but compare it to three months of their engineer’s salary.

But it actually isn’t a budget question, not really. It only appears that way on the surface. And understandably so! After all, a $10k retainer has a way of monopolizing your mental space if you’re responsible for making those kinds of decisions. But at its core, it’s actually a question about strategy, as well as personnel.

To illustrate what I mean, think of a game launch like it’s an MMO raid.

In this framing, an agency is a DPS class.

It’s a specialist class, meaning that it deals one kind of damage extremely well. It has cooldowns and rotations and a gear score and all that jazz... and if you point it at the right target, at the right moment, it absolutely wrecks. In the right situation, that’s really valuable! Believe it or not, I’m not one of those people who thinks agencies are useless!

But tell me: have you ever once seen an MMO raid clear with nothing but DPS? No! Of course not! If you’ve ever been on a raid, you know the very premise is laughable on its face. If you want to actually kill the scary dragon and reap all its sweet, sweet loot, then you need all sorts of other specialists in addition to DPS:

• You need a tank,

• You need a healer,

• You need an engineer, bard, or some other support,

• And most importantly, you need someone calling the pulls.

In case you’re not an MMO player, what I mean by that is: you need someone who knows how to win the fight. Someone who knows all its phases, who knows when to burn cooldowns and when to hold them, and (most importantly) who is accountable to the guild when the whole thing wipes at 4%.

Now do you see what the missing piece is?

That’s right: an agency will not call the pulls for you. Now, some of them will offer to… and we’ll get to that, but in the meantime, know that you should be very wary of the ones that do.

So, with this in mind, hopefully you see now that the real question isn’t whether to hire an agency or not. The question you should ask instead is:

“Do we have a strategy that an agency can execute against? And does someone on our side own that strategy?”

If the answer is yes, then an agency can be one of the best things you can spend your limited dollarbucks on! But if the answer is no, then you’re about to pay a vendor $8,000 a month to simply guess at your positioning and your target market. And you don’t need to hire an agency for that! Anyone can do that… and for free, at that! But then again, I suppose you’re also paying the agency so you can blame them when whatever they’re doing doesn’t work… which isn’t for nothing, I suppose, but that’s not going to magically generate the wishlists that agency retainer was supposed to get you.

But all that said… when things do go wrong, it won’t be entirely their fault. Sorry, but it’s the truth!

What Can Agencies Do Well?

Again, I’m not one of those people who thinks agencies are bad, or a waste of money. I know for a fact that good agencies are not just good, but great. Excellent, even! There are agency founders in this industry with over 25 years of launch-chaos scar tissue, who really cut their teeth in the storefront and social media trenches, who’ve fought tooth and nail to get their clients’ games on the front pages of IGN and Game Informer, and have a lifetime’s worth of experience, judgment, and marketing insight permanently seared into their synapses. They will do things for your game that you simply cannot do yourself. If given a choice, I’d rather you hire the right agency than not hire one at all!

But how do you make that choice? How can you tell which agencies have earned your precious, limited dollar spend? It’s really quite simple, just look for any of the following markers:

1. They bring relationships to the table that you can’t build by yourself in six months

I know it’s kind of a meme in marketing circles to mock press lists as little more than glorified spreadsheets… mostly because of all the subpar agencies who really do treat them that way. But think about what’s behind that spreadsheet: a set of living, breathing people who’ll open a pitch email solely because they know the living, breathing person who sent it. When an agency has been placing games with a particular editor for a decade or more, they’ve built up a real relationship. That relationship is an intangible but insanely valuable asset, and it’s one that you simply cannot speedrun in a matter of months, and you certainly cannot fake. This is by far the single most legitimate and compelling reason to write them that check (and all of this applies to creator relationships as much as press relationships, if not even more so).

2. They know how to work the tooling that enables creator outreach at scale

Speaking of creators… sending keys to over 800 creators, tracking what they do with them, and tailoring your follow-ups accordingly can easily be a full-time job. That’s why platforms like Keymailer, Lurkit, Gamesight, and Terminals.io exist! Agencies — solely by the nature of the work they do — eat, breathe, and live in these tools every single day and know them inside and out. This acts as a major accelerator on your creator outreach (which, if you’ve been reading me for a while, you know is indispensable for indies).

3. They can unlock regional and language reach beyond your own backyard

This might be the most underrated reason to hire an agency. Fact is, running a pan-European or Asia-facing campaign is not something your community manager is going to be able to pull off in between bug triage sessions. But an agency staffed by people who actually speak the languages and know the right outlets and creators to reach out to? They absolutely can. So if you’re eyeing LATAM, Japan, CEE, or MENA for your launch, this alone can justify the engagement.

4. They can take event logistics completely off your plate

So you’ve gotten a booth at Gamescom or PAX. Awesome! Now, who’s going to manage your booth, schedule your press appointments, and man your demo lines? Please tell me it’s not you, because you will shave a good ~5 years off your life if you try to run this in-house. Event management is a highly specialized discipline, and take it from me and my own personal experience, it’s absolutely miserable to learn on the fly. And during the most stressful week of your year, no less? Life’s too short, man. Save yourself the hassle, and let someone else worry about it for you.

5. They excel at creative production

So you wanna try for a slot at Summer Game Fest. Who’s cutting your trailer? Or running your capture sessions? For that matter, who’s making your key art? Yes, yes, I know… you can feasibly do all of this in-house. But should you? And just three months from launch, while also finishing the game? Probably not. And you definitely won’t do it as well as a dedicated creative agency! Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

6. They’re a simple and seamless way to add surge capacity

Launch windows are spiky by nature: you might need eight people for nine weeks out of the year, and only two people for the other 43. So what do you do? Try as you might, you just can’t fit a full-time hire into that schedule... but you can fit an agency. In fact, that’s kind of the exact type of engagement that they’re built for!

Now, notice how every single one of those involves executing a decision you’ve already made. Which brings me to…

What Can’t Agencies Do? (No Matter What Their Deck Says)

Now, it’s time to have the suckier part of this conversation: what can’t agencies do? And I do want to stress that agencies can’t do these things not because they’re bad, or incompetent, or not smart enough. All of this applies even with the best agencies in the world! And that’s because these are structural limitations; agencies can’t do the following because they are (by design) on the outside of your studio, looking in:

1. They can’t decide who your game is for

Positioning is the single highest-stakes marketing decision a studio can ever make, and in order to decide it correctly, you need to know things about your studio and your game that only you can know. This includes all sorts of details and nuances related to things like:

• Your roadmap

• Your team’s actual (not just stated) capabilities

• Your funding situation

• Your appetite for risk

You will never fully transfer all of that to a vendor over the course of even the longest kickoff call. And absent the full picture, any recommendations an agency gives you is akin to telling you where to shoot darts while you’re both blindfolded.

2. They can’t fix what you haven’t scoped them to fix

You’d be amazed at how often a studio hires a PR agency while they’re still using a placeholder for their capsule art and their short description reads like a design doc or pitch deck. The agency gets them coverage… but that coverage then drives traffic to a WIP page that (surprise, surprise!) doesn’t convert it into wishlists or sales. Naturally, everyone acts quite confused about why the wishlists didn’t move… but hopefully, if you’re a longtime reader, it should be quite obvious to you why.

3. They can’t conjure a hook out of thin air

If your game doesn’t have a clear “A-HA!” moment, a magical instance where the prospective player goes “oooh, that’s what this is!”, then no amount of pitching press or creators is going to create one. The best agencies will tell you this upfront, by the way. Everyone else, meanwhile, will happily take your money (and send the press release anyway, so you can’t entirely pin it on them).

4. They can’t make deposits into your community’s trust reserve

My OG readers know how I think of community: as a trust reserve, akin to a bank account. First, you make deposits (by posting transparent devlogs that admit failure, visibly fixing bugs, honestly and tactfully announcing delays, and other things your community can see), and eventually you make withdrawals (pushing for wishlists, asking for reviews, and of course the big one: launch day itself). But community trust deposits have to come from you. Your studio is not showing up for your community if you pay a contracted community manager to post announcements on a fixed schedule. And before you ask: yes, players can tell. They can always tell.

5. They can’t make tough calls about tradeoffs

When your trailer slips, but Next Fest is in just five weeks and now you have to choose between delaying the beat or shipping a noticeably rough trailer... what the hell do you do?! That type of massively high-stakes leadership decision can have massive consequences for your whole studio, and it has to come from you and your internal marketing lead. No honest vendor is going to make that call for you... and honestly, you wouldn’t even want them to!

6. And finally, they can’t care about your next game

Your agency’s engagement will eventually end, and with it, they’ll take all the extra manpower, support, and knowledge they brought with them. That’s very much by design. You, however, still need to launch your studio’s second title... on your own. Every launch brings valuable, painful, bitter, and hard-earned lessons… but you’ll only keep them, over the long run, if someone inside your studio holds onto them for the entire journey.

Write This on a Laminated Sticky Note and Glue It To Your Monitor

Ok, ready? Here it is:

I know. That’s a really strong reaction! But why? After all… strategy and execution, all in one package? Gee, that sounds so easy and convenient, like a common-sense value add! Sure seems like a no-brainer! So why do I feel so strongly, you ask?

Well, let me answer your question with another question: do you think it’s a good idea to let high school students assign themselves homework? Because on a fundamental level, it’s really no different!

The bottom line is: when you hire an agency to formulate your strategy, you’re paying them to define the scope of work that they will then bill you to perform.

Think about it. The agency will be highly, massively incentivized to write you a bigger scope. Not necessarily a dishonestly bigger scope... but a bigger scope, nonetheless. After all, their team needs billable hours, and their account managers have targets to meet. Also, the strategy they bring back to you will just so happen to feature a lot of the things that the agency just so happens to be good at, and remarkably few of the things it isn’t.

Gee, will you look at that? What are the chances?! It’s a mystery, folks!

And just to be clear, this isn’t due to any overt villainy on their part. They’re just following the incentives wherever they lead them. Remember: incentives are to economics as gravity is to physics.1

And you can tell, just by looking at the deliverables: you’ll get something that looks like a strategy document, at least on the surface, but is really just a services menu. Will you look at that... six workstreams, all of which they can staff. How… convenient? And what’s this, here? I don’t see them recommending us not to do something… nor do I see them mention any of the parts of our marketing that don’t involve them at all!

Curious. Surely, it’s just a coincidence!

Meanwhile, a real strategy document would also tell you what not to do. It’d have a section (or several) detailing which channels and tactics your campaign is deliberately skipping, and why. If the plan you paid for doesn’t have one, then I hate to break it to you, but you didn’t buy a plan… you bought a quote.

Caveat emptor.

To Hire, Or Not To Hire?

I know you read this newsletter for concrete, actionable advice. So let’s make this concrete and actionable, with a handy-dandy checklist!

You SHOULD Hire an Agency When:

• You have a written, fully fleshed-out, and (even if just mostly) finalized go-to-market (GTM) strategy. This detailed and concrete document details who your target player is, spells out your positioning statement, contains a robust beat calendar, and lists which success metrics to track and what numbers constitute “success” for your launch.

• You need to fill a gap that only a specialist can fill, and that specialist’s work has a clearly defined scope (EMEA creator outreach, trailer production, paid social acquisition, TikTok clipper campaign, etc.) within a clearly defined window. Whether it’s a launch PR push targeted at major gaming outlets, your Gamescom booth presence, or a creator campaign in MENA or APAC (or some other region you don’t cover in-house), what all of these have in common is that you know exactly what work needs to be done, when it needs to get done, and that you can’t do it in-house.

• Someone in your studio (ideally, your marketing leader) owns the relationship with the agency and has the authority to tell them “no, we’re not doing that.” And most importantly, knows both when to say no, and why.

• You know — and most importantly, you can articulate — what you’d cancel the contract over, how you know things aren’t working out, and how you’ll not get screwed in the breakup. If it helps, think of it (roughly) like a business pre-nup (even though this marriage was never meant to last forever… it’s not a perfect analogy, but the lesson is: be specific and CYA). Being able to name your engagement’s failure conditions is what upgrades a hope to a scope!

You SHOULD NOT Hire an Agency When:

• You’re only hiring them to tell you what to do. See: the sticky note above. This almost guarantees the engagement will fail; you might as well take that $8k/month and use it as toilet paper. As a bonus, not doing this is also a mercy for the agency; I can tell you first-hand that agencies absolutely despise clients that don’t know what they want.

• You want to attract eyeballs but haven’t even finished your store page. Always fix your conversion layer before you buy traffic. Always. Now, can you hire an agency to fix your store page, and then another agency (or a new scope with your current agency) for a PR campaign? Sure. But first, you have to be able to articulate what you’re envisioning for your store page. The point is: don’t put execution before strategy!

• You’re only going to ask them to “make my studio famous.” That’s a wish, not a brief… and one that the agency can’t grant. They’re not God, or a magic genie. They’re just… a marketing agency. And marketing agencies can’t make your game worthy of fame when it isn’t already (that’s your job), nor can they predict or control which games will go mega-viral and which ones won’t; you might as well ask them to change the weather. (Agencies also dread working with this type of client, by the way!)

• You’re ~12 weeks out and panicking about your launch. Marketing agencies don’t conduct rescue missions… and the good ones will straight-up tell you that. The bad ones, meanwhile, will be more than happy to bill you for the attempt.

  • Now, hiring a PR agency to manage a crisis situation is different. Their whole specialty is in running rescue missions. But that’s a whole other conversation, and it’s not what I’m talking about here. A PR crisis is not even in the same universe as a soon-to-be underperforming launch.

• Nobody on your team has the bandwidth to manage them. An unmanaged agency isn’t free… and if anything, it’s even more expensive, because now nobody’s checking their output against your studio’s goals (usually because nobody wrote those down, either).

I want to really emphasize that last one, because it’s by far the most common reason I see agency engagements fail with indies. An agency is not a way to avoid having marketing leadership; it’s something that marketing leadership uses.

How to Spot a Shady Marketing Agency

Okay, wrench time! How do you know when an agency is trying to pull one over on you? Unfortunately, there are many ways that this could happen. So here are all the things I’d keep a really close eye on, roughly in ascending order of how much money each can cost you:

1. They pitched you before they even played you (if they even play you at all)

If you get a proposal and there’s no indication that anyone at the agency ever touched one of your builds, opened your Steam page, or even noticed what genre you’re in, then congratulations! They’ve just sent you a templated proposal. Do you feel properly insulted, or that your time has been wasted, yet? There’s a reason we make fun of these things so much in the marketing world, so take heed and proceed with caution (if at all). And to be clear, templates are fine… for invoices. They’re not fine, however, for positioning. There’s a time and a place, and this is neither.

2. They guarantee coverage, wishlists, or anything “earned”

In the marketing world, “earned” refers to any marketing assets that didn’t originate from you and for which you didn’t pay. And no matter what the agency’s accounts team tells you, nobody can guarantee that an IGN editor will decide to cover your game. Anyone promising you coverage from a specific outlet is either straight-up lying to you, or actually promising a paid placement without telling you it’s paid. If an agency promises you this, ask them which one it is. Then watch their face.

My favorite proof of this actually comes from an agency’s own website! Funny how that happens sometimes. Terminals.io (one of the creator key distribution platforms I mentioned earlier; this one’s run by Evolve PR) has a line in their public FAQ that flat-out states that there are really no guarantees when it comes to gaming PR. What they will commit to, however, is getting your game in front of thousands of verified media and creators… and everything that happens afterwards depends on your trailer, your announcements, and your game itself. Evolve is a reputable and serious shop; observe how completely transparent and honest they talk about the limits to what they sell. Hold every other agency to that same standard. If a vendor promises you more certainty than even the platform companies do, beware. They want you to think they’re more capable... capable enough, in fact, to Jedi mind-trick creators and editors into covering your game. Don’t believe the hype.

3. The pitch team is not the account team

This is depressingly common, especially with larger agencies. While the agency’s in the process of courting your business, you’ll meet the founder, the 20-year veteran, and the person whose LinkedIn profile made you reach out in the first place… anyone and anything to get you to say “yes.” Then the engagement starts, and suddenly you find out that your day-to-day contact is a junior account manager barely three months into the job. Seriously, this is so, SO common. To protect yourself, ask the agency, in writing: who specifically works on my account, what’s their experience, and what percentage of their week am I buying with my retainer?

4. They measure deliverables in activity, not outcomes

Some greatest hits examples, which you’ve probably seen before, include:

• ”We sent X press releases!”

• “We contacted Y creators!”

• “We generated Z Impressions!”

The problem? These are all inputs. They tell you the agency was busy… but they don’t tell you whether anything substantial actually happened. They don’t tell you if you’re any closer to hitting your wishlist targets, and if you are, whether it was specifically because of the work they did.

When scoping deliverables, push instead for metrics like wishlist velocity, page conversion, and creator-attributed traffic — in other words, actual KPIs that connect to a number you can justify to your CFO.

5. They own your assets

This one may well hurt the most out of all of these. Before you sign that agreement, ask the agency:

• Whose name is on the Discord?

• Who administers the ad account?

• Who holds the creator relationships, and the press contact list?

If the answer to any of those is “the agency,” then I’m sorry to say that you’re renting your own audience, and you’ll lose it all the day the engagement ends. Get asset ownership and handover terms in writing before you sign.

6. They mark up tooling you could just buy directly

Before you go into negotiations with the agency, know what the underlying platforms they use actually cost. It’s actually not hard at all, because a lot of them publish it publicly!

Terminals.io lists four launch packages at $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, and $6,000 per campaign, covering newsletter blasts, 2–4 weeks of key distribution, a few consulting hours, reporting, and featured placement. This is a highly useful service, at a price you can know and verify. So if an agency is charging you five figures for what is functionally that package along with an afternoon of coordination per week, then I’m sorry to announce that you are being ripped off. Don’t be a patsy for a shady agency’s lazy arbitrage opportunity! Ask for a line-by-line breakdown of pass-through costs versus the agency’s own fee. If they hand it over without blinking, you’re dealing with one of the good agencies. If they get weird, HANG UP THE PHONE.

7. They time their contract minimums against their cash flow, not your launch

If you start a 12-month retainer six weeks before you ship, you’re just paying the agency to coast for 10 months after the moment that mattered the most has come and gone. Instead, match the contract term to what your campaign (and your game) actually needs. You’re the client, your needs should come first.

8. They pepper rights language in what’s supposed to be a marketing contract

If you’re looking through what should be a services agreement and you see anything about revenue share, IP, or distribution creeping in? STOP, and get thee to a lawyer who knows games. Marketing contracts should be about one thing: marketing. Publishing deals are an entirely different beast altogether, an entirely different conversation with entirely different math to be had with entirely different entities than you would with marketing agreements. One should not be disguised as the other.2

9. Nobody has defined failure conditions or reporting cadences

If neither of you can describe what it looks like when something isn’t working, or how you’d even find out in the first place, don’t worry... you’ll find out. The expensive way.

At the very least, you should write down which KPIs you’re using to evaluate the agency’s performance, monthly or quarterly targets for those KPIs, how to track those KPIs, how often you’ll get KPI reports, and what happens when the agency doesn’t meet its targets.

Same goes for budget, and the budget should be tied to those KPIs as well: how much spend will get you X new wishlists? What if that budget gets you less than that number?

Finally: how do you evaluate all of that, and if the agency underperforms, what’s the process for remediation or termination? What if the agency disputes anything? What’s the process for resolving that?

Ok, POP QUIZ time!

Let’s do a quick gut-check before we move on. Which of these two lines from an agency pitch call should worry you more?

If you picked “B,” then go ahead and pat yourself on the back. Here, have a cookie as well! “A” is spoken by a true professional, who’s making a tightly calibrated claim that you can hold them to later on. “B,” meanwhile, is just a meaningless sentence that a shyster has surgically engineered to let him off the hook when he turns out to have been wrong.

What Does Hiring an Agency Cost?

I knew you were going to ask, so let’s go ahead and talk about numbers now:

• Public pricing guidance from within the gaming PR world puts retainers somewhere in the range of $5,000 to $25,000+ per month depending on scope, region, and agency size.

  • Though I should note that estimate comes from an agency’s own published guide, so don’t take it as gospel. Take it instead as a directional range from an interested party (which is still useful information, as long as you’re mindful of that caveat).

• Meanwhile, broader (non-gaming) PR pricing guides for 2026 tend to put the lower range for a credible agency at around $3,000–$5,000/month, with boutique firms typically in the $3,000–$7,000 range.

• And at the tooling end, as I noted above, a Terminals.io launch package runs $2,000 to $6,000 per campaign.

Before we move on, I do want to highlight a couple of things you should know about the high end of that range.

First: you’ll often hear a rule of thumb that marketing spend should come out to something like 30% of your development budget… but this figure tends to come from people who sell marketing services. Remember: caveat emptor. Always consider the source… mine included!

Second (and more useful to you): the public, documented record of indie marketing spend above ~$10,000 gets thin rather fast, and marginal dollars past that point tend to flow into paid ads… which especially for indies are usually the weakest performing channel according to most published postmortems. Now, I’m not saying this means you shouldn’t spend anything above that. But I am saying that nobody really has good evidence for what a $40,000 campaign actually buys a $3M game… not even the people selling the campaign. Again, I’m not saying you shouldn’t spend it… but I am saying to be careful.

Anyway, I’m starting to ramble, so what should you take from all of this? Basically, a good rule of thumb is: if an agency’s quote lands well under the lower end of the above ranges, ask what you’re not getting. Conversely, if it lands well over, ask what specifically justifies the spend… and demand a real answer.

Putting It All Together

Ok, since you made it this far, here’s a quick summary of the sequence you should run for actually hiring an agency. Run it in order… no skipping!

Steps 1 and 6 are absolutely essential; they are, indeed, the whole ballgame. Without them, Steps 2–5 don’t matter at all. I know it’s hard, and I’m sorry if you thought hiring an agency meant you didn’t have to think about marketing strategy or actively manage the relationship and I’ve now burst your bubble. But that’s just the way things are, and getting mad at me won’t change that. If after reading all this, you still insist on hiring an agency to not have to worry about marketing? Well, there is an old saying about a fool and his money soon being parted (and also a similar one about not letting a fool keep said money).

The Most Important Part? It’s Not About Agencies

Because it really isn’t, is it?

Agency relationships fail all the time. Whenever a founder has expressed to me why they “don’t believe marketing works,” it’s almost always been because they once hired an agency for $8–10k/month only for said agency to not move the needle at all. And I understand where they’re coming from; on the surface, it absolutely seems that the agency either didn’t know what they were doing, or were taking the founder out for a ride!

But the truth is, behind every failed agency campaign I’ve ever been privy to, behind every service menu disguised as a strategy document, every unmanaged retainer, every undefined metric that nobody agreed on anyway, and every community outsourced to a contractor’s schedule, the culprit was clear as day… and it wasn’t a bad agency, but a bad founder.

And in gaming specifically, that’s usually a founder running a studio where nobody owns marketing as their primary responsibility.

When somebody on the studio side owns marketing, an agency acts as a force multiplier. The marketing lead hands them a brief with actual teeth to it, checks the output against the studio’s strategy, and cuts the engagement as soon as it stops yielding results.

But when nobody owns marketing, an agency only becomes a very expensive way for the founder to feel like someone’s handling the problem… all while they get to continue avoiding and not making the most important and critical decisions behind a successful launch — things like: “Who is this for?” “Why now?” Or “What are we skipping, and why?” — right up until the moment of truth, when those decisions answer themselves in the form of layoff notices and apology letters.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you hire the best agency in the entire damn industry. If nobody’s calling the pulls, you’re still going to wipe at 4%.

So… who’s calling the pulls at your studio? Be honest. If you answered “me, whenever I find the time in between everything else,” don’t feel too bad about yourself. You’re in good company; that’s actually the single most common marketing arrangement in indie games. But don’t give yourself a pass, either... because it IS a problem, and one that could cost you your dreams and your team their livelihoods.

Fortunately, it’s also an EMINENTLY fixable problem… and it’s a lot cheaper to fix before you sign a 12-month agency retainer than after!

So… are you going to fix the problem?

GG,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

ED NOTE: A scheduled article accidentally went out to some of you on Thursday. I’d meant to send it out next week, and barring any ground-breaking industry news until then, that’s when you’ll receive it for real. Apologies for any confusion caused by my false start!

The Curious Case of The Delay that Announced Itself

On July 23, Amazon Games boss Jeffrey Gattis sat down with The Game Business for an interview, where he mostly talked about Luna (Amazon’s cloud game streaming service) landing inside the Prime Video app. Somewhere in the middle of a question about how Amazon splits its investment between AAA and indie titles, he said this:

“We have obviously announced the two Tomb Raider titles. Tomb Raider Legacy of Atlantis comes 12 February, next year, and then we’ll follow on in 2028 with the next one. We’re excited about those.”

Did you catch it? Let’s take a second look at that quote:

“The next one” that he’s referring to is Tomb Raider: Catalyst. When Amazon and Crystal Dynamics first unveiled it at The Game Awards in December 2025, their announced release window was “2027.” So Gattis just pushed a flagship AAA title back a full year… in a subordinate clause… during a podcast about a streaming app.

As of this writing, Amazon, Crystal Dynamics, and the platform holders still haven’t formally announced the delay, and as of the time I’m writing this, Amazon’s own website still lists Catalyst as coming in 2027. But Gattis spoke, and in doing so, gave us different information about the game’s launch dates… and since it’s now the most recent information to come out of the platform, the press was more than happy to run with it.1

Now, will Tomb Raider survive this? Yeah, obviously. DUH. Lara Croft has survived tank controls, three reboots, and that one godawful movie with the bungee ballet scene. A brand with three decades’ worth of equity and Amazon’s balance sheet backing it can absorb a sloppy delay reveal, much in the way a Level 80 paladin can absorb a goblin’s dagger.

You, however, are not a Level 80 paladin. You’re an indie studio whose community trust is probably the single most valuable asset (if not the only valuable asset) you own before launch. So let’s talk about your three realistic options when a date slips… because one of them will slip eventually, and whether you handle it well or handle it like Amazon just did will directly affect both your wishlists (today) and your sales (at launch).

Option 1: Announce It Yourself (Clearly, and With a Reason)

This is when you rip off the proverbial Band-Aid. You write the delay announcement yourself, you name the new window (or you forthcomingly admit that you don’t have one yet), you give a reason for the delay, and you publish it on your own channels before anyone else can frame the delay for you.

Let’s not suguarcoat it: there IS an immediate cost to this. Players will be mad at you! For a while! Your Discord will light up with invective, salty players will fill your announcement replies with clown emojis, and someone will inevitably comment “dEaD gAmE!!1!!” on a project that is very much alive. But that sting lasts roughly a week or two in most cases, and then something interesting happens: all that anger metabolizes into a weird kind of respect.

Longtime readers will remember the Trust Reserve Model that I’ve harped on at length in these pages: trust is a currency, and your community is a bank account. Devlogs and honest updates are deposits, and launch day is a massive withdrawal. A self-announced delay might well be the strangest transaction in that ledger… it’s a withdrawal that eventually converts into a deposit. Players take a clear and reasoned delay announcement as evidence that you’ll tell them the truth, even when telling the truth is painful or inconvenient. And that’s often all the evidence they’ll need to preorder, review, or evangelize on your behalf.

You also keep control of the framing, which matters far more than many founders seem to realize. If you announce it, the story is “studio delays game to make sure it’s up to par.” But if a journalist pieces it together from a SteamDB change, the story turns into “studio quietly delays game,” with quietly being the most damning and damaging word in the entire story (for what I hope are obvious reasons... but even if not, keep reading). Notice how the same facts spin into a completely different narrative! And the only thing that actually changed is who published the story first.

Your stated reason for the delay doesn’t need to be a confessional, by the way; “We need more time in the oven” is a little thin, but entirely acceptable. However, “The final act isn’t hitting as hard as the first two acts, and we’re not shipping it until it does” is much better, because the more specific you are, the more honest you seem. Disclosure is a dial, not a switch… and don’t worry, we’ll get to where you should set it once we get to the framework below.

Option 2: Let It Emerge Sideways

This is what Gattis pulled: you change the date in an interview aside, a store page update, or a quiet calendar shuffle, and let the press do your announcing for you. Let’s call it what it is: a shadow nerf. We all know the move from live service games… the devs change a stat, nothing appears in the patch notes, and players only find out when their build stops working. Studios that shadow nerf catch flak for it every single time, for the same underlying reason that you will too, if you pull this: the crime isn’t in making the change itself, but in concealing it.

And I get the appeal, truly. A sideways slip costs you nothing today. No angry announcement thread to moderate, no needing to stand in front of a news cycle, and no having to answer any awkward “what he hell happened?!” questions. The date just… drifts. And if you’re lucky, maybe nobody notices for a while.

But look at what happened with Catalyst. Within 48 hours of the interview, VGC, GameSpot, and half the gaming press had written it up, and GameSpot even framed it as Gattis having “sneakily mentioned” the delay. Sneakily. Uh oh. That word is now attached to the reveal, and the worst part is, Amazon never got a chance to contest it because Amazon never made a statement of its own. The press release they never wrote got written anyway… just by other people, who got to append their own set of adjectives to the delay.2

Anyway, in terms of the Trust Reserve, this type of “sideways leak” is a pure withdrawal, with no deposit to offset it. And even worse: it’s a compounding withdrawal. Do it once, and players shrug. Maybe you’re just figuring it out, they say... or you got busy and let it slip, or you simply don’t know any better. Do it twice? Then they start checking SteamDB before they believe your own announcements. And God help you if you do it habitually, and in the process teach your community that your official channels are the absolute last place the truth will appear. At that point, your announcements will stop moving wishlists at all, because everyone will simply wait for the dataminers to confirm them. Congratulations, you’ve speedran your way to a community that trusts a third-party database more than it trusts you. And you can’t cleanse that debuff, no matter how good your next trailer is.

Option 3: Say Nothing at All

And then, there’s good ole’ silence: the date passes, or quietly stops being mentioned, and your studio simply… doesn’t address it. The roadmap page goes stale, and you still have a pinned Discord message that says “coming this year”... even though “this year” ended eight months ago.

This is by far the worst of the three, and it isn’t even close. Silence doesn’t defer the trust withdrawal… it automates it. Each day the stale date sits there, some fraction of your community notices, draws its own conclusion, and files it away… and in a vacuum of information, people’s imaginations will completely take over the narrative. Trust me, their fanfiction is grim… much, much worse than anything you could conjure up in a straightforward announcement! People will say that the game is stuck in development hell, that your funding has collapsed, or even that your studio is dead (or close to it). You’ve now delegated your narrative to the most anxious 5% of your Discord, and because perception is reality in the world of marketing, their fanfiction will become canon in the eyes of the other 95%. Your radio silence has become a Rorschach test, one that gives license for your community to immediately presume catastrophe behind the scenes. And since you can’t (or won’t) even refute this... are they even really wrong? Worst of all: once this type of narrative sets in, you can never fully dispel it even if you do eventually announce something.

“But Jay,” you protest, “Team Cherry said basically nothing about Silksong for years! Hell, the silence became a meme, and that game eventually launched to sales that most studios would sacrifice a kidney for without a second thought.” True! And to be fair, it does prove that silence isn’t automatically fatal.

But also, look at what Team Cherry already had in the bank before they went dark: they were a tiny team with a reputation for craft, who’d already shipped a beloved generational game that netted them truckloads of evergreen goodwill, they hadn’t taken any preorders, they didn’t break any of their live commitments, and as such their fanbase’s frustration curdled into affectionate memes instead of a mass exodus. They had such an unfathomably deep trust reserve that years of withdrawals never fully emptied it… but even then, the memes expressed real frustration underneath all the jokes.

Do you really think you could replicate that strategy? No! It’s not even much of a strategy… it’s more like a jackpot, and one that was hit by a studio that had already won a previous jackpot. What do you think your odds are of hitting it? My advice: don’t bet the studio on it.3

This Will Hit Your Studio Harder Than It Hit Amazon

Let’s zoom out for a second and look at how completely different the stakes are at your scale.

Amazon can eat a botched delay reveal because Tomb Raider‘s brand equity was built over 30 years… and not to mention Catalyst’s marketing budget probably exceeds your entire studio’s lifetime revenue. When the news cycle turns hostile for a week, Amazon’s only suffers a bad week. You, on the other hand? You’d be screwed. For an indie studio in pre-launch, community trust often is the marketing engine. It’s what turns a devlog into wishlists, wishlists into Day One sales, and Day One sales into actual algorithmic visibility that can literally save your launch. If you drain that reserve before you ship, you’ll arrive at the final boss fight without any potions.

I also want to point out another asymmetry at play here (because life isn’t fair, and certainly neither is this industry): players are often more quick to forgive big publishers, because players have been playing their games for several decades. Your community has, what, one shipped title? Maybe even zero? With every action you take, you’re building their model of who you are. As such, a sideways slip from Amazon is simply “lol, classic Amazon”… whereas a sideways slip from you becomes foundational evidence about your character. You don’t get to respect first impressions.

Spawn Point Marketing’s Patented Delay Disclosure Protocol

(NOTE: Patent Pending. ~Legal)

So, as promised, here’s some actual advice for ya. And I want you to act on it this week: decide your delay policy now, while nothing has slipped and everyone’s calm. If you wait for a crisis to hit before writing this policy, you’re gonna have a bad time. Don’t worry, it’s easy! You simply have to make the following four decisions, well in advance of any possible delay:

1. Who announces the delay?

So, who should be the bearer of bad news? Almost always, it should be the most senior face at your studio that your community already knows: usually the studio head or game director. Write the announcement in the first person, and attach their name on it. People will read a delay signed by “The [Studio] Team” as a legal disclaimer; whereas if the delay is announced by an actual, named human, it’ll read like starting a conversation, on the players’ level. And most critically: brief everyone who talks in public (founders, leads, and anyone doing interviews or podcasts) that dates are announcement material, never small talk. Gattis slipped because Catalyst’s release date lived in his head as trivia rather than the thing it actually is: embargoed news. Don’t let your dates wander around unsupervised like an oblivious NPC in an escort mission.

2. What channels will you announce in, and in what order?

Your owned channels go first, full stop. The canonical version of your announcement lives wherever your community lives (Steam news post, Discord announcement, newsletter… whichever is your true home base), and everything else links back to it. Update store pages and inform the press on the same day... but only after your post is live, never before. Don’t neglect the sequencing, it’s more important than it might seem at first: the moment a storefront date changes before your announcement exists, you’ve accidentally switched from Option 1 to Option 2, and if you have attentive and eagle-eyed dataminers following your launch, they’ll do you the courtesy of publishing your news for you. No bueno.

3. How fast do you announce it?

Set a clock: once the decision to delay has been locked internally, ship the announcement within five to 10 business days. No exceptions! And yes, you do need a real number here; blowing this off and saying you’ll ship “when the messaging is ready” means you’ll never actually ship the announcement. That’s how you drift into Option 3, the worst option of them all, one extra draft revision at a time. Furthermore, as if that weren’t bad enough, every day between your decision to delay and your disclosure of such is a day the truth can leak sideways in an interview (or even just after the founder gets a little carelessly loud at happy hour), thus converting your planned deposit into an unplanned withdrawal. Announcing your delay quickly is the cheapest insurance you will ever buy for your studio.

4. How much of the reason for delaying will you disclose?

This is the dial I was talking about earlier. As for where to set it? The rule of thumb is: be specific about the work, and discreet about any drama. Players deserve to know what needs more time… whether it’s the back half of the campaign, performance on older devices, a system that isn’t fun yet, or even characters that now seem uglier than they were during concepting (hey, it worked for the Fable remake! …so far, at least). Specificity makes the announcement stick, because then players will see it as honest rather than mere boilerplate. They do not, however, need to know the tea on any internal politics, how terribly negotiations with the publisher are going, or anything else you’d regret seeing IGN quote you in a headline. And if you don’t have a new date yet? Then just say that! But make sure you also commit to setting a date for the date (”we’ll share the new window by March”). Naming the checkpoint keeps the silence, and all the Discord fanfiction that spawns out of it, from restarting.

Write down your answers to all four in a Notion or Google Doc. One page, max; you’re not writing The Iliad here. Make sure it’s easily accessible; put it wherever your studio keeps its operating docs. And most importantly: make sure everyone who might everhold a microphone (even if it’s just a karaoke microphone) has read it and committed it to memory.

“Who Frames the Delay?” Was the Only Real Choice, All Along

So, let’s bring all of this home. If you’ve ever shipped a game before, you already know that a delay is not actually a choice… nobody actually wants to delay a game, and nobody starts writing a design doc thinking “oh boy, I can’t wait to push this back two years, maybe even twice for good measure!” No. Making software is hard. And a game is probably the hardest software of all to make. Delays are as inevitable in this industry as the summer rain in Aruba. The fact is, the game will take the time the game takes. No more, no less.

The only choice you actually control is who tells the story... and you choosing to not tell the story doesn’t mean the story doesn’t get told! So, which is it gonna be? Do you tell the story, with your reasoning and your framing front and center? Do the press and the dataminers tell the story, with theirs? Or do the most imaginatively paranoid members of your community tell the story, with all of their hyperbolically apocalyptic flourish that would put Valhalla to shame, until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy?

The bottom line: when it comes to delay announcements, doing nothing is far costlier than doing something. A direct announcement costs you at most a bad week, but pays you back in credibility. Meanwhile, a sideways leak feels free in the moment, but slowly and surely bankrupts your credibility. Last and least: total radio silence hands your narrative to the doomers, wrapped in a pretty little bow, and lets the horror fanfiction (with your studio as the protagonist) metastasize daily.

Amazon will be fine, because frankly, Amazon has installed a money mod and can literally afford to be sloppy. You, however, are playing hardcore mode: 1 HP, permadeath, with no save files to reload. So go make those four decisions above this week, while they’re still cheap to make. Because the absolute worst time to design your delay announcement is the day you need to.

GG,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

I wanted to touch on this topic this week because an attendee asked me the following question at my recent webinar:

How do you decide whether to launch a new game, or keep supporting the game you already have?

Now, obviously, it depends highly from game to game. However, this is also kind of useless advice, isn’t it? Namely, because it begs the question of what “it” depends on, which I very un-helpfully didn’t elaborate on. So in the spirit of giving actually useful and actionable advice (ie, the very reason you read this newsletter), I’ll give you the framework I’d actually run with a client who’s facing this decision. I built it around four simple tests, which you apply in order.

First, though, I want to address a false premise that this question sneaks in, and kill it right off the bat:

This Is Not an Either/Or Decision

The attendee’s question assumes that your existing game and your next game compete for the same resources (be it time, budget, effort, or all of the above). And sure, sometimes they do! But for the vast majority of studios, their existing game actually serves as their next game’s single cheapest available marketing channel.

After all, your shipped game has many, many things that your unannounced game does not, among them:

• Steam followers

• A review history

• A (hopefully) active Discord

• An email list

• And most importantly: players who already trust you

Every single one of those is a launch asset for your next game.

After all, when Studio MDHR or Supergiant announces a new title, it’s not like they’re starting from scratch, from zero wishlists; no, they’ve already got a head start on that front, by dint of their existing communities and brand equity. So instead, all they really have to do is convert an existing audience, which they’ve already spent years earning, to their new title. That is a much easier lift, which confers them a massive advantage over studios that are launching their debut title.

So the real question to ask yourself isn’t whether to support Game A or launch Game B, as if one necessarily foregoes the other. Instead, you should be asking yourself which marginal dev-month, as well as which marginal marketing dollar, nets you the most long-term value for your studio.

Fortunately, that’s an eminently answerable question! Anyway, I’ve been dancing around this long enough, so here’s how to answer it:

Test 1: Marginal Return per Update

This test forms the framework’s quantitative trigger, and fortunately for you, it’s actually quite straightforward to run these numbers:

1. Take your last 2–3 content updates,

2. For each one, chart the resulting revenue lift from within 30 days after release, against what that update cost to ship (in terms of team months and tech costs),

3. Look at the trend line: does it go up, or does it go down?

When an update works, it really works… like, dramatically so. Take Cult of the Lamb’s recent Pilgrim Pack DLC, which drove a 280% revenue increase the month it dropped. That’s your ceiling, your absolute best-case scenario: your content drop basically functions as a second launch, re-triggering Steam’s visibility systems (which are primarily driven by revenue) as well as pulling any lapsed players back into the fold.

But that’s a literal jackpot, and you have comparable odds of hitting it. So don’t bet the farm on it! The truth is that for most games, this trendline will gradually trend downwards, and each successive update will produce a smaller spike that also decays faster than the previous update. I really want to emphasize that, in most cases, this is to be expected. Don’t beat yourself up over it if the line goes down at all.

Ah, but you caught those last two words, didn’t you? “At all.” This brings me to the real question… if it’s not that the line is going down, then what is it? If you guessed “by how much it’s going down,” go ahead and pat yourself on the back. You want to look at where you sit on that downward curve.

The specific number will vary with each game and with each studio, obviously. But in more practical terms, if your last update’s revenue lift didn’t cover its production costs, that means your existing game is no longer supporting your studio’s growth, and you should allocate your resources accordingly. Now, I’m not telling you to abandon it yet! You can and should keep it healthy by patching it and remaining active in your community… but from this point onward, understand that if you pour new content into it, you’ll net increasingly diminishing returns.

So this diagnostic, in a nutshell, is as follows: if your existing game’s last two updates each returned less than what they cost, your existing game’s support timeline is drawing to an end… whether you realize it or not.

Test 2: Audience Transferability

Next up! This next test will probably throw the biggest wrench in your calculations, so pay attention.

For this test, ask yourself if your existing game’s community is actively signaling intent to purchase your next game. Concretely, that means any and all of the following:

• Wishlists on your new title,

• Steam followers,

• Email subscribers,

• Discord members who will actually show up when you announce the new game.

If your next game is in the same genre and tone as your existing game, then the answer is probably “yes,” and that completely changes the calculus on how much you should support your current game. If you put out an update to the old game that re-engages 10,000 lapsed players, who then see the announcement for your next title in their activity feed, that isn’t a pure opportunity cost! It actually doubles as early launch marketing for your next game, even if it looks like mere patch notes for your existing game. Score it accordingly.

But if you’re doing a hard pivot for your next game — if you’re making the new game in a different genre, or for a different audience, or launching it on a different platform (or all of the above), then it’s more likely that your existing game’s audience will mostly not transfer over (unless you have Capcom-tier brand strength), and if that’s the case, then your support for your existing game really does compete head-to-head with your new project. That doesn’t mean you should stop supporting it, but you should absolutely stop pretending said support is actually building toward anything (beyond the current game’s gradually declining revenue, that is).

Oh, while we’re at it, I need to drop one really quick but really important operational note: your audience is not going to transfer by accident. If you want your old game’s community to fund and seed your new game’s launch, then you have to deliberately build that bridge for them. To start:

• Cross-promote your new game when announcing updates for your existing game,

• Open a “what we’re working on next” channel in Discord,

• Write email sequences designed to migrate players from lists specific for your game to studio-level lists,

• Do whatever you can to shout your new game from the rooftops and actually ask players to wishlist and buy.

And that’s just for starters! There are many, many ways to go about this, and what’s optimal will vary by studio. But regardless of tactics, my point is this: don’t assume your audience will show up for your new game by default; if you haven’t built the marketing infrastructure to transfer them over, then the audience you so diligently earned through your existing game will simply evaporate the day you stop updating it.

Test 3: Platform Visibility

Sorry, I’m about to throw you another wrench. For this next test, you’ll need to recalibrate your instincts based on the most recent industry data, specifically the kind that shows how over the past few years, platforms have steadily shifted value toward the back catalog instead of new releases.

Newzoo’s 2026 PC and Console report (which I’ve already cited quite a bit in these pages) found that playtime for games ranked outside the Top 20 grew 44% on PC from 2022 to 2025; furthermore, long-term survivability for these long tail studios depends on the depth of their catalog and how it interplays with platforms’ discovery mechanics more than it does on launch window momentum for any new title.

Among those long tail titles on PC, roughly 80% of revenue comes from back catalog games, not new releases! And to corroborate this insight, GameDiscoverCo’s own analysis has shown that only around 15% of Steam playtime goes to any new games at all.

Meanwhile, a new launch starts from zero in a market that sees 20,000 new Steam releases each year. Your existing game, if it’s selling steadily, already has algorithmic standing with Valve, which is insanely valuable in and of itself. Steam’s post-launch visibility is based on revenue, and a game clearing meaningful weekly revenue will continue surfacing in recommendations, tag pages, and discovery queues… without you spending a single dollar.

The implication and lesson here is that your bar for walking away from earned visibility should be very high indeed. Visibility is the most expensive thing in this industry to acquire, as well as the easiest to squander. If your existing game still has algorithmic standing, your default move should be to harvest it, not abandon it.

Test 4: Concentration Risk and Runway

Now we arrive at the framework’s counterweight, and it’s important because the previous three tests, on their own, can sneakily seduce you into milking a single game until your studio dies of old age. So stay with me for a bit longer.

The reality of the current market is that a studio with only one game is only one decay curve away from closure. Every game’s revenue eventually declines, and if your existing title generates more than 80% of your studio’s revenue and is trending down, then your studio’s survival literally depends on you launching a new game. It’s a mathematical necessity!

Sorry, but that’s just the reality.

But also, look at how the publishers who live or die by this reality play it: Team17’s new releases generated just 8% of its total revenue in the first half of 2024, while Devolver (as I opened with) runs at 88% back catalog. These companies survive because they treat their catalog as their main business and their new launches as bets… but also notice that they never stop placing bets. Their catalog funds their pipeline, while their pipeline refreshes their catalog. If they were to stop either side, the machine would simply seize up.

And yes, I know you’re not Devolver, but this same logic applies just as much for a single-title indie studio. It’s just at a smaller scale. The point is, if your back catalog consists of just one game, then your existing game’s revenue is your runway. So with that in mind, let’s conduct Test 4 by asking the following questions, in order:

1. How many months of runway does your current game’s decay curve give you?

2. Is that longer than your next game’s development timeline + a proper pre-launch marketing window?

If the answer to that second question is “no,” then forget about deciding whether to support or launch… you now have an existential scheduling emergency on your hands.

Putting It All Together with a Tapering Support Schedule

After running these four tests, most indie studios will land in the same place… and it will rarely be a binary either/or decision. In most cases, the solution is a tapering support schedule, explicitly designed to start migrating the current game’s community to the upcoming game, with Test 1 determining whether to kill support for the existing game altogether.

In practice, that looks something like this:

1. Continue supporting your current game, at full intensity, while its content updates still return more than they cost.

2. As returns decline, shift from shipping content updates to maintaining the community (a comparably lower-cost endeavor), and rebuild every remaining touchpoint to point forward at the next game:

   1. Cross-promote announcements

   2. Open a Discord channel for the new game

   3. Migrate your email list to studio-level

3. When an update fails Test 1 (the marginal return test) twice in a row, completely cease new content production for your existing game, and shift your team’s full weight towards the new title… which by then should already have a wishlist base that you seeded with the old game’s audience.

Also, notice that this framework scaffolds what is ultimately a leadership decision. This is not a question of tactics; there is no TikTok strategy or polished trailer that can tell you where to allocate your next dev month. That question belongs to whoever owns marketing as a leadership function inside the studio; and if nobody owns it, then the decision gets made by default… which usually means that you support the old game out of habit until you discover that you’ve run out of runway and can’t fund the next game’s development or launch.

So if you’re staring at this decision right now, start with how ready you are to launch your next game. Fortunately, the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard I built takes about four minutes to complete and will tell you whether your next title has enough of a foundation to justify pulling resources off your current title:

Evaluate Your Launch Readiness

And, of course, if you’re facing this decision and need a marketing leader to evaluate it, make it, and be accountable to its results, you can always book a free consultation with me to see if we’re a fit:

Book a Free Consultation

GG,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

Gamescom is coming up in a month, so I wanted to articulate some thoughts on something I’ve noticed recently. To get us started, here’s a stat for you to chew on: according to the inimitable Chris Zukowski, in 2025, 212 roguelike deckbuilders shipped on Steam. Note the nuance: he’s not referring to roguelikes broadly, just the deckbuilder subgenre. That breaks down to roughly 1 deckbuilder roguelike every 41 hours last year… all year, every year, with no weekends or holidays off.

Now, that number alone isn’t all that interesting. After all, lots of games ship! Over 20,000 last year on Steam alone, specifically. It’s what happened to them once they got there that makes it interesting… but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Let me back up.

A while back, I saw a LinkedIn post promoting a deck (a paid course, actually) whose entire pitch was that roguelikes and roguelites1 are basically easy money. And you know what? That’s not a crazy premise. The development case, by now, is firmly well-established: roguelikes/roguelites really are comparatively cheaper and faster to build, because developers have iterated on the attendant systems and engagement loops so many times that they’re practically fully optimized by now. Why invent the wheel, when you can already pull a very good wheel off a very well-stocked shelf? And when told me about the sheer wall of roguelites on the Gamescom show floor last year (he mentioned a figure of 500+ making the rounds, though I’ll be honest, I can’t independently source that one2)? Well, that’s when the story really clicked into place. It confirmed on the development side what I’d been observing on the market side over the past year. Namely, that everyone’s had the same idea. Everybody’s pulling the same wheel off the same shelf.

Which brings me to the false premise that’s not only hiding behind the deck, but indeed fueling the entire roguelike gold rush and thus quietly funding a lot of doomed projects. Let’s go ahead and kill it now:

I know they feel like the same thing. I understand why developers want them to feel like the same thing. But the cold hard truth is… they are not the same thing.

A proven formula tells you the genre can work. A safe bet, meanwhile, means that the genre will work for you, at your launch date, in the market as it will actually exist at that point. Those are two totally different claims. Why? Because the very thing that makes a genre “proven” just so happens to be the exact same thing that’s quietly and gradually poisoning it: everyone already knows it works, so everyone’s building it.

Look at the Hit Rate, not the Release Count

Okay. Now let’s circle back to those 212 games.

Of that year’s roguelike deckbuilders, about 5.1% cleared 1,000 Steam reviews (the rough-and-ready indie benchmark for games that actually found an audience), which means about 1 in 20 can be said to have succeeded. The year before, that number was 6.71%. So… the hit rate is falling.

“Fine,” you say to me as you huff and puff, “but that’s just because games are just getting harder to launch across the board!” Ah… but you caught the trap, didn’t you? Because that’s the rub: in relative terms, at least, they kinda aren’t. 2025 was, by Zukowski’s same count, the least brutal year on record for indie games overall — a hair under 3% of all Steam releases cleared that same 1,000 review bar, constituting the highest success rate he’d ever measured. He even called it “a bit of an indie golden age.”

Now… before anyone reading this takes that as good news, let’s bring ourselves back down to Earth for a bit so we can remain clear on what that stat actually points towards. Because it’s not what it sounds like! It means that even in the best year we have ever measured, roughly 97% of games still didn’t clear the bar. Each of those 20,000+ new titles were all clawing at the same finite pile of player attention, and the overwhelming majority of them sank without leaving so much as a ripple. So I’m going to push back on Zukowski here, because that, to me, does not constitute a “golden age.” The discoverability crisis is real, it’s very much still operative in 2026, and it’s the water every studio is swimming in, whether they’re making a roguelite or not (it’s also, not for nothing, the exact problem I spend each of my waking days on... but hold that thought for now).

And that’s why the roguelite deckbuilder number is such a loud signal… if anything, it amplifies what that number is signaling. The overall tide rose to its highest point ever… and roguelike deckbuilders still got harder to launch anyway. When even a record year can’t lift your genre’s boat, that’s not a problem with the rising tide (and it’s not a problem with your luck, either); the problem is with your leaky boat. That’s what the market is telling you about the genre.

And yes, I know Slay the Spire exists… and don’t worry, I’ll get to it in more detail shortly. But since you I brought it up (because I’m assuming you’re a fan, like me), we can briefly use that game to illustrate my point here: think of it as the drop rate on a rare. It used to be that shipping a competent roguelite deckbuilder actually gave you a reasonably decent roll at finding your audience. But now, the market is quietly nerfing that drop rate — not necessarily because the games are worse (though this is likely subjective), but rather because the pool has become absolutely flooded and most players have already gotten the drop. They’ve already played your game! Just, you know… someone else made it, 18 months ago, and they’ve already got over 400 hours in it.

Will the Last One Out, Please Shut the Door?

Let’s move away from aggregate data and examine a particular example, shall we?

In April 2026, Poncle (the studio behind Vampire Survivors, one of the past decade’s true breakout hits) released Vampire Crawlers, a roguelite deckbuilder spin-off of its massively successful debut title. And just to be clear: it worked. It really, really worked, to the tune of over a million copies sold in its first week, “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews on Steam, and an aggregate low 80s score on OpenCritic. By any normal yardstick, it was a hit.3

So… why am I citing an objective hit as a warning sign? Well, for two reasons:

1. First, its ceiling: Vampire Crawlers peaked at just over 20,000 concurrent players on its best day. In a vacuum, that’s absolutely fantastic — most studios would happily sell their own grandparents to the salt mines for it. But if you hold it up to the light, the smudges start coming into view: six weeks earlier, Slay the Spire 2 had launched into the same genre and was still, a month and a half later, pulling around 250,000 concurrent (more than 10x as many!)… from a game that wasn’t even new anymore! You can see, clear as day, who’s breathing most of the genre’s oxygen supply.

2. Second: ask yourself why it worked. I’ll tell you right now, it wasn’t because roguelite deckbuilders had room for one more. Rather, it worked because Poncle, through Vampire Survivors, spent four years building one of indie gaming’s deepest reservoirs of brand equity and player trust… which Vampire Crawlers walked up and cashed it all in. Players didn’t show up for “yet another roguelite deckbuilder, yay!” Remember, there are already 212 of those; they showed up for Poncle, specifically.

All of this leads me to the following prediction: I suspect that Vampire Crawlers might be one of the last roguelite deckbuilders of its kind to truly, genuinely succeed. It held a key that almost nobody else in the genre holds, which it used to tunnel under its genre’s saturation. If you’d shipped that same game, but from a completely unknown studio with no back catalog behind it, it wouldn’t have sold a million copies… it would have been just another one of the other 200 roguelite deckbuilders that quietly vanished into the ether.

And sure — I know you’re not Poncle, and that you probably don’t have a generational hit sitting in your back catalog that you could borrow player trust from. But that’s my whole point! If the price of admission to this genre has quietly and suddenly increased to “have already made a Vampire Survivors,” and you haven’t, then this isn’t a highway lane that you get to merge into. It’s a wall with one gate… and Poncle just walked through it ahead of you, slammed it shut, locked it up, and threw away the key.

“B-b-b-but Slay the Spire 2 just broke every record!”

…Yes. It did. And your argument is still invalid.

Now, snark aside, this is actually a reasonable objection, so let’s give it a fair hearing before I absolutely DESTROY it with facts and logic.

In March 2026, Slay the Spire 2 hit Early Access and absolutely mogged everyone else in the charts. It peaked north of 570,000 concurrent players (roughly five times the previous concurrent record for the entire roguelike genre4), sat at 93% positive, and briefly ranked as the 4th most-played game on all of Steam. By some estimates, the game moved around 4.6 million copies and pocketed $92 million in revenue in just its first couple of weeks.

Well, I suppose that settles it, then. So much for “roguelite fatigue,” right?

Wrong!

Fact of the matter is… Slay the Spire 2 would have shattered records if it had launched this year, or next year, or three years from now, or even ten years from now. It’s a rabidly anticipated sequel to the game that literally defined the roguelite deckbuilder genre. The studio that made it singlehandedly invented the genre’s modern template, and came into the launch carrying a decade’s worth of earned player trust. It didn’t launch a roguelite deckbuilder; it launched the roguelite deckbuilder, a true category king with an impenetrable moat that none of the imitators cluttering the genre’s shelves could ever hope to cross. That’s how and why it beat genre saturation.

You cannot even hope to repeat that plan. You might as well play the lottery… frankly, you’d probably have better odds of hitting that jackpot.

And yes, I know you’re not Mega Crit. I reckon you probably don’t have a genre-defining original hit and ten years of accumulated player goodwill in the bank. That’s fine. But it means the right lesson you should draw from Slay the Spire 2‘s success is the exact opposite of “See? Roguelites are safe. We’ll be fine, greenlight ho!”

The real lesson you should draw instead is: in a saturated genre, only the truly exceptional and truly differentiated games survive the crossing. The middle of the pack (ie, the truly competent and faithful “me too” roguelite) doesn’t get a StS2-tier outcome. At its absolute best, it gets a Vampire Crawlers outcome… except if you strip away the borrowed brand that actually carried it across the roguelite red ocean, that “absolute best” outcome quietly but surely collapses into being buried on Page 9 of Steam’s New Releases tab.

Notice the pattern here? The only two roguelite deckbuilders that can actually be said to be winning the game (pun intended) each won on the strength of something you simply cannot replicate at will — a decade-defining original in one case, or a borrowed generational brand in the other. Neither of them won by being a roguelite deckbuilder qua roguelite deckbuilder. The genre itself carried neither of them across, and if anything, they succeeded in spite of the genre, not because of it.

The roguelike genre is not a boat anymore. Now, it’s just water.

We’ve Absolutely Played This Run Before

Now, if you’re currently making a roguelite, yes you have a lot of thinking to do. But don’t rest on your laurels or feel too smug if you’re not making a roguelite, however! Because none of this is a problem with roguelites, in and of themselves. Rather, it’s a problem with saturation, and saturation is basically just a marketing law (like gravity is in physics).

Cast your mind back a few years. Remember when hero shooters were “the sure thing”? Peppridge Farm remembers I remember! And sure enough, it certainly seemed that way… until the market was packed wall-to-wall with them and Concord launched right into that wall. Remember Concord? Because I sure as hell remember! I remember how it lasted less than two weeks before it got pulled offline in one of the most expensive faceplants in the industry’s entire history. Meanwhile Marvel Rivals, which landed in the same crowded genre at almost the same time, thrived… because it brought a genuine and actually compelling hook (the IP, first and foremost, but also the delightfully destructible team-up chaos and actually well-done character designs) instead of just… yet another hero shooter. And then, as if solely to drive the point home, Highguard’s failed launch served to finally and decisively drive the hero shooter era’s final nail right into its bloated coffin.

Why did Marvel Rivals succeed where Concord and Highguard failed, despite all three games being in the same genre and launching (roughly) in the same moment? Differentiation, that’s why. Full stop.

Still not convinced? Then let’s set the clock back even earlier, when battle royales ran the same identical arc: a couple of monster hits signaled gold in them thar hills, then a stampede of clones descended on the foothills with panning trays in hand, and finally it all ended in a veritable graveyard filled with the dashed hopes and dreams of the ones that showed up late to the party with nothing new to say.

So when I look at the roguelite space right now, I’m not seeing a doomed genre — I don’t think roguelites are going to die, or stop being made altogether. There will always be some market for them, just like there’s still a market for hero shooters, battle royales, and even the narrative walking simulators that were also all the rage back in the 2010s. It’ll just be a much smaller market… one that simply cannot accommodate all the newcomers coming down the pipeline, hoping to cash in.

No, when I look at the roguelite scene right now, I see a genre standing at the exact point where hero shooters once stood… in other words, right before the culling. And by the way… that friendslop co-op genre that’s absolutely exploding right now? Put a pin in this post — if that genre’s trajectory keeps up unabated, I’d bet real money we’ll be having this exact same conversation about it in about ~5–10 years5 (feel free to DM me or help me set up one of those Polymarket prediction thingies so we can agree to terms).

The characters may swap out for each run… but it’s always the same run.

Planting My Flag, Right Here! *thunk*

Speaking of predictions, here’s my biggest one today, plain as the noon sky: I think we’re at or very near peak roguelite.

Not peak quality, mind you… the best ones are still nothing short of spectacular, and the outliers will always keep outlying. Rather, we’re at peak opportunity; I think that the studios greenlighting a middle-of-the-road roguelite today are going to meet a meaningfully colder market by the time they actually launch in 2027 or 2028… and, regrettably, a good chunk of them are going to blame their marketing for it.

But the problem won’t be their marketing, for the problem will have been baked right into their fateful decision on what kind of game they greenlit, and when they greenlit it.

Now, obviously, this is still very early days. You will not, as of press time, find a stack of thinkpieces or player surveys confirming the existence of “roguelite fatigue”; this sentiment is only just starting to curdle at the furthest and most cursed edges of The Discourse, mostly among the people who play games the most and the critics who review games the most. But that’s precisely why I’m saying this now, instead of in 2028 when it’ll be obvious (and therefore useless); the whole point and value of a market read is in it being early. So… consider my flag fully planted, timestamp and all. We’ll see. If I’m wrong and you rub this article in my face, I won’t blame you; you would’ve fully earned the right to make me eat crow. (That won’t happen, though.)

This Was Never Really a Genre Decision, After All

Now, let’s zoom out a bit. If you take one thing from this, please don’t let it be “dUrRrR… rOgUeLiTeS bAd.” That’s not at all what I’m saying, and in any case it’s the wrong attitude to have.

The actual reason we’re even talking about this incipient “roguelike fatigue” in the first place isn’t because the studios picked the wrong genre. Or rather… it’s not the main reason, or the actual reason. There’s a deeper reason underneath that decision, the mistake which actually constitutes the real failure mode.

That mistake is picking a genre by looking at your feed instead of your players. “Look, fellas! Everyone’s making these, and some of them are printing money!” …is not an indicator of product-market fit. If that’s actually your reasoning, then be honest with yourself: you're just chasing a trend. And sure, the two might look the same… right up until launch day, when the difference becomes clear as day.

By contrast, real PMF starts from the other side — from a player cohort that wants something they can’t currently get, combined with a studio positioned to give it to them better than anyone else (in other words, a match made in PMF Heaven). Now, sometimes that IS a roguelite! With a genuinely fresh hook, it can absolutely still be a roguelite… yes, even in 2026. But genre is the answer to that wider question; it should never be the starting point.

And like most of the issues I cover in these pages, this is squarely a leadership problem and not a tactics problem: choosing what to build, and reading whether the market will still be there when you finish building it, might well be the single most consequential and highest-stakes marketing decision a studio can make… and unfortunately, it usually happens before a marketer is even in the room. But by the time the trailer’s cut and the wishlist campaign launches, that outcome has already been mostly decided… and by default, no less.

There is a better way: somebody at the leadership table has to ask, “Is this genre a blue ocean? Or are we about to camp a spawn point with 400 other studios?” And that person needs to ask this at greenlight. Not at launch.

Now, obviously, I’m not exactly a neutral observer here: I’m a fractional CMO. I run Spawn Point Marketing, and I help indie and AA studios make this type of call — namely, is the market going to be there for us on launch day, and if not, what do we change now while it’s still (relatively) cheap to change it? So yes… this whole essay describes a problem I get paid to solve, and I’m not gonna lie, I’d be nothing short of thrilled if you reading it made you want to work with me. I’m telling you this up front. But the truth is, I’d tell you every single word of it even if you never did hire me. After all, being early on this stuff is the entire reason you subscribed, right?

In any case, I’m collaborating with and on a new diagnostic that’ll help you evaluate exactly this question. More details to come soon! In the meantime, if you want to pressure-test your own upcoming launch, pick one of two doors:

• Evaluate Your Launch Readiness — take the Scorecard. A quick assessment on whether your game is ready to launch or not.

• Book a Free Consultation. Quick and easy, less than 30 minutes, and no pitch deck shenanigans; just me, you, your roadmap, and any uncomfortable questions you want clear answers on.

GG,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit spawnpointmarketing.com

This is a BONUS article in Ready Check, a weekly series of 12 13 articles on launch readiness for indie and AA games that serves as a companion compendium for my Game Launch Readiness Scorecard. While each individual piece focuses on themes and provides tips that stand on their own, they also build on and reinforce each other, so I recommend reading them in order. To catch up, start here:

New installments of Ready Check will drop each Monday at 7:00 a.m. Pacific Time. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to Spawn Point Marketing so you don’t miss any:

Subscribe now

The entire Ready Check series has focused on pre-launch (intentionally so, very much by design). I’ve organized all 12 articles you’ve read over the past 12 weeks around a single, simple premise: the decisions you make before launch determine your launch outcome.

But launch day isn’t the end of your game’s story. It’s a new chapter in the story, the moment it changes shape. After launch, the marketing system you’ve built either starts compounding its returns, or it doesn’t... and what you should do in the weeks and months after launch entirely depends on which of those two scenarios you’re in.

This Ready Check BONUS piece covers both: how to sustain momentum when things go right, and the brutal truth of what’s possible when they don’t.

Part 1: Sustaining Momentum after a Strong Launch

A “strong launch” means different things at different scales. Selling 5,000 copies in a single week could well be transformative for a solo developer, but is unlikely to cover a 15-person studio’s costs. Regardless, from a structural perspective, “strong” usually means the following things:

• Reviews are trending positive

• Sales have exceeded your conservative projection

• Your community’s generating organic word-of-mouth that you didn’t pay for

If that’s you, then your job for the next 90 days is to extend the compounding cycle for as long as possible. Here’s how:

1. Treat Patches as Marketing Beats

Every patch is a chance to re-enter the conversation. Don’t just update the changelog; really seize the moment to demonstrate responsiveness to your players and deposit more trust in the reserve you built pre-launch.

This is what Pearl Abyss did with Crimson Desert. Their rapid post-launch patching cadence was visible to the community in real-time, and as a result, it went beyond QA and became an insanely effective exercise in rebuilding trust. With each patch note, the team was telling its players that they were listening to them and fixing things. That message both converts people sitting on the fence and reinforces the buying decision for players who’d already purchased. Reviews soared from Mixed to Very Positive, and the game sold 5 million copies in its first month.

But you don’t need Pearl Abyss’ resources to follow their overall structure and cadence! Simply adopt and adapt the following post-launch framework for your game:

1. Schedule your first major patch for 1-2 weeks post-launch, and make sure it addresses the top issues reported by your community.

2. Post the patch notes everywhere, from Steam and Discord to email and social media. Frame it as “you told us, we fixed it.”

3. Then maintain a regular cadence: substantial updates at 1-2 months post-launch, then quarterly after that.

Each update gives creators a reason to come back, the press to write a follow-up, and Steam’s algorithm to resurface your game. Take advantage of it!

2. Immediately Plan Your Sale Event Calendar

Steam sales are how you monetize your long tail. Plan for a modest first discount (15-20%) and time it to the nearest major Steam sale event, ideally 6-8 weeks post-launch. This captures the players who wishlisted, but didn’t buy at full price. That remaining wishlist backlog is deferred revenue, and sale events are how you convert it.

Deeper discounts (40-60%) work well at 6-12 months post-launch, when you’re shifting from maximizing per-unit revenue to expanding your player base. Regardless of how much you’re discounting, support each sale event with an uptick in marketing activity: email your list, post about it in Discord, update your capsule with a sale-themed variant, and reach out to creators with fresh keys and a new angle (”major update + 40% off for the first time”).

3. Maintain an Active Creator Pipeline

The creators who covered your launch are your warmest relationships. Don’t let them go cold! When your first major content update ships, those creators are the first people who should know. As always, send them a personal message, not a key blast:

“Hey, we shipped the update that adds [feature]. Wanted you to see it first since your coverage was part of why we could build it!”

Mid-tier creators (10k–100k followers) are the sweet spot for post-launch coverage, because they’re large enough to move the needle but small enough to have a genuine relationship with your studio, unmediated by talent management agencies and structured brand deals. Every post-launch update is an opportunity for them to make new content, and for you to reach more players. Everyone wins!

4. Don’t Abandon Your Community, Evolve It!

Community dynamics shift after launch. Before launch, your community drove anticipation for your game… but post-launch, it becomes a retention engine. The Discord goes from asking “when is this thing coming out?” to saying “here’s a bug I found” and “here’s a build guide.” That shift is healthy, normal, and expected. Lean into it!

Studios that sustain post-launch momentum all stay present and active in their community. Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean the founder does this; as your studio grows, you should delegate community management. But regardless of whether you do so, someone should be in the Discord every day, responding to feedback and closing the loop between player input and development output. That loop is how the trust reserve continues compounding long after launch.

5. Measure What Matters Now

Pre-launch, you mainly tracked wishlists. But post-launch, you should track the following three metrics instead:

1. Review Score: This, more than anything, is what amplifies the algorithm over the long run. Steam’s recommendation engine weights your review score very heavily. A game that launches at Very Positive and maintains it will continue to receive organic traffic for years, while a game that drifts to Mixed will quickly see its organic traffic crater. Each time you respond to a review, patch the game, and interact with your community, you invest in maintaining that score.

2. Median Playtime: This tells you whether players are finishing (or replaying) your game. A short median playtime, relative to how long your game is, signals that something is causing players to bounce, and that “something” will hurt your algorithmic discovery, either directly (because Steam tracks playtime and uses it, among other metrics, to determine your visibility) or indirectly (through the negative reviews from some of the players who bounced). Prioritize your content updates based on that signal.

3. Revenue Curve Shape: Your first-week revenue always looks like a spike. But it’s what happens next, however, that determines whether you built a spike or a curve. For games that sustain momentum, Year One revenue typically runs 3-5x the Week One number. Sales almost always drop off after launch (totally normal), but if your revenue flatlines after Week One instead of building a long tail, then either your post-launch marketing isn’t working (fixable), or your game isn’t good enough to sustain word of mouth (uh oh).

Part 2: Can You Overcome a Weak Launch’s Brutal Math?

Now, it’s time to have a much harder conversation. What happens when your game underperforms at launch? In other words, what if your launch is weak? What are your options here?

Let’s start by defining what we mean by “weak.” Basically, a weak launch is the mirror opposite of a strong launch:

• Your reviews are Mixed or below

• Sales landed at or below your conservative projection

• There’s no organic word-of-mouth generating momentum that you didn’t manufacture yourself

I’m going to be really blunt about the data here, because when the stakes are this high, I fervently believe that founders (and their teams, and their teams’ families) deserve honesty more than encouragement or cope.

And the honest truth is… the math is brutal.

The inimitable Chris Zukowski analyzed every Steam game that reached 1,000 reviews in 2024 (so, 445 games in total). Of those, he found exactly one that successfully turned around a genuinely weak launch: Beltmatic, a minimalist automation game that launched with roughly 300 wishlists and earned only 51 reviews in its first three months. A creator named Real Civil Engineer played it, introducing it to a wider creator ecosystem, and after that, the game slowly built momentum over several months.

Again, that’s ONE game out of 445, and that’s only because a creator randomly discovered that game and it happened to be the exact right fit for their audience. That’s just not a replicable strategy for just about any studio. It’s luck (albeit coupled with a good product), and you can’t build a strategy around luck any more than you can plan a nest egg around winning the lottery.

And if you extrapolate Zukowski’s broader finding, it becomes even starker: if your game fails to earn 100 reviews in the first month (whether Early Access or 1.0) there’s a 0.2% chance it will ever reach 1,000 reviews. Notice the decimal place! He’s not saying a 20% chance, or even a 2% chance… his data says you have a zero point two percent chance of turning things around.

That’s not necessarily a death sentence (miracles do happen, as rare as they are), but the odds are very much stacked against you here. So if your launch underperforms, remember that number… and consider it before you decide how to allocate the next six months of your budget (and your life).

Sure, but What CAN Work After a Weak Launch?

Ok, so you’ve read through the entire above section, you’ve talked it over with your team, and came to a decision: numbers and data be damned, you’re going to either beat the odds or die trying. You’re going to sink or swim with your weakly-launched game. So, what can you do to try and turn things around? First of all: good luck. Second, let’s take a clear-eyed and frank look at what the data supports in this regard, and what it doesn’t:

What Doesn’t Work: More of the Same

If your pre-launch marketing didn’t generate enough interest for your game to launch successfully, doing more of the same marketing after launch won’t fix it. Posting more on social media, sending more press emails, being more active on your Discord… none of these will address the underlying problem, which is almost always one of two things: either the game isn’t resonating with the audience you targeted, or you targeted the wrong audience.

What Also Doesn’t Work: Adding Features, as Marketing

A common impulse after a weak launch is to add features (such as a level editor, a new mode, or multiplayer), hoping the new feature will attract a new audience. But unfortunately, Zukowski’s data doesn’t support this; players who weren’t interested in your game at launch are unlikely to suddenly become interested just because you added a random feature. The only exception is if the feature fundamentally changes the game’s value proposition (like No Man’s Sky adding multiplayer), but that’s usually a multi-year, multi-million-dollar commitment that most indie studios can’t make.

What CAN Work, With Caveats:

• Targeted and specific creator outreach. The Beltmatic case shows that a single well-matched creator can restart a game’s trajectory… but only if that creator’s audience truly finds the game compelling. If you launched weak and haven’t exhausted your creator outreach list, this is the single highest-leverage post-launch activity you can activate. As always, don’t send a key blast; send targeted and personalized outreach to creators who cover exactly your genre, and give them a real reason to look, whether it’s a significant patch that addresses the game’s launch issues, a new demo, or a fresh new angle.

• A major update that addresses players’ core criticism. If your reviews are Mixed because of a specific and addressable problem (common culprits include performance issues, a missing feature that players expected, or a difficulty curve that’s too punishing), fixing that problem and marketing the fix as a relaunch moment can work. BUT… the update has to be substantial enough to convince players who bounced to reconsider; “bug fixes” aren’t substantial enough. “Complete combat rebalance + new progression system + performance overhaul,” on the other hand, might be.

• Repricing. If your game launched at $25 and the market is saying “this is a $15 game,” a permanent price reduction combined with a visibility event can reset player expectations. This is undoubtedly painful, but sometimes it’s the only correct action. To make this bitter pill easier to swallow, consider that a game selling 5,000 copies at $15 generates more revenue (and more reviews, and more algorithmic momentum) than a game that sells 1,000 copies at $25.

• Accepting the outcome and planning for the next game. Nobody wants to hear this suggestion, but it’s often the most (or only) rational option. If your game launched to Mostly Negative reviews, has fundamental design issues you can’t simply patch out, and generated less than 100 reviews in its first month, then the ROI for post-launch marketing is likely close to zero. Every hour and dollar you spend trying to salvage this launch is an hour and dollar you’re not spending on your next game.

When it’s all said and done, studios don’t survive weak launches because they turn them around (which, as we’ve just seen, is a Herculean and Sysyphean task), but because they learn from them. What did your Scorecard categories look like in retrospect? Where was your marketing system weakest? What would you do differently for your next title? Those lessons, applied to Game Two, will yield far more than spending six months of post-launch marketing on Game One.

The Post-Launch Scorecard

If you take the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard after your game has launched, it adapts! Post-launch users get modified questions:

• Next Fest participation becomes post-launch marketing cadence

• Wishlist count is reframed as remaining backlog

• Recommendations shift from “build before launch” to “sustain or recover after launch”

But all the same structural lessons still apply; studios that built their marketing infrastructure pre-launch (community, leadership, timing, discovery) tend to sustain post-launch momentum. Post-launch marketing doesn’t create those foundations, it only extends them.

Studios that need to recover from a weak launch almost always suffer from structural weaknesses. Whether it’s because they didn’t have enough runway, didn’t hire a marketing lead, didn’t build their community, or had no relationships with creators (or all of the above), the underlying reality remains the same: their launch didn’t fail on launch day; it failed months earlier, when they didn’t build their marketing system.

Which is where this series started… and where it ends.

What’s Next for Ready Check

This is the last foundational piece (for real, this time). Going forward, Ready Check shifts to an irregular cadence: reactive analysis of recent launches, occasional deeper dives into specific categories, and interviews with founders scoring their own games in real time.

If you’ve followed all 12 pieces (er… 13 pieces, including this one), you now have the complete marketing framework you need for a successful launch. The Scorecard operationalizes it, and the articles explain the reasoning behind every weight, every question, and every recommendation.

Now, the ball’s in your court. Take the Scorecard to find out where to start, then go forth and build your marketing system. For real, this time.

Take the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard →

Book a Speedrun Strategy Session →

GG,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

This is the final article in Ready Check, a weekly series of 12 articles on launch readiness for indie and AA games that serves as a companion compendium for my Game Launch Readiness Scorecard. While each individual piece focuses on themes and provides tips that stand on their own, they also build on and reinforce each other, so I recommend reading them in order. To catch up, start here:

New installments of Ready Check will drop each Monday at 7:00 a.m. Pacific Time. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to Spawn Point Marketing so you don’t miss any:

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What a run this has been! Twelve weeks ago, I opened this series with a simple stat:

Nearly 20,000 games launched on Steam in 2025. Almost half got fewer than ten reviews. More than 2,000 got zero.

Since then, we’ve gone deep on six categories, scored Balatro and Hades against the framework, parsed a recommendation engine that tells you what to fix first, and even crunched the wishlist conversion math! That’s a lot of ground to cover, so thank you for sticking through to the end.

For this final piece, I won’t summarize what we’ve learned, because you can always go back and read all the individual pieces for that. But I do want to distill what we’ve learned into the five things I wish I could tell every studio founder at greenlight, long before they book a call with me pleading for help.

If they heed this advice from the very get-go, before they’ve written the first line of code, before they’ve locked art direction, before anyone says “eh, we’ll figure out marketing later,” and long before they desperately refresh their Steam dashboard at launch day as that most awful of realizations starts dawning on them? Then maybe… just maybe… they can reach out to me after launch to say “Hey, check out these numbers! Your advice worked!”

1. Marketing Is a Function, Not a Phase

This is the closest thing to a thesis I have for this series, and it addresses the single most expensive misconception in indie (and even AA!) game development.

Marketing is not something you do after the game is built, nor is it a phase that starts when the trailer is cut. And it’s certainly not a sprint you run in the final three weeks before launch.

Marketing is a function of the business that runs parallel to development from day one:

1. In pre-production, marketing means defining your audience.

2. In production, it means building your community and store presence.

3. In pre-launch, it means activating your discovery layer.

4. At launch, it means converting the trust you’ve built up.

5. Post-launch, it means sustaining momentum through updates, sales events, and creator relationships.

Every studio that landed in the top revenue tier in 2024 and 2025 treated marketing as infrastructure and built it alongside the game. It’s simply not a cost center that you just bolt on at the end!

That’s what the Scorecard’s heaviest category, Marketing Timing at 25%, ultimately measures. Yes, it specifically evaluates how early you’ve started marketing, but think about what that implies: starting early gives its compounding effects enough time to work their magic before launch day.

2. Someone Has to Own It

When everyone does a little marketing, nobody does effective marketing. We covered that in Part 4, because it’s the most common structural failure I observe amongst the studios I talk to.

The specifics of who fills the role matter less than the fact that someone does. Does your publisher have a competent marketing team? Great! Did you hire a Fractional CMO? Awesome! Or maybe you hired a full-time marketing lead? Sweet! Oh, your co-founder knows marketing and owns it as their domain? Perfect. As long as you have someone whose primary accountability is getting people to know and care about your game before launch, you’ve got this part covered.

The Accidental CMO (ie, the founder who handles marketing between code reviews at midnight) is both the default model for most indie studios, and the one that leads to the worst outcomes. It’s not that founders are necessarily bad at marketing; they may even, in a vacuum, be quite good! There are many such cases.

But when marketing gets relegated to the gaps in between production sprints, it never gets the strategic attention it needs. The founder may know what needs to get done, but since production will (rationally, and quite understandably) always get priority, this means that in practice the founder will choose channels by default instead of properly evaluating them, won’t plan marketing beats, and won’t build creator relationships. Some scattershot activity happens, but without the strategic architecture that directs it towards an actual goal, it won’t actually move the needle. All the while, the crippling cognitive load on the founder increases as launch looms ever closer and nothing ever seems to work.

The Scorecard’s lowest-weighted category silently controls everything: Marketing Leadership is weighted at only 10% on the Scorecard, but it’s one of the most important categories because it’s the prerequisite that allows the other five categories to even function.

3. Community Compounds, Campaigns Don’t

Remember the trust reserve framework from Part 5? If not, here’s a quick refresher: your community is a bank account. Each honest devlog you post, along with every working demo, fixed bug report, and incorporated player suggestion, deposits trust in your account. This trust accrues very slowly, enough to even feel insignificant in the moment. But then launch day arrives; launch day is a massive trust withdrawal, because you’re asking people to spend money based on the trust you’ve built.

If your reserve is full, the withdrawal clears: people buy your game, they leave positive reviews, tell their friends, and sometimes even stream it! Your launch then further compounds into a self-reinforcing cycle.

But if your reserve is empty (because you started three months ago, or because you built a Discord and never showed up in it), the withdrawal bounces: people don’t trust you, so they instead wait for reviews, wait for a sale, or (in the worst cases) wait to see if the game is even real. While they’re waiting, the 48-hour launch window closes and Steam’s algorithm moves on from you. An underfunded trust reserve manifests in that hesitation, which puts a meaningful dent in your revenue projections. And no amount of launch-week ad spend can buy that trust back.

Community is weighted at 20% (second only to Timing) because trust is the only marketing asset that compounds over time. Campaigns spike and decay; entropy comes quickly for each campaign. Meanwhile, ad spend stops working the moment you stop spending. But community trust, once built, generates returns for the life of the product and even into the next one.

4. Your Steam Page Is Where Everything Converts (Or Doesn’t)

Every ad click, creator referral, press mention, social media post, and Discord invite ultimately funnels to one place: your store page. And if that page doesn’t convert, you’ve wasted all your upstream effort.

This asymmetry is why I called your Steam page a hygiene factor in Part 6; a great Steam page doesn’t guarantee traction, but a bad one guarantees you lose the traction you already have. Fixing a weak store page has the highest immediate ROI of almost anything you can do, and unlike community (which takes months to compound) or timing (which can’t be recovered), you can fix it in less than a week!

The fixes themselves are also quite straightforward:

1. Your capsule art must be readable at 120x45 pixels.

2. Fill all 20 tag slots with specific tags that map to your target audience.

3. Rework your short description to communicate hook, genre, and unique mechanic in less than 300 characters.

4. Rewrite your long description for the players who’ll buy your game, not the publisher you’re pitching to.

5. Re-cut your trailer to lead with gameplay in the first five seconds.

6. Pick screenshots that show both actual current gameplay and visible UI.

Don’t agonize over these like you would a major creative decision; you’re not reworking the game’s art direction, you’re just optimizing your page’s conversion rate. Keep this in perspective.

And most importantly, you can and should iterate. Your first capsule will almost never be your best, and as your positioning crystallizes and you learn more about your audience, you should swap in and out certain tags and sharpen your description. Your store page is a living document, not a painting you hang up once and walk away from.

5. Wishlists Are a Thermometer, Not a Thermostat

I’m incredibly fond of this metaphor (which I introduced in Part 8) because it succinctly captures and addresses the most common analytical mistake I see in indie game marketing: confusing the metric with the cause, and optimizing for the former instead of the latter (ie, Goodhart’s Law).

Wishlists measure your marketing efforts’ temperature, but they don’t set it. A high wishlist count is evidence that the other things you’re doing are working well: you started early enough, you’re growing your community, your store page converts well, and your discovery layer is surfacing your game in front of players’ eyeballs. But a low wishlist count signals that one of those upstream components is broken. Way too often, studios directly optimize for wishlist count through giveaways, paid traffic, or other gimmicks… but this is akin to holding a lighter under a thermometer and then declaring that the room is warm.

The median conversion rate for games priced above $10 is 0.10x, which means you can expect a $20 game with 50,000 wishlists (which translates to about 5,000 first-week sales) to net roughly $70,000 after Steam’s cut. Keep in mind that’s the median; the full range runs from 0.02x to well above 1.0x. And it’s the marketing execution (along with the game’s quality) behind the wishlist count, not the wishlist count itself, that determines where you land in that range.

So when founders ask me “How do we get more wishlists?”, I almost always redirect the question to “What’s the weakest link in your marketing system?”, because that weakest link is suppressing your wishlists. Fix the system, and the thermometer will move on its own.

What Do These Five Things Have In Common?

Simply put, they’re all structural. These five Spawn Point Marketing axioms all touch on how a studio’s marketing is organized and when it starts, versus how a lot of studios think about marketing (namely, how much the studio spends or how clever its campaigns are).

That’s really the Scorecard’s operating principle, in a single sentence: structure determines execution. A studio with good timing, a strong community, clear leadership, an optimized store page, and a functioning discovery layer will produce healthy wishlists and perform strongly at launch. Unlike a campaign, you won’t be able to attribute this to any one brilliant marketing move, but make no mistake, it does work… because the system is compounding as designed.

But a studio without those structural foundations will struggle to execute no matter how talented the team is, how beautiful the game looks, or how much they care about the outcome. Caring isn’t a strategy; structure is.

So, What Happens Now?

This is the final piece in the Ready Check arc. I’ve published 12 articles over as many weeks, covering all six categories in depth along with two case studies, filled with actionable marketing advice, revenue projection math, and hopefully the foundation you need to start building your marketing engine in earnest.

The Scorecard itself remains free, and always will be. Likewise, the series will always remain available in the archive. Together, they provide you with the diagnostic and the framework for successfully marketing your game without spending a dollar or talking to anyone.

But sometimes, you want or need more than a diagnostic! And if you need help developing a full go-to-market strategy, defining your audience, filling out your beat calendar, selecting the right channels, and/or someone to own the marketing function on your behalf? Well, that’s exactly what Spawn Point Marketing exists to do. You can book a Speedrun Strategy Session with us: a focused half-day engagement where we build a complete marketing plan that’s tailored to your game, your team, and your launch window.

But that’s not the point of this series. I wrote Ready Check because there’s a massive information asymmetry within indie marketing that’s literally killing studios filled with talented people making amazing games, which is an eminently fixable problem. Most studios don’t fail because marketing is some mysterious dark art, available only to the gifted few; it really isn’t, and literally anyone can learn it! But most studio founders never leveled up their marketing skill tree (because they never had to), and nobody ever told them the principles I’ve seen work time and time again: that marketing starts in pre-production, that community compounds, that an underperforming store page is a conversion (not discovery) problem, that wishlists are a symptom not a cause, and that someone has to own the whole damn thing.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. What you do with this knowledge going forward is, as always, entirely up to you.

Take the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard →

Book a Speedrun Strategy Session →

GG,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

The big news this week: Xbox just cut 3,200 people. The prevailing narrative is that a villain did this… which is a comfortable story, but also wrong. The uncomfortable truth is that the AAA industry did this to itself… and Microsoft helped lead the march.

Read more for a quick take on the games industry’s long, slow march towards this week’s events. And for more Games Industry analysis like this, as well as game marketing tips and case studies, subscribe to Spawn Point Marketing to receive weekly (and sometimes more!) dispatches, like this one, delivered straight to your inbox. Always free, always useful:

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Let’s start this piece the only place where we should, with just one single number: 3,200.

Specifically, 3,200 people laid off.

That’s roughly 20% of Xbox, gone over the next year; 1,600 this week, and 1,600 more through FY 2027. They’re part of a broader 4,800-person cut across all of Microsoft (so, not just Xbox). In addition, four studios are also leaving the Xbox first-party family altogether.

The resulting scenes of utter carnage and tumult are as heartrending as ever; at Bethesda, for instance, staff put up a small memorial to their laid-off colleagues… and HR made them take it down.

These are people who shipped the games we love. Some of them spent over 20 years at one studio, while others had only been there for a few months. There was one (that we know of) laid-off Bethesda dev who says he’d just been told he was getting a raise. And all these people have families to feed, mortgages to pay, and careers that just got a huge wrench thrown in them. There’s no framing of this news that makes any of that less painful, so I’m not even going to try.

But I am going to push back on the two most popular explanations for why it happened, because both of them let the real culprit completely off the hook.

It Was Arithmetic, not AI

Predictably, one of the Discourse’s reflexive takes has been that AI took these jobs. Now, Microsoft’s chief people officer explicitly denied it, for whatever you think that’s worth… but honestly, you don’t need the denial; the numbers tell us what really happened, and those numbers long predate ChatGPT.

The bottom line is, Asha Sharma inherited a terrible balance sheet when she took over Xbox in February; its margins were running 3–10 times lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses. Microsoft had invested over $20 billion in content and hardware over five years (not counting the $69 billion Activision Blizzard acquisition), while annual revenue declined by nearly half a billion dollars in the same period. In a typical year, Xbox lost 64 cents on every dollar it invested in all those studios that it ultimately didn’t keep.

Sixty-four cents on the dollar. The MBAs in my audience’s jaws should be on the floor right now. Those are absolutely lousy returns, which absolutely nobody would accept if it was their money on the line, and they didn’t come about because of any disruption by new technology. Those numbers reflect a company that bit off more than it could chew and tried to swallow anyway; Xbox bought everything, integrated nothing, hoped scale would eventually resemble strategy… and to what should have been no one’s surprise, started to choke. This “reset” is Sharma performing an emergency Heimlich maneuver.

The one place AI does touch this story is on the hardware side, but that’s an entirely separate mechanism: the memory crisis (aka the “RAMpocalypse”). AI datacenters are devouring the world’s DRAM supply, and the spot price of a 16Gb DDR5 chip roughly quadrupled between September and December of last year. That’s why the pricing arc that every gamer grew up with (consoles launch expensive, then get cheaper) has now been fully and utterly broken, perhaps irreparably so. The PS5 Pro now runs $899, Xbox prices will go up by another ~$100 in August, and Valve’s Steam Machine launched $300 over its target price. Analysts don’t expect real relief before late 2027 at the earliest.

That crisis is very real, and Sharma is right that it accelerated everything. But also, pay attention to the way she frames it: a healthy Xbox could have weathered it. Xbox, as she literally said, and which literally everyone can see, is not healthy. The RAMpocalypse didn’t cause the disease, it merely amped up the symptoms such that the patient could no longer ignore them.

Xbox’s Two Original Sins

If you strip away the memo’s sterile corpo-speak, you’ll find that the disease ultimately comes down to two things:

SIN ONE: Xbox Stopped Listening to Players

Game Pass prices went up twice in roughly a year, and none other than Microsoft’s own chief strategy officer has acknowledged that the latest price hike cost the service millions of subscribers within months. At the same time, console prices rose mid-generation instead of falling. Microsoft stopped publishing hardware sales figures years ago, and we all know what that implies (if you don’t, let’s put it this way: it’s the corporate equivalent of turning off the smoke detector because you found the beeping too annoying). Meanwhile, the whole “everything is an Xbox” strategy told players that the box they’d purchased didn’t really matter, and then the company seemed surprised when players agreed and stopped buying it; to underscore this, consider that Xbox hardware revenue fell 33% in the latest quarter.

All throughout this time, players kept sending Xbox signals... only for Xbox to keep filing the signals away as noise. And now, here we are.

SIN TWO: Bloat that Would Embarrass a Habsburg Court

Sharma’s memo also revealed that some decisions at Xbox pass through as many as 14 layers of management. HOLY MOLY. Her target is five, and ideally three (ie, an actually sane org chart). Platform teams grew 40% larger than they were at the start of this console generation, all while playtime on the platform declined. None other than Satya Nadella himself has noted that YouTube creators make more money from Xbox games than Microsoft does.

Imagine that! The people making videos about Xbox games out-earn the trillion-dollar company that owns them.

None of this happened to Microsoft, by the way. This is entirely their own doing. Microsoft built the situation they’re currently in, one acquisition and one additional org chart layer at a time, while marching at the front of an industry-wide parade toward consolidation, bloat, and player-hostile economics. The chickens didn’t come home to roost this week; they’ve been circling the coop since at least 2023. This is just the week in which Xbox finally looked up.

In Defense of the Big, Bad Executive

Now, this is the part where I’ll undoubtedly lose some of you. I still stand by everything I’m about to say here.

The internet has, by now, fully settled on Asha Sharma as the face (and, therefore, the cause) of this bloodbath. And they’re not entirely wrong to criticize her memo — the whole “billion people each day” ambition is laughably delusional on its face (not to mention tone-deaf) when you’ve just exiled 1,600 of the people who might have been able to realize that ambition into the worst job market this industry has ever seen. That’s a fair hit, Asha. Take it.

But also, let’s take all of this into perspective; just look at the situation that Sharma walked into. She was just named CEO back in February (five months ago), when she inherited a floundering division with a myriad of festering problems over 16 years in the making:

• The Gen 9 install base hole,

• The bottomless acquisition spree,

• The failed Game Pass bet that did create value (contra some of the criticism out there), but never grew fast enough to replace what it cannibalized,

• The 14 layers of management,

• And I could go on, but you get the point.

You know who actually presided over that? Phil Spencer. Yet he exited to warm, glowing retrospectives, and is still remembered fondly. Meanwhile, Sharma gets to be (as one commentator put it) the pain sponge. Or, if you want to put it more vividly, the sin eater.

Also, consider that she did something no Xbox leader has done in years: she actually described the sordid, ugly truth by publishing the sordid, ugly numbers behind it. “Our business today is not healthy”… her predecessors demonstrably knew this to be true, but never said it out loud. Sharma did, along with the 64-cent-ROI figure, the platform margin comparison, and the management layer count to underscore it all. That’s real leadership; she put the full diagnosis on the record, knowing full well that it would be quoted against her until the end of time.

Was there a version of this reset with zero layoffs? If so, I’d really love someone to show me the math.

The only real alternative to a painful restructuring wasn’t a painless status quo, but an even slower bleed with far more casualties at the end, and likely studio closures instead of spin-offs. Oh, yeah, and speaking of which… the studios aren’t being shuttered. Double Fine and Compulsion are returning to their founders: Tim Schafer and Guillaume Provost are getting their studios back, with their IP, their catalogs, and some runway for their next games. Ninja Theory and Undead Labs, meanwhile, are moving to new ownership… with enough funding secured to finish Senua and State of Decay 3. Meanwhile, by way of contrast, compare that to 2024, when Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin were simply deleted from existence.

Remember, Sharma didn’t create this mess. But she’s the first person in the burning building willing to run headfirst into the fire; to name it, price it, and eat the reputational cost of fixing it. She deserves far more credit for that than the discourse is currently giving her.

Pop, Goes the AAA Model

Zoom out, and this was arguably the worst two weeks in the entire history of the AAA platform model… and Xbox was but one of three shakeups.

Before the latest round of Xbox layoffs, Sony brought the Discourse’s Eye of Sauron on itself by announcing it will end physical disc production for all new PlayStation games in January 2028, alongside winding down the PS3 and Vita storefronts. Rockstar, meanwhile, finally opened GTA 6 pre-orders… and quietly confirmed that the “physical” edition is actually just a download code in an otherwise empty box, which prompted at least two retailers to refuse to stock it and fired up a still-ongoing consumer revolt over ownership, preservation, and what “buying a game” even means anymore (to which all I can say is… where the hell have you been this past decade?!). And underneath it all, the RAMpocalypse keeps pushing hardware prices in exactly the wrong direction, at exactly the worst possible time (mid-generation).

Ownership is eroding as hardware costs skyrocket, all while player trust continues to evaporate before our very eyes. Those are three components of the same story, which are converging in truly spectacular and chaotic fashion: the platform-scale AAA model (own the box, own the store, own the studios, and [finally] own the customer) is being stress-tested on every axis at the same time, and it’s failing the test hard. If you’re still telling yourself that this is a downturn and not a complete structural shift, I’d encourage you to take your head out of the sand and see the situation for what it is, before it’s too late… otherwise, you and your studio are NGMI.

A Marketing Failure, Through and Through

I want to touch on another angle and lens that comparatively few people are putting on this, and wouldn’t you know it, it happens to be the one closest to my day job!

Xbox’s studio strategy bombed partly due to a failure of marketing leadership. When you acquire 20+ studios, your development capacity is functionally unlimited but marketing attention becomes your scarcest resource. Now, every game under your umbrella is competing for shelf space in your own launch calendar, your own showcase, and your own budget allocations. And Xbox, unfortunately, never built that muscle at portfolio scale.

Double Fine shipped three games under Microsoft; if you’ve never heard of two of them, you’re not alone. Keeper and Kiln reportedly launched with barely any promotional push at all! This means that a studio that Microsoft paid to acquire was releasing games into silence… on Microsoft’s own platform, to boot!

And “everything is an Xbox” was, and this is as generously as I can put it, the complete abdication of a positioning strategy. Positioning means both choosing what you are and (the harder part) what you aren’t. When everything is an Xbox, nothing is. Players couldn’t tell you what the brand stood for by 2025, and the sales data tells us that they all but stopped trying.

Microsoft might be a mega-corporation, but it doesn’t matter; the applicable marketing lessons here scale down to every studio reading this newsletter:

1. Pricing is messaging

2. Silence is also messaging

3. Player sentiment is data, not noise

Two Game Pass hikes in 12 months told players, in dollars and cents, exactly what Microsoft thought of them. And players, in response, answered in the only language that platforms reliably hear (dollars and cents).

I’m (Long-Term) Optimistic Anyway

As painful as this past week (and year, and decade) have been, and as painful as the coming years will continue to be, I’m still hopeful for the future for two big reasons (and no, neither of them are cope):

1. Focused Teams: The talent and IP flowing out of this contraction don’t just vanish into the ether; instead, they recombine. Remember, Clair Obscur was borne from ex-Ubisoft devs. The truth is, Schafer and Provost running independent studios with their own catalogs is a much better structural outcome than those same teams having to compete for attention inside a 14-layer bureaucratic labyrinth. These studios now have a much better shot at thriving, assuming they take the only viable route forward and seize the opportunity to directly own their audience relationships — by treating their community as a compounding asset, and building their in-house publishing capability, they can finally spread their wings, no longer at the mercy of a platform daddy who decides whether their launch gets a marketing budget this quarter. Small, focused, and close to their players will always beat big, diffuse, and insulated from the market… and it has always been like this; it’s just been distorted by billions of Microsoft dollarbucks over the past decade. What’s dying right now is the bloated middle, not the medium as a whole.

2. Better For Players: While this restructuring represents an opportunity for developers (as painful as it undoubtedly is), the biggest silver lining is on the players’ side. Now that the old structures are collapsing before our eyes, it’s soberingly clear that the currently dying era of trillion-dollar companies subsidizing gaming as a strategic loss-leader was never going to spawn healthy creative incentives. Its long-overdue coda (again, as painful as it will continue to be for a while) is still genuinely good news on a long enough timeline. After all, the games that defined the last five years, from Baldur’s Gate 3 to Balatro, did not come out of the platform + scale model. Instead, they came from focused teams that picked a lane, went all-in on it, and (most importantly) actually listened to their players. There are about to be a lot more of those teams, staffed by very talented people with very sharp motivation, and (finally) driven by incentives that center player needs and preferences above all else.

I’m not denying that hitting the reset button hurts. It always does, and always will. But sometimes, the save file really is corrupted, and the only way forward is to restart the run… with everything that you’ve learned along the way.

Insert coin to continue,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

This is the eleventh article in Ready Check, a weekly series of 12 articles on launch readiness for indie and AA games that serves as a companion compendium for my Game Launch Readiness Scorecard. While each individual piece focuses on themes and provides tips that stand on their own, they also build on and reinforce each other, so I recommend reading them in order. To catch up, start here:

New installments of Ready Check will drop each Monday at 7:00 a.m. Pacific Time. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to Spawn Point Marketing so you don’t miss any:

Subscribe now

Over the past ten weeks, I’ve broken down every category of the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard: what each one measures, why I weighted them as I did, and how the recommendation engine prioritizes your next moves. Now, I want to do something a little different:

I’m going to show you what a score of 90 or more actually looks like… in the wild!

Instead of a hypothetical studio or an idealized checklist, I thought I’d highlight real games that shipped with a fully-built marketing infrastructure… and what happened when they did.

Shall we get started?

Scoring Games We Can Study

Obviously, I can’t retroactively run the Scorecard on games that launched before it existed, but I can map their pre-launch marketing against the six categories and ask: would this game have scored Launch Ready? Where would it have been strongest, and where would it have lost points?

So I’ve chosen two case studies: one unknown solo dev backed by a publisher, and one established studio with a strong track record. Each situation is obviously unique (different contexts and different scale, for one), but they both displayed the same structural discipline that the Scorecard measures and scores well.

Case Study 1: Balatro

Obviously. Is it any wonder I picked this one? But probably not for the reasons you’re thinking. After all, everyone points to Balatro as an overnight success story, and I understand why. Here you have a solo developer who built a pixelated poker roguelike and sold over a million copies in its first month. It’s a highly seductive narrative: LocalThunk built a great game that got organically discovered… lightning in a bottle!

But the reality, however, is a bit more humdrum than that. It’s also far more instructive for our purposes. In fact, Balatro’s pre-launch marketing gives us a textbook case study in nearly every principle we’ve covered in this series. Let’s have a look!

Marketing Timing

LocalThunk put Balatro’s Steam page up in May 2023, nine months before the game’s February 2024 launch. That places it solidly within the 6-12 month window that the Scorecard rewards the most. That said, there’s a bit of nuance here that I want to call your attention: Balatro’s marketing started before the page went up, with a public beta and a bunch of Reddit posts that generated close to zero traction. In fact, the page launched with just 43 wishlists, and for the first month, literally nothing happened!

The game’s timeline and trajectory only shifted when a handful of small creators discovered the demo. Dan Gheesling played it on stream and then recommended it to Northernlion, providing the spark that ignited the marketing engine.

By the end of July 2023, Balatro had gone from 183 wishlists to 28,661. On the surface, it seems like organic discovery, and it kind of is, but not as people generally understand the term. Rather, it’s simply what happens when a game has a live, playable demo and even a tiny number of the right creators encounter it.

In other words, the game had built the marketing infrastructure that allowed that moment of discovery to actually happen. Think about it: what if Balatro didn’t have the demo, or the page up? What if the game wasn’t so accessible to prospective players? I’ll tell you what: Gheesling never streams it, and the game launches into obscurity like most of the year’s releases.

Steam Page & Store Presence

I cited Balatro’s capsule art to highlight the principles from Part 6. To recap: it had one focal point (a Joker card). It also had bold, high-contrast typography on a dark background, and it communicated the game’s genre at any size. You knew what kind of game this was in under one second.

Playstack, the publisher, also understood that traditional marketing assets wouldn’t work for this game. Their communications director later publicly admitted that the game was hard to market using conventional trailers and screenshots, because the game’s pixel art simply didn’t “wow” on a store page.

Their solution was to lean entirely into the demo; after all, if the magic was in the mechanics, then of course you should just let people play it! Still, this was a highly unorthodox Steam page strategy. Most studios would never even consider making the demo the primary conversion tool instead of the trailer!

Community

Balatro’s community built itself, but only because the infrastructure existed to allow it. The game had an active Discord before launch, and Playstack funneled creator audiences directly into it: viewers followed their favorite streamers’ runs, shared combos, and organized around the game. The publisher deliberately let the community be as loud as it wanted.

By launch, the Discord was large enough and engaged enough to generate Day One word-of-mouth that went far beyond what any paid campaign could have generated. Players became evangelists because they’d been playing the demo for months and felt ownership over the game’s discovery.

Wishlist Momentum

Balatro reached 208,401 wishlists before launch, well into breakthrough territory and far above the 30,000-wishlist publisher cushion. At over 208,000 wishlists, Balatro would have utterly dominated the old Popular Upcoming section, and today sits well above the new ~80,000 threshold (a level most indie games will never reach). But the principles that got Balatro there, like creator-driven discovery funneled to the community and a demo-first strategy, work regardless of which storefront sections exist or are available to any particular game. They operate completely outside the algorithm and thus aren’t subject to its whims.

On launch day, Balatro sold 119,000 copies in 24 hours, a conversion rate well above the 0.15x median. These were high-intent wishlists, because they came from creator audiences and demo players and not giveaways or paid traffic.

Content & PR Readiness

Balatro’s story takes a bit of a twist here. Traditional press initially wouldn’t cover the game (because of course they wouldn’t), so the publisher pivoted to a creator-first strategy, building a curated outreach list of streamers who’d covered similar games like Slay the Spire, Super Auto Pets, and The Binding of Isaac. Even then, their initial pitch emails failed because they were too long and leaned too heavily on describing features. Playstack finally broke through by stripping the pitch down to one line:

“It’s a poker roguelike. Play for five minutes and come back to me in three hours.”

They also strategically timed their participation in Next Fest. Rather than entering the first eligible fest, they held back for February 2024, which was just two weeks before launch. The demo pulled tens of thousands of downloads and wishlists during the fest, and that data became ammunition for a second pass at press coverage. In timing their participation like this, they maximized Fest wishlist conversions on launch.

Marketing Leadership

LocalThunk was a solo developer. Without Playstack, he would have been the Accidental CMO (the exact failure pattern we examined in depth during Part 4) and scored quite low in this category.

Indeed, it was LocalThunk’s very decision to sign with a publisher that saved Balatro’s launch, as Playstack provided strategic marketing leadership, a go-to-market plan, localization, console porting, and other functions that are often too heavy a lift for a solo developer. LocalThunk made the game, but the publisher built the marketing architecture.

Overall Estimate:

Case Study 2: Hades (Supergiant Games)

Hades gives us a different model: an established studio with a proven track record of using Early Access as both a development tool and a marketing strategy. Let’s dive in!

Marketing Timing

Supergiant announced and launched Hades into Early Access at The Game Awards in December 2018, nearly two years before the 1.0 launch in September 2020. That’s an unusually long runway, and the studio used every month of it. They didn’t use Early Access as a soft launch, like studios often do; instead, EA was a structured marketing campaign that also doubled as a key part of the game’s development process.

Steam Page & Store Presence

Hades launched into Early Access on the Epic Games Store first, then came to Steam. By the time 1.0 arrived, the Steam page had been live, optimized, and battle-tested through multiple major content updates. The game’s page reflected its current state at all times; the “set it and forget it” trap I mentioned in Part 6 never applied here because the Early Access model forced regular updates.

Community

Hades would probably score highest here. Supergiant, legendary for its community ops, built Hades’ community through Early Access as a deliberate design choice, with Greg Kasavin saying the team decided to make an Early Access game before they even settled on Greek mythology as its setting! The game’s Discord became its primary feedback channel, and the team read all of it. They built an upvote system for feature requests, watched streamers play, used anonymous player data to identify friction points, and most importantly, listened to their players.

The community was therefore both a development tool and a marketing asset, similarly to the Early Access model. Player feedback directly shaped mechanics, balance, and (in the case of Hades 2) even the ending. The community and the game’s development were deeply intertwined, and that level of integration yielded extraordinarily flush trust reserves. By 1.0 launch, Hades had a 98% positive rating on Steam, which it has maintained ever since!

Wishlist Momentum

By 1.0 launch, Hades had already been purchased by hundreds of thousands of Early Access players. The traditional wishlist model doesn’t perfectly capture this, because Early Access sales are a much stronger commitment signal than wishlists (obviously). But structurally, the result remains the same: players displayed massive Day One purchase intent, driven by two years of community building and content updates.

Content & PR Readiness

Supergiant methodically approached content creators and PR readiness. They treated each major Early Access update as its own marketing beat (new content, new god, new story elements, etc). The press dutifully covered each update, continuously keeping the game in the news cycle for two years. Similarly, this also sustained organic creator coverage because each update gave streamers a reason to return. By 1.0, the game had been covered dozens of times; instead of the first impression, launch was the culmination of a long journey.

Marketing Leadership

Supergiant is a studio with dedicated leadership and an established track record across multiple titles. Their approach to marketing reflects this; far from an afterthought, marketing was embedded in the game’s very development model. Deciding to use Early Access was itself a marketing strategy, and one that the studio made before they even chose the game’s theme!

Overall Estimate:

Patterns that Separate The Best from the Rest

So, there you have it. Two very different studios that made two very different games, yet displayed five consistent patterns across both:

1. Marketing as a decision, not an afterthought: In both cases, someone made a deliberate strategic choice about how marketing would work, and they made it before the game was far along enough for marketing to feel urgent. Supergiant decided on Early Access before choosing Greek mythology, while Playstack built a creator-first strategy immediately after recognizing that traditional press wouldn’t bite. Neither studio defaulted into marketing; they both chose an approach and brilliantly executed it.

2. The demo as the main marketing channel: Both games let players experience the product before launch. Balatro’s demo drove its entire creator discovery chain, while Hades’ Early Access was itself a 22-month playable demo. In both cases, instead of a marketing tactic bolted on at the end, the demo was the primary mechanism through which players and creators encountered the game.

3. Community built before it was needed: Both studios had engaged and active communities well before launch. Hades built theirs through two years of Early Access updates, while Balatro built theirs by funneling creator audiences to a highly active Discord server. In both cases, launch day earned them a clear withdrawal from a full trust reserve (instead of making a cold ask to strangers).

4. Someone who owned the marketing: Playstack provided marketing leadership for Balatro, while Supergiant had it in-house. In both cases, neither game was marketed by a developer splitting time between code and capsule art. The marketing function benefited from a lead that could dedicate attention, provide strategic direction, and had the authority to make decisions.

5. Compounding scores: This one’s more of a meta lesson. Notice how neither game excelled in one category only to limp through all the others; they scored high across all six. This is because the categories reinforce each other: good timing allows for early community building, which yields strong wishlists, which spurs creator interest, which forces Steam page optimization, which improves conversion rates and ultimately launch performance. In both cases, the underlying marketing structure enabled the studio’s executional excellence.

Most Studios Aren’t at 90 (But You Can Be!)

Both games show us a very clear pattern, but unfortunately, most studios can’t replicate it. This isn’t because they lack talent or work ethic (indeed, most studios are filled to the brim with hardworking and talented people); rather, they usually lack at least one (and usually several, if not all) of the marketing engine’s structural prerequisites.

They don’t have a publisher providing marketing leadership, and can’t afford a full-time marketing hire. They don’t complete a playable demo early enough for creators to discover, aren’t experienced enough to know which channels to invest in, nor do they have enough runway to sustain 9-18 months of pre-launch marketing.

You can fix these problems, but not in three weeks. Three to six months, however, is a different story… as long as you have a clear plan, dedicated marketing leadership, and a willingness to start marketing before it feels comfortable.

That’s really what the Scorecard is for, at the end of the day. Most studios aren’t at 90, and that probably includes yours. But the Scorecard can tell you where you are, what you’re missing, and what to fix first so that by launch day, you’re as close to 90 as your resources and timeline allow.

Take the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard →

Book a Speedrun Strategy Session →

Next Week: We wrap up the series! Twelve weeks of Ready Check, distilled into what I wish every studio knew before greenlight.

GG,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

This is the tenth article in Ready Check, a weekly series of 12 articles on launch readiness for indie and AA games that serves as a companion compendium for my Game Launch Readiness Scorecard. While each individual piece focuses on themes and provides tips that stand on their own, they also build on and reinforce each other, so I recommend reading them in order. To catch up, start here:

New installments of Ready Check will drop each Monday at 7:00 a.m. Pacific Time. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to Spawn Point Marketing so you don’t miss any:

Subscribe now

We’ve covered a lot of ground in Ready Check, haven’t we? Over the past nine weeks, we’ve broken down the six categories of your game marketing engine:

• Marketing Timing

• Steam Page & Store Presence

• Community

• Wishlist Momentum (+ Revenue Projections!)

• Content & PR Readiness

• Marketing Leadership

You now understand what each one measures, and why I’ve weighted everything the way it is (if you don’t, you may want to give the series another read before coming back to this tab!). So this week, I’ll show you how to read your results, and how to actually act on them.

Because after all, in any assessment, a score without a next step is just a number. That’s why the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard doesn’t stop at your score and tier! It also generates three specific recommendations to buff your launch readiness. In this market, you need all the help you can get, which is why I built the Scorecard to give you the three highest-leverage moves you can make right now, based on where you’re currently weakest.

How the Scorecard Picks Recommendations

The Scorecard’s recommendation logic is actually quite straightforward: it simply ranks your six category scores from lowest to highest. Your first recommendation comes from your weakest category, your second comes from your second-weakest, and your third comes from your third-weakest.

If two categories are tied, the tiebreaker follows a priority order:

1. Marketing Timing beats Community

2. Community beats Wishlists

3. Wishlists beats Content & PR

4. Content & PR beats Steam Page

5. Steam Page beats Leadership

That priority order reflects the Scorecard’s compounding logic, which I’ve gone over at great length throughout this series; namely, it surfaces structural categories first, mostly because they’re more impactful (and more load-bearing, and because they take longer to fix).

Within each category, your answers determine which specific recommendation you receive. So, for example, if you scored low on Community because you have no Discord, you’ll get a different recommendation than if you have a Discord but no email list… similarly, someone who scored low on Marketing Timing because they haven’t started yet will get a different recommendation than someone who has started but has no written plan.

As a result, instead of more generic “do more marketing” advice, you get three actionable recommendations, specific to your situation. These are concrete next steps, tied to the gaps your answers revealed, that you can act on right away!

Why Three Recommendations, not Six?

The Scorecard evaluates you across six categories, and you might be weak in four, five, or even all six of them. So why only show three recommendations?

Because I believe that, at any given moment, focusing on the bigger problems beats comprehensively covering all the problems. If you try to fix everything all at once, you’ll usually end up fixing nothing (because you’ll spread yourself too thin… especially if you’re a solo dev or running a small team). Three action items, on the other hand, constitute a much more manageable scope. Remember, these are recommendations for a 90-day sprint, not a massive 12-month overhaul.

And in most cases, fixing your three weakest areas often creates positive cascading effects that end up raising the other categories, even without any direct intervention!

But why does that happen? Well, because the six categories don’t operate in a vacuum; they’re interconnected pieces of a marketing engine. If one piece of the engine falters, it drags the rest down… but the inverse is also true, and fixing one part will end up buffing the others. For instance:

• Fixing Marketing Timing by getting a plan in place makes it easier to fix Community, because now you know what channels to invest in.

• Fixing Community by building a Discord and starting an email list, in turn, makes it easier to fix Wishlist Momentum because you now have active channels driving organic wishlists.

• And fixing Content & PR by building creator relationships indirectly lifts your Steam Page score, because creator traffic tests your page’s conversion rate and forces you to optimize it.

The Scorecard just gives you the first three dominoes; if you knock those over, the others will often follow.

The 4 Most Common Result Patterns

Yup, you guessed it! It’s that part of each article again where I go over the patterns that emerge after seeing enough scorecard results. But I’m going to switch it up a bit this week! Instead of three examples, here are the four profiles I see most often, and what the recommendation stack typically looks like for each:

1. The Builder Who Hasn’t Started Marketing

Score Range: 25-45 🔸 Tier: Flying Blind or Behind Schedule

This studio has a game in production and well underway (maybe a vertical slice, or in alpha) but has done essentially no marketing work. The game either has no Steam page, or one that’s been up for a few weeks and hasn’t been optimized. The studio also hasn’t set up any community infrastructure, and isn’t conducting outreach. Basically, the game itself is at Level 50, while marketing is still at Level 1.

A typical recommendation stack for this studio is:

The timeline for this studio to fix its problems is 3–6 months, which harks back to why the Scorecard’s tiebreaker prioritizes Marketing Timing to heavily; this studio needs to lay the structural foundation before anything executional can work, and laying the structural foundation takes time… lots of it, in fact!

2. The Pollyanna With No Wishlists

Score Range: 45-65 🔸 Tier: Behind Schedule

This studio has done some marketing; its Steam page is live, maybe it has a small Discord along with some social presence. But its wishlist momentum is very weak, and it hasn’t started reaching out to creators. It also hasn’t written a full GTM plan. But hey, at least it’s something, right? And it’s true that the team is doing things… it’s just not doing the right things, or in the right order. Unfortunately, that’s not enough for a strong launch. Not in 2026.

A typical recommendation stack for this studio is:

This is the most common profile I see, and the good news is, it’s also the most responsive to intervention. And that’s because these studios are already in motion; instead of starting from zero, they just have to reorient efforts they’re already expending.

3. The “+1 Community / -1 Strategy” Studio

Score Range: 55-75 🔸 Tier: Behind Schedule or On Track

This studio already has an engaged community; they’ve got a solid Discord and an active social presence that oozes palpable fan enthusiasm. But the studio has no formal marketing leadership or a GTM document, and the game’s low wishlist momentum (especially relative to its community health) suggests that the community, active as it is, just isn’t converting to store page visits.

A typical recommendation stack for this studio is:

This profile is the most frustrating for founders because their active and buzzing community feels like proof that their marketing is working. And it is working… somewhat. Partially. But the game’s missing a conversion layer, and that is a ticking time bomb that’s primed to catch everyone off-guard at launch. But if fixed, that conversion layer would defuse the bomb by transmuting their community’s enthusiasm into measurable pre-launch traction and, come Day One, into strong sales.

4. The Studio Performing a Ready Check1

Score Range: 70-89 🔸 Tier: On Track

This studio has done the most things right: their game has a strong Steam page, their wishlists are growing at a healthy clip, their community flywheel is starting to spin, and creators are responsive to their pitches. For this tier, gaps usually appear in one or two specific areas that vary by game and studio; maybe there’s no email list, or no press kit, or maybe the founder is still the sole marketing owner.

The recommendation stack for this profile similarly varies, but it usually targets the one or two gaps that still remain. At this level, the Scorecard’s recommendations become more incremental rather than structural in nature; for instance, starting an email list rather than starting marketing at all. The Scorecard’s value for this profile lies more in confirming what’s working and finding the remaining gaps; these studios often know they’re in decent shape, but want to make sure they’re not overlooking anything.

A Quick Note on Post-Launch and Non-Steam Studios

The four profiles above describe pre-launch studios on Steam, which is the most common scenario I encounter. But the Scorecard also adapts for two other situations:

1. If you’ve already launched, the recommendation engine shifts its framing, replacing pre-launch urgency language (”narrow your launch window,” “accelerate wishlists before launch”) with post-launch equivalents: reigniting momentum through content updates, optimizing for sale event conversions, and building creator relationships around your next major patch or DLC. The Scorecard swaps out the Next Fest question for one on post-launch marketing cadence, and reframes your wishlist backlog as deferred revenue that converts during sales events (instead of as a launch-day conversion pool).

2. If you’re not on Steam (whether because you’re console-first, launching on mobile, or using a different PC storefront), the scorecard replaces Steam-specific questions with platform-generic equivalents. But make no mistake: you still need to optimize your page, and measure pre-purchase intent (whether through App Store pre-orders, PlayStation Store follows, notification sign-ups, or whichever metric is best for your primary platform). The principles remain the same regardless of where you launch; only the specific platform vocabulary changes here.

Obviously, both of these states produce different recommendation stacks than the profiles above. The Scorecard handles this automatically, so you don’t need to translate the advice yourself. Easy peasy!

How to Sequence the Three Recommendations

The Scorecard orders recommendations by urgency, but urgency and sequence aren’t always the same thing! Here’s how to think about the order in which to execute your recommendation stack:

If your first recommendation is structural (start marketing, write a GTM plan, assign marketing leadership, etc.), do it first. Don’t skip to recommendation #2 because it feels more actionable! Structural recommendations exist because the Scorecard detected a missing foundation, and if you build tactics on top of a missing foundation, don’t be surprised if you end up shutting down four months after launch.

If your first recommendation is executional (optimize your Steam page, build a press kit, start creator outreach), you can often run recommendations #1 and #2 in parallel, because executional work doesn’t depend on sequence like structural work does.

If your three recommendations span structural and executional, do the structural one first, even if it’s listed second or third. The ordering reflects your score’s severity, but in practice, the structural fix enables any executional fixes to work at all!

A reasonable timeline for most studios is to spend weeks 1-2 on the structural recommendation (define audience, write GTM plan, assign marketing ownership, etc.), then spend weeks 3-8 on executional recommendations (optimize page, build outreach list, launch community channels, collect emails, etc.), and weeks 9-12 measuring results and retaking the Scorecard to see what moved.

Retaking the Scorecard

Yes, you read that right… the Scorecard is designed to be taken more than once! In fact, your score will change as your marketing infrastructure develops. A studio that scored 35 in January might score 60 in April after executing on their three recommendations, and the new score will then generate three new recommendations… which will be different because the gaps will have shifted.

I recommend retaking either every 90 days or after any major marketing milestone (you launched your Steam page, presented a demo at Next Fest, rode your first creator coverage wave, released a new trailer…). Each retake will give you an updated diagnostic and a fresh set of priorities, so I encourage you to keep checking.

Over time, your pattern should show a rising score with shrinking gaps between categories. A healthy trajectory looks roughly like this: 35 ➡️ 55 ➡️ 70 ➡️ 80+. The first jump is usually the biggest because structural fixes produce outsized gains, while later jumps become smaller and more incremental. That’s totally normal and to be fully expected.

What the Scorecard Can’t and Won’t Tell You

As useful as the Scorecard is, it’s not a crystal ball. Specifically, there are three things it can’t tell you, because it’s not designed to:

1. Whether your game is good. The Scorecard measures marketing readiness, not game quality. A mediocre game with perfect marketing will underperform just as much as a brilliant game with poor marketing readiness; it will just log better Week One numbers before negative reviews kill its momentum. The Scorecard assumes you’re building something worth playing; if you’re not sure about that, the Scorecard won’t help, because you need a different type of diagnostic altogether.

2. Whether your market exists. The Scorecard also doesn’t evaluate product-market fit. In other words, it doesn’t ask whether anyone even wants a “farming roguelite with time travel mechanics.” That’s a positioning question; it lives way upstream of everything that the Scorecard measures, and is determined long before any marketing is executed. If you’re not confident your game has an audience, I do offer a Speedrun Strategy Session that’s designed (among other things) to answer that question before you further invest in marketing infrastructure (more details later).

3. Whether you should launch now or delay. The Scorecard gives you a score and recommendations, but it can’t render a verdict on whether to launch or not. A low score doesn’t necessarily mean you should delay; it might mean you should launch and accept less initial revenue while you build the infrastructure for your next title. Likewise, a high score doesn’t mean you should launch immediately; it means your marketing readiness is strong… but production readiness is a different beast altogether, far outside of the Scorecard’s scope.

The Scorecard is but one diagnostic. A useful one, to be clear! But it sits inside a larger context that includes things like your financial position, team capacity, competitive timing, and risk tolerance. The three recommendations help you prioritize within the marketing domain, but you need a broader and more holistic view to make the final launch decision itself.

When Three Recommendations Aren’t Enough

There are situations when three recommendations just don’t cover it, and sometimes the Scorecard surfaces a deeper systemic problem. A studio that scores below 30 across four or more categories is dealing with more than just a few gaps; these folks are outright missing an entire marketing function.

For those studios, the three recommendations form a workable starting point, but the real intervention is structural in nature: someone needs to own their marketing strategy end-to-end, build the architecture that the Scorecard measures, and sequence the work across a 6-12 month timeline.

Fortunately, that’s exactly what a Speedrun Strategy Session is designed to do! During a focused half-day engagement, we build you a complete plan: positioning, audience definition, marketing beats, channel strategy, timeline, and KPIs, all tailored to your game, your team, and your launch window! It’s the full version of what the three recommendations sketch an outline of.

If your Scorecard shows three recommendations that you can execute on your own, do that. The Scorecard did its job! GG, go get ‘em, come back in 90 days and see where you are then.

But if your Scorecard shows a systemic gap that three recommendations can’t close, you don’t need a diagnostic. You need a strategist.

Take the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard →

Book a Speedrun Strategy Session →

Next Week: We’ll examine what “Launch Ready” truly looks like, and the patterns that separate studios that score 90+ from everyone else.

GG,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

This is the ninth article in Ready Check, a weekly series of 12 articles on launch readiness for indie and AA games that serves as a companion compendium for my Game Launch Readiness Scorecard. While each individual piece focuses on themes and provides tips that stand on their own, they also build on and reinforce each other, so I recommend reading them in order. To catch up, start here:

New installments of Ready Check will drop each Monday at 7:00 a.m. Pacific Time. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to Spawn Point Marketing so you don’t miss any:

Subscribe now

Last week, I argued that wishlists are a thermometer, not a thermostat. This delightful little metaphor cuts through a lot of the confusion regarding why indies target wishlists, while also giving a good reason to not optimize raw wishlist count as a means in itself (ie, to Goodhart’s Law it), as far too many studios do: because wishlists only measure your marketing’s temperature, they don’t actually set it.

But that only begs the question… what is said temperature a measure of, to begin with? Well, let’s work backwards a bit:

Why do we measure wishlists? Because they’re a lagging indicator of player interest in your game.

Why do we care about player interest in your game? Because interested players are more likely to actually purchase the game.

And why do we care if a player purchases your game? Because purchases = revenue. AKA “$$$”

And that’s it, there you have it!1 That’s why we care about wishlists so much. Because they allow us to project, however imperfectly, how much money we can expect to make from our game.

So this week, we’ll break apart the projector itself. The Game Launch Readiness Scorecard includes a Wishlist Revenue Projector that takes your wishlist count and price point, and spits out a Week One revenue estimate across three scenarios:

I built it because every founder eventually asks themselves (or asks me, or their fellow founders on LinkedIn) the same question:

“We have X wishlists. But what does that actually mean in dollars?”

The answer is too complicated and nuanced to land on a single number, so the projector gives you three numbers instead. In this piece, I’ll explain what’s behind each of these numbers, why they vary so much, and how to use the projector’s output as a compass instead of copium.

The Inputs You Feed the Projector

The projector takes two inputs from your Scorecard answers:

1. Your current wishlist count. That’s the number you get from your Steamworks dashboard under Wishlists & Followers. Don’t guess, and don’t run a Boxleiter estimate from your follower count! Input the actual, specific wishlist number. If you select “I don’t know” on the scorecard, the Projector doesn’t run, and you get a note saying you should go check. Knowing your wishlist count is baseline literacy for anyone launching a game on Steam.

2. Your planned price point. There are four bands to choose from here:

• Under $10 (modeled at a $7 midpoint)

• $10–$19.99 (modeled at $15)

• $20–$29.99 (modeled at $25)

• $30+ (modeled at $35)

That’s it! Just two inputs. I deliberately made it this simple because the Projector isn’t a financial model, and you shouldn’t use it as such. It’s merely a reality check (which still means it’s valuable, just make sure you go in with the right expectations).

The Conversion Rates

The Projector’s core is a set of wishlist conversion rates drawn from GameDiscoverCo’s 2024–2025 analysis of all Steam launches with 25,000+ wishlists (which I’ve cited quite a few times in this series already). The rates differ by price tier because, as with all products, price significantly affects purchase resistance.

• For games priced under $10:

  • The conservative rate is 0.08x

  • The median is 0.15x

  • And the optimistic rate is 0.30x

  • That means for every 100,000 wishlists, the projector estimates between 8,000 and 30,000 first-week unit sales, with a midpoint of 15,000.

• For games priced at $10 or above:

  • The conservative rate is 0.05x

  • The median is 0.10x

  • And the optimistic rate is 0.25x

  • For the same 100,000 wishlists, the range shifts to 5,000–25,000 units, with a midpoint of 10,000.

I know it seems overly nitpicky, but you’d be surprised how many founders don’t realize how much the price split really matters. As I covered last week, GameDiscoverCo found that games above $10 converted at a median of 0.10x, which is a third lower than the 0.15x headline number that gets cited everywhere!

Most indie games price between $15 and $30, so most of you reading this should be using the higher price band; if you’ve been planning your revenue around the 0.15x figure without adjusting for price, your projections are probably ~50% too optimistic.

Why Three Scenarios Instead of One?

A single estimate would probably be more satisfying, and it would’ve certainly made the Projector easier to build. But a single estimate would also be a lie.

Here’s why:

Conversion rates vary by an order of magnitude between projects. For example, Peak converted at 29x, which is a highly unrealistic expectation for most games. Hell, some games in the GameDiscoverCo dataset converted below 0.02x. That amount of variance really throws a wrench in the predictive usefulness of any wishlist projection, because absent a crystal ball, you really can’t tell how a game will perform ahead of time. Now, the median is still a useful anchor, but keep in mind that any individual game can land anywhere in the range.

Given this variance, I went with the three-scenario model so you can plan against the uncertainty instead of pretending it doesn’t exist (always a fatal error, for indies especially). So, here’s how to read each one:

• Conservative is your floor plan. If everything goes fine (you get decent reviews, see normal launch traffic, and suffer no major setbacks but also gain no viral moments), what can you reasonably count on? Use this number for your studio’s wider financial planning; if your game only needs to hit the conservative number to break even, you have a viable project. But if it needs to hit the optimistic number, then you’re in a bit of a pickle, because now you’re relying on things you can’t control, which doesn’t usually bode well for smaller projects.

• Median is your most likely scenario, with all the caveats that carries in a distribution as wide as this. As the center of the distribution, it’s neither too cautious nor overly aggressive, so use this number to set internal benchmarks and manage expectations with stakeholders.

• Optimistic is what happens when everything goes right: you earn strong reviews, enjoy a viral moment (or two, or ten), creators cover your game like gangbusters, your trailer gets featured in a marquee showcase, and your community mobilizes on Day One. Don’t plan for this number, because that’d be like planning a monthly budget based on you winning the lottery. But you should still know what it looks like, because if your launch tracks toward it, you’ll want to be ready to ride that wave: line up all your post-launch content, have the operational infrastructure in place to scale your community, and follow up with creators and the press while the buzz is still hot.

Walking Through the Math

So far, this probably still seems a bit abstract and hypothetical, so let me make this more concrete with a common scenario:

STEP 1: Select the conversion band

Your game is priced above $10, so we use the higher-price band:

• Conservative: 0.05x

• Median: 0.10x

• Optimistic: 0.25x

STEP 2: Calculate first-week unit sales

Multiply your wishlists by the conversion rate:

• Conservative: 25,000 × 0.05 = 1,250 units

• Median: 25,000 × 0.10 = 2,500 units

• Optimistic: 25,000 × 0.25 = 6,250 units

STEP 3: Calculate gross revenue

Now, multiply the result using the $15 midpoint for the $10–$19.99 band (for simplicity’s sake, the Projector uses midpoints instead of the exact price):

• Conservative: 1,250 × $15 = $18,750

• Median: 2,500 × $15 = $37,500

• Optimistic: 6,250 × $15 = $93,750

Step 4: Apply the Steam cut

Steam takes 30% on the first $10M in revenue (which covers virtually every indie and AA launch), so multiply by 0.70:

• Conservative: $18,750 × 0.70 = $13,125 net

• Median: $37,500 × 0.70 = $26,250 net

• Optimistic: $93,750 × 0.70 = $65,625 net

And that’s your range! Notice the spread: the same game, with the same wishlists, could net anywhere from $13,000 to $65,000 in its first week. The differences between games that land in the lower and higher ends of the spread are myriad; it doesn’t always (or entirely) come down to luck! Your review scores, how well you executed your marketing, and how well you’ve primed your community for launch will all determine your actual number, as well as whether you reached the right audience in the first place.

Where You Sit on the Visibility Map

Below the revenue table, the projector shows your position relative to Steam’s key visibility benchmarks.

The most important benchmark is 30,000 wishlists, which is the range where your launch-day revenue is likely to clear the ~$10,000 threshold for being listed under New & Trending, even with conservative conversion. Post-launch algorithmic promotion on Steam is driven by revenue, not wishlists, and the 30,000 count is a cushion that usually makes the revenue math work (though there are exceptions, so don’t get complacent if you land above this!).

If you’re below 30,000, the projector shows your progress toward that benchmark and what it means for your launch-day revenue probability. If you’re above 30,000, it shows how your count positions you for stronger performance. Finally, if you’re above 100,000 wishlists, it congratulates you and notes how at this point, prediction models become significantly more reliable and that Steam’s organic promotion is now a major driver of your discovery.

Now, the projector doesn’t model Steam’s brand-spanking-new (as of June 2026) Personal Calendar, which surfaces upcoming games to players based on tag affinity and playtime profiles regardless of wishlist count. This means a game with 5,000 wishlists but excellent tag optimization may be visible to more of the right players than a game with 20,000 wishlists and generic tags. The projector can’t quantify that advantage… but you (and you alone) can create it by optimizing your Steam page!

Things That the Projector Doesn’t Account For

The Projector isn’t a perfect tool, by any means, and I owe it to you to be upfront about that. So in the interest of transparency, here’s what I intentionally left out of the Projector:

• Genre-specific conversion rates. Co-op games convert higher, while narrative games convert lower. Horror converts particularly well, because the streaming ecosystem drives impulse purchases. Point is, the Projector uses price-adjusted broad medians instead of genre-adjusted specific rates. That’s a trade-off that I intentionally made; adjusting for genre would make the Projector more accurate, but it would also require the Scorecard to collect genre data that it currently doesn’t, use dozens of genre benchmarks that I’d then have to constantly track and update, and on top of all that, the added precision would only create a false sense of certainty. So I decided against it.

• Review score impact. As I covered last week, underperformers launched to 67% review scores, while overperformers launched to 91% scores. The projector doesn’t adjust for review score, simply because you don’t have a review score yet (you haven’t launched!). But keep it in mind: if your game launches to Mixed reviews, your actual conversion will likely land below the conservative estimate. Conversely, if it launches to Very Positive, you could well beat even the optimistic one.

• Year One multiplier. The projector only estimates Week One revenue. Year One revenue for indie games typically runs 3-5x the first week’s number, driven by sale events, seasonal discounts, word of mouth, and how well you monetize the long tail of wishlist notifications. A $26,000 first week might translate to $80,000-$130,000 in Year One revenue, but that multiplier varies enormously by genre and post-launch execution, so the projector doesn’t try to model it.

• Long-tail revenue. Closely related to Year One revenue is the long tail: some studios will want to know total lifetime revenue. But I deliberately didn’t build a lifetime projector because the uncertainty compounds too aggressively. Multiplying an already uncertain first-week estimate by yet another uncertain multiplier would spit out a number that looks precise but is essentially fanfiction. The Week One estimate is your anchor; everything after that depends on decisions you haven’t made yet.

• Non-Steam revenue. If you’re launching on multiple platforms, your total revenue will be higher than what the Projector shows. But Steam is typically 70-80% of PC revenue for most indie and AA titles, so the projector’s output isn’t wildly off as a total estimate. Console revenue, if applicable, sits on top.

How to Best Use This

The way I see it, the Projector has three viable use cases for your typical indie studio:

1. As a financial viability check. Run the math with your current wishlist count and price, then look at the conservative estimate. Can you break even on that number? If yes, your project has a viable floor. If no, you need either more wishlists, a different price point, or a lower cost structure. The projector doesn’t solve this problem for you, but it does make it visible, which is always the first step in solving the problem.

2. To justify your marketing investment. The gap between the conservative and optimistic projections reveals your marketing opportunity. Better marketing execution (stronger community, more creator coverage, better Steam page, and higher review scores) pushes your actual result from conservative towards optimistic. If the gap between those two numbers is $50,000, that’s the ceiling on what marketing investment can produce. So if you’re deciding whether to bring on a marketing lead, that gap is part of the ROI case.

3. To manage expectations. Show the three-scenario table to your co-founder, your publisher, your investors, or your team. In doing so, you reframe the conversation from how many wishlists you need to what each scenario looks like and what you’re doing to move from conservative toward optimistic. That’s a much healthier conversation to have, because it replaces a fantasy with an actual numerical range.

The Worst-Case Scenario

Now, let’s run the most uncomfortable hypothetical. I know, I know… it’s hard, and it’s grim. But the stakes are high, your team’s livelihoods are on the line, and you owe it to them to approach this with clear eyes.

So let’s consider the following scenario:

• Conservative: 5,000 × 0.05 × $25 × 0.70 = $4,375 net

• Median: 5,000 × 0.10 × $25 × 0.70 = $8,750 net

• Optimistic: 5,000 × 0.25 × $25 × 0.70 = $21,875 net

At the median, that’s less than $9,000 in Week One revenue. So now, the question is… is this viable? And the answer is… it depends. For a solo developer who spent a year on the game, that might be acceptable. But for a four-person studio that spent two years building it, it probably means having to disband the team.

It’s tough, I know, but the Projector’s job isn’t to make you feel good. I built this tool to make the math visible early enough so that, if said math looks ugly, you can actually do something about it. If you’re sitting at 5,000 wishlists and you’re six months from launch, you still have time to build the marketing infrastructure that can move that number. But if you’re three weeks from launch, you have a really tough decision to make. The Scorecard can’t tell you whether you’re better off launching now, or delaying to build more momentum. Only you can make that decision.2

But it’s easier to make that decision with actual, real, concrete numbers than with cope.

Take the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard →

Next Week: I’ll show you how to read your full Scorecard results and use the three-recommendation framework to decide what to fix first, second, and third.

Press Start,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

This is the eighth article in Ready Check, a weekly series of 12 articles on launch readiness for indie and AA games that serves as a companion compendium for my Game Launch Readiness Scorecard. While each individual piece focuses on themes and provides tips that stand on their own, they also build on and reinforce each other, so I recommend reading them in order. To catch up, start here:

New installments of Ready Check will drop each Monday at 7:00 a.m. Pacific Time. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to Spawn Point Marketing so you don’t miss any:

Subscribe now

Steam wishlists are all the rage in game marketing, and have been ever since Steam first became a thing. This seemingly unassuming number carries a lot of weight and power: pump it high enough, and it can unlock publisher deals, loosen up the Steam algorithm, and accelerate word-of-mouth… or, it will lock you out of all of the above if you let it slip low enough. Long the definitive game marketing metric to track, wishlists have always served as a reliable (if flawed) indicator for both pre-launch interest and eventual post-launch sales.

But, since we’re in the year 2026, this picture isn’t quite so simple anymore. In such a chaotic and increasingly crowded market, served by an industry in flux and sustained by an audience pulled in every conceivable direction, wishlists aren’t as reliable an indicator as they once were; high wishlists no longer necessarily guarantee strong sales, for reasons as varied as each of the over 20,000 games that launch on Steam each year.

And yet, wishlists remain a supremely important metric to track, especially for indie studios. In the absence of a crystal ball or time machine, wishlists are the closest thing to a launch performance forecasting tool that indies have at their disposal. But just like with a weather forecast, it’s more important than ever to know how to read your wishlists correctly, and to come in with a crystal-clear idea of their strengths and limitations as an indicator, as well as what they can and cannot predict on a fundamental level.

That is what we’ll be going over today: how to actually use your wishlists as a useful barometer for both anchoring your marketing strategy and evaluating the health of your six-pronged marketing engine.

So, with all that in mind, let’s start with a nice, round number:

Tell me… What does that number even mean? And relative to what? How many sales can you expect at launch from that number? Is that even a good number? After all, 50,000 wishlists sure sounds like a lot, and it feels validating; it feels like 50,000 people who want your game! After all, isn’t that what the very term “wishlist” implies?

But at the median conversion rate for indie games, a $10 indie game with 50,000 wishlists only converts to roughly 7,500 first-week sales, or roughly $105,000 in Week 1 revenue (net, after Steam’s 30% cut). Which isn’t nothing, but it’s probably not what you envisioned when you saw “50,000.”

And keep in mind that’s the median. This is an enormous range; some games with 50,000 wishlists sell only 750 copies in week one, while others sell over 75,000. The conversion rate varies by an order of magnitude depending on the game’s genre, price, quality, and how well the studio/publisher executed its marketing.

Wishlists are the most watched number in indie game marketing, and also the most misunderstood (often fatally so). But since you’re reading this article, that won’t be the case for you! So let’s start by clearing some things up about this maddening, mystical, and mysterious marketing number.

How Many Wishlists Convert to Sales?

First, let’s start with a quick terminology refresher: in marketing, a “conversion” is the act of turning a prospect or visitor into a paying customer. In other words, it’s a sale; if a wishlist “converts,” it means the player who wishlisted the game actually ended up buying it.

So, how many players who wishlisted a game will ultimately purchase it? Unfortunately, we can’t see into the future, so it’s impossible to say for certain. But we can work backwards from the past, which is exactly what the discoverability oracles at did!

Their analysis of all Steam titles with over 25,000 wishlists, released between September 2024 and September 2025, found a median first-week conversion rate of 0.15x. And knowing that number lets us do a little math! That conversion rate of 0.15x means that for every 100,000 wishlists at launch, the median game will sell about 15,000 copies in Week 1.

That said, we do need to place a few asterisks on that magical predictive conversion rate, for the following three reasons:

1. Price matters. Games above $10 at launch actually converted at a median of 0.10x, a full third lower than the overall figure! This means that for most indie and AA titles, which generally price between $15 and $30, the 0.10x number is actually more realistic than the 0.15x headline. So going back to our example: that same 50,000 wishlist game, but priced at $20 and using the price-adjusted median, can expect around 5,000 first-week sales and roughly $70,000 in net revenue.

2. Genre matters, too. Yes, the type of game you’re making will affect your conversion rates, too. Different personalities gravitate towards different types of games, which means that different genres will attract different audiences that constitute different market sizes and display different purchasing behaviors. For example, co-op games convert at significantly higher rates, mainly because social dynamics drive group purchases (which is obviously highly relevant for… *ahem* group games). Meanwhile, narrative-focused and niche indie titles often convert lower because their audiences approach their purchases more deliberately; in other words, they’re more likely to wishlist and wait for a sale. Funnily enough, NSFW games convert unusually high, because they have dedicated and comparatively price-inelastic audiences; they buy at full price rather than wishlisting and waiting on a sale, for what I’m hoping are fairly obvious reasons that I don’t need to spell out in a family-friendly newsletter.1

3. Game quality matters most of all. This last point, I cannot overemphasize. Underperforming titles in GameDiscoverCo’s dataset launched to a median first-week user score of 67% (Mixed). But the overperformers, on the other hand, launched to 91% (Very Positive). I hope that correlation illustrates why this might be the most important caveat of them all. The fact of the matter is, no amount of wishlist volume can overcome a Mixed review score. More than just a marketing metric, a game’s conversion rate is also a product-market fit signal, and no amount of the former can overcome a deficit in the latter.

Wishlists Are Ultimately a Lagging Indicator

I get a fair amount of pushback from weighting Wishlist Momentum at only 15%, and I think that’s because it feels far too low for a metric that practically every studio obsesses over.

But I have a very good structural reason for doing that: wishlists, in and of themselves, don’t cause sales. Instead, they reflect the underlying marketing execution that actually causes sales. A high wishlist count is evidence that all the things you’re doing to market your game are working: you’ve made use of your runway, your community is growing, your Steam page converts well, and you have a fully-oiled and functioning discovery layer. A low wishlist count, meanwhile, signals that something upstream in your marketing engine is broken.

If I’d weighted wishlists too heavily, that would allow a studio enjoying a single viral moment to mask deeper structural weaknesses in their marketing system. A TikTok clip with millions of views could push wishlists to 30,000 in a week, producing a strong Wishlist Momentum score… even though the studio has no community, isn’t building relationships with creators, hasn’t written a GTM plan, and has no one leading their marketing. That studio’s Scorecard would say it’s “On Track,” when it really isn’t; so the 15% weight ensures that it doesn’t.

FirstLook’s 2026 survey of 250+ senior studio leaders (which I’ve already cited many times in this newsletter) reinforces my reasoning, by the way: 93% of studio heads said they cannot reliably predict whether a game will be a commercial success based on pre-launch metrics including wishlists. 76% had fully believed they had a hit on their hands, based on pre-launch data… only to watch the game underperform. Meanwhile, 83% had worried that their game looked weak, only for it to exceed their expectations.

Wishlists might be the most visible number (which is precisely what makes them valuable), but they’re far from the most predictive. Not even close, actually. As I covered in Part 5, Discord community growth was the number one unseen success factor for sleeper hits, cited by 48% of studios (nearly half!). It outranked wishlists, YouTube views, and press coverage… which means that the metric that studios obsess over the most turns out to tell you far less than something most studios barely track.

What the Scorecard Measures

Speaking of the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard, let’s have a look at what it asks here. The Wishlist Momentum category works differently from the other five — instead of fixed-answer multiple choice questions, it takes your actual wishlist count and scores it against industry benchmarks, with 30,000 wishlists as the primary planning threshold (ie, the wishlist count that reliably clears Steam’s post-launch revenue floors, even with conservative conversion).

This category also feeds the Wishlist Revenue Projector, which I’ll break down in detail in the next piece. The projector takes your wishlist count, applies the appropriate conversion band, accounts for the Steam cut, and produces a revenue estimate. Just keep in mind that this is a planning tool, not an ironclad prediction (it may seem subtle, but the difference between the two does matter!).

The Visibility Landscape (As of June 2026)

The discovery landscape on Steam shifted significantly while I was writing this; in fact, I had to re-do this entire section, and even completely rework how the Scorecard scores wishlists! A lot has changed in just the past few weeks, and you need to understand the new terrain.

Fortunately, that’s what I’m here for! It’s quite literally my job to keep you fully apprised of these changes in the game marketing landscape. So with that in mind, here’s what you need to know about Steam’s big recent changes:

What Changed: Popular Upcoming, the storefront section where indie games with roughly 7,000 wishlists could appear on the front page before launch, now has an effective entry floor of about 80,000 wishlists. This section, which selects and displays games algorithmically rather than chronologically, already heavily favored AAA and viral indie titles; now, after this update, Popular Upcoming is no longer a reachable milestone for most indie games and even a good chunk of AA titles.

So if you’ve seen older advice telling you to aim for 7,000 wishlists to trigger the Popular Upcoming algorithm, beware: that advice is now obsolete. With one fell swoop of Steam’s fingers (or rather, more likely, a click of a mouse), the most actionable milestone every indie studio was chasing has just disappeared.

What Replaced It: From the ashes of every indie team’s Popular Upcoming dreams, Valve launched Personal Calendar, a discovery system that matches upcoming games to players based on playtime profiles and tag affinity. Most importantly, it has no wishlist floor, and it retrains daily. Early developer reports confirm it’s heavily weighted toward smaller games, with one mid-sized indie reporting gains of over 1,000 wishlists in a single day from the calendar alone.

This shift has profound implications for how you, as an indie developer, should think about your pre-launch visibility. The old model, roughly, looked like this:

1. Accumulate at least 7,000+ wishlists (and ideally much more than that)

2. Appear on Popular Upcoming

3. Gain 1,000-3,000 organic wishlists per day

4. Clear Steam’s revenue threshold for algorithmic visibility, ride the wave

That ladder had a clear first rung with a numeric target that was quite achievable for even a small indie team executing a disciplined marketing strategy. The new model, meanwhile, looks like this:

1. Optimize your tags and genre identity

2. Personal Calendar matches you to the right players

3. Those players wishlist based on tag affinity and store page conversion

4. If your tags are well-matched, you can still clear the threshold and ride the wave

So the first rung is no longer a concrete number to shoot for; now, you must ensure the quality of your game-to-player match. Which actually reinforces this series’ main argument.

What Hasn’t Changed: Basically everything else! Post-launch visibility on Steam is still primarily driven by revenue, and Valve’s New & Trending algorithm still uses Week One revenue as your game’s primary signal. Steam’s ~$10,000 Week One revenue floor for algorithmic promotion still very much applies... which means that the 30,000-wishlist “publisher cushion” (the wishlist count that reliably clears that revenue threshold, even with conservative conversion) is still useful as a planning benchmark, even though the mechanism for reaching 30,000 has decisively shifted.

Another thing that remains unchanged: above 100,000 wishlists, prediction models become significantly more reliable and Steam’s organic promotion becomes a major driver of both wishlists and sales. VG Insights found that wishlist-to-sales correlation strengthens substantially above 100,000 wishlists… whereas for smaller projects, the relationship between wishlists and sales becomes much less predictable.

The Bottom Line: This is a tactical shift; the strategic picture remains mostly unchanged. You still have to start early, you still have to build community and creator relationships, you still have to optimize your Steam page, and you still need a marketing leader to own the outcomes. But yes, you do need to prioritize your activities (specifically, your Steam page optimization) a little differently now.

For Indies specifically, your three highest-leverage pre-launch activities are now:

1. Optimizing your tags: use specific tags, use tags that accurately describe your game, use all 20 tag slots

2. Building your community: aka, the channel you directly control, independent of the whims of any storefront algorithm

3. Cultivating creator relationships: build the discovery layer that operates entirely outside Steam’s ecosystem

Getting listed on Popular Upcoming used to be an attainable and realistic fourth lever, but following these changes, it no longer is. But not all is lost, because Personal Calendar may well replace it… as long as your tags are good enough for the system to find you.

The Three Wishlist Traps

Surprise! Could you have guessed? There are three wishlist traps I’ve observed indie studios making time and time again. So just like with the other categories, I’ll spell them out here so you can learn from their mistakes:

1. Chasing the number instead of the system. (AKA “Goodhart’s Law claims another casualty.”) Studios often fixate on raw wishlist count and, as a consequence, tend to optimize for the wrong things. They run giveaways that inflate wishlists with low-intent users, and even buy traffic that hits the “add to wishlist” button but never actually converts at launch (or anytime after). They’ll pop champagne for hitting 10,000 wishlists without ever asking whether those 10,000 people are actually their target audience and will ever buy their game. But don’t be fooled — a single wishlist from someone who’ll buy your game at full price on Day One is worth 10 wishlists from people who added it during a giveaway and will wait six months for a 75% discount.

2. Comparing your number to the wrong benchmark(s). People often ask me, “We have 15,000 wishlists! …Is that good?” Well, it depends… on when you launch, what you charge, what genre you’re in, and what your review score ends up looking like. 15,000 wishlists for a $7 roguelite launching next February is in a very different position than 15,000 wishlists for a $25 narrative RPG launching this December. The median conversion rate is not meant to be a verdict; treat it as a starting point for both your own research and your marketing efforts.

3. Treating wishlists as a finish line. Wishlists accumulate. Sales happen once (per customer). A strong wishlist count at launch is the beginning of your revenue story, not the end. The Steam notification that fires when a wishlisted game launches is PC gaming’s highest-converting marketing channel, but it only fires once. After that, your revenue depends on reviews, word of mouth, sales events, and the long tail. Don’t spend all your energy on pre-launch wishlist growth and none on post-launch retention, unless you want to build a spike instead of a curve.

What a Healthy Wishlist Curve Looks Like

If wishlists are an imperfect indicator, what should you actually track? Well, funny you should ask, because I can confidently recommend two metrics to keep a closer eye on than raw wishlist count:

1. Wishlist Velocity. Your daily rate of new wishlists is a far more useful metric than your absolute wishlist number. A game adding 50 wishlists per day at launch minus 6 months, and 200 per day at launch minus 2 months, is accelerating at a healthy clip. But a game adding 200 per day at launch minus 6 months, and 50 per day at launch minus 2 months, is decelerating. If your wishlist velocity is declining, take heed; deceleration before launch is always a warning signal, regardless of how many total wishlists you have.

2. Wishlist Conversions. Your conversion rate itself (assuming you have access to it through prior launches, or Early Access data) will tell you far more about your launch performance than your wishlist count will. A game with 20,000 wishlists and a 0.25x conversion rate will outsell a game with 40,000 wishlists and a 0.08x rate (the math doesn’t lie!). And your conversion rate is largely determined by all the factors we’ve covered over the past seven weeks: how early you started marketing, whether you kept it up, how much your community trusts you, how good your game is, and whether you reached the right audience in the first place.

This is the most useful frame for wishlists I can think of: Wishlists are a thermometer, not a thermostat. They tell you the temperature of your marketing efforts, but they don’t set it. If the number is low, don’t try to fix the thermometer; fix the thing it’s measuring, instead.

And this is even more the case following Steam’s recent changes. Under the old system, you could aim for a specific wishlist count as a marketing milestone in and of itself. But under the new system, the milestone is now completely upstream of wishlists; now, it’s all about whether you’ve tagged, positioned, and presented your game in a way that the algorithm can find the right players for you. But wishlists can still function as a useful barometer for how well you’re doing that, as long as you remember to not Goodhart’s Law your wishlist count.

Recalibrate Your Expectations

You probably don’t need me to tell you how brutal the economics of this industry are. But this is important enough that it’s worth reinforcing, so let’s put the math in concrete terms for a typical indie launch scenario.

A game priced at $20 with 30,000 wishlists at launch, using the price-adjusted median conversion rate of 0.10x, can expect roughly 3,000 first-week sales. After Steam’s 30% cut, that’s about $42,000 in Week One revenue. Year One revenue, including the long tail and sale events, typically runs 3-5x the first-week number… so perhaps $125,000-$210,000 in the first year.

Is that enough? That fully depends on how expensive making the game was. For a solo developer with low burn, that might well be a life-changing windfall. But for a 15-person studio that spent two years in production, it’s highly unlikely to cover costs. So the lesson here is that your wishlist count doesn’t tell you if your game will be profitable; it only tells you, roughly, what your first check might look like.

That’s why the next piece in this series breaks down the Wishlist Revenue Projector in detail. That’s the tool I’ve built into the Scorecard that runs these numbers for your specific situation, with your specific price point and your specific wishlist count. It’s not a crystal ball, and it can’t predict the future, but it can make these assumptions visible so you can plan against them instead of hoping or coping.

Take the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard →

Next Week: We’ll dive into the math behind the Wishlist Revenue Projector! I’ll break down how it works, what it assumes, and what it can and can’t tell you.

Insert coin to continue,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

This is the seventh article in Ready Check, a weekly series of 12 articles on launch readiness for indie and AA games that serves as a companion compendium for my Game Launch Readiness Scorecard. While each individual piece focuses on themes and provides tips that stand on their own, they also build on and reinforce each other, so I recommend reading them in order. To catch up, start here:

New installments of Ready Check will drop each Monday at 7:00 a.m. Pacific Time. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to Spawn Point Marketing so you don’t miss any:

Subscribe now

Oh, and I’m hosting a free webinar with the fine folks at soon! It’s called “Building a Marketing Engine for Your Game (Without a CMO)”, and we’ll go deeper into how to build a scalable, repeatable marketing engine for your game… even if you have to DIY it!

WHEN: Tuesday, June 9, 2026 @ 9am Pacific Time [TOMORROW!]

LENGTH: 60 minutes total (40 min presentation + 20 min Q&A!)

COST: FREEEEE

Snag your spot here:

Click for +1 to Marketing Knowledge!

They say that the fundamentals of marketing never change. And to a certain extent, this is true; marketing is simply the art and science of understanding the person you want to sell your product or service to, and convincing them to buy it. As such, as long as human psychology doesn’t change, neither will the basics of marketing.

But in an era like the one we live in, defined and shaped by massive technological change and all its downstream shifts in behavior and media consumption, this doesn’t entirely hold true. And game marketing provides an instructive case study. Back in the day when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, marketing a game looked a lot like marketing any other product: a mix of print and broadcast ads (including some gloriously cursed ones, brought to you by Nintendo of all companies), press coverage in actual physical magazines that you could hold in your hand, sales promotions (both consumer-focused promotions, and “trade” promotions aimed at wholesalers and retailers), product placement in other media like movies, in-person events, and yes, even direct mail (fellow Millennials, raise your hand if you remember the Star Fox 64 promo VHS that Nintendo Power sent to their subscribers… yes, they actually sent practically every kid in America an actual VHS tape containing a 10-minute ad for Star Fox 64, and you better believe we ate it all up).

What a difference just a few decades make.

Fundamentally, all these channels are still in use. But they look and operate very different in 2026 than they did in 1996. Digital marketing of all stripes is now king; sales promotions now take the form of discount codes and Steam sales, email blasts have taken physical mailers’ place, ads (now digital as well as print and broadcast) are still effective for the AAA publishers who can afford them but are otherwise too expensive and low-ROI for indies, and the press is increasingly irrelevant in the eyes of players, their function now being almost entirely performed by online content creators: YouTubers, Twitch streamers, TikTokers, podcasters, and yes, even bloggers and Substackers.

Oh, and you’d better believe there’s data to back this up! In fact, if you’re an indie developer, there’s one number I want to call your attention to, because it will (or should) completely reshape how you think about marketing your game:

Meanwhile, just 14% discover them through social media, and only 12% through digital storefronts. The press, meanwhile, comes in at a paltry 10%… and for Gen Z, it’s as low as 6%; for Gen Alpha, it’s basically negligible.

That’s from Bain’s 2025 survey of over 5,000 gamers across six countries, which I’ve cited quite a bit in these pages. The takeaway for indie marketers? It’s actually quite simple: in 2026, video games’ primary discovery channel is no longer the storefront where you buy them, the social platform where you post about them, or the media outlet that reviews them, but the creator who plays them on camera.

For indie and AA studios, this is actually the best news, as it represents one of the new gaming market’s most underexploited opportunities. Content creators are the single most powerful discovery channel available to you as an indie developer… and yet, most studios either a) completely ignore them, or b) approach them so badly that they might as well have.

What This Category Measures

Content & PR Readiness is weighted at 15% on the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard, as much as both your Steam Page and Wishlist Momentum. Like the previous two categories, it asks you three questions:

• Is your press kit ready?

• Are you reaching out to content creators?

• Are you participating in showcase events (like Steam Next Fest)?

Together, these three elements form the discovery layer, which is the infrastructure that connects your game to the people who’ll talk about it. There’s a nuance here that I want you to make note of — it doesn’t connect you to the audience directly, but to your game’s amplifiers: the creators, press, and events that turn your game from something that merely exists somewhere deep in the annals of Steam into something people will have actually heard about.

I weighted this one at 15%, because discovery infrastructure is executional in nature. Unlike Timing (which determines your runway) or Community (which compounds the trust that players place in you), what you get out of discovery fully reflects and depends on what you put into it. You reap what you sow, in other words. It doesn’t compound the way community does (these are linear, not exponential, returns), but it is the primary mechanism by which people who’ve never heard of your game encounter it for the very first time. And so it’s very much worth paying attention to.

Why Creators Beat Press, Social, and Storefronts

Let’s return to that stat I opened this article with. If you look at the GDC 2026 State of the Industry survey, you’ll see it further confirms the channel hierarchy laid out in Bain’s report, but from the studio side. According to the GDC survey, the user acquisition channels that studios most use are:

• Social media at 65%

• Streamers and content creators at 39%

• Paid advertising at 31%

• Events at 30%

• Community platforms at 28%, and

• Traditional press and bloggers at 25%

No, those aren’t typos, and no, I didn’t forget how to read or count; I realize that social media is higher than creators on that list. But remember what I said back in Part 3 about looking deeper into the data instead of immediately taking it at face value? Well, this is actually another textbook example of why.

First off, there’s a subtle but meaningful difference between what studios use to find players, and what players use to find games. They’re often similar, but it’s not an exact one-to-one. And even considering that, “social media” at 65% is highly misleading as a standalone channel because most of the social media activity that drives wishlists is actually creator content being shared on social platforms. A TikTok clip of a game going viral is actually an instance of creator-driven discovery that the studio is nonetheless measuring as “social media.” So when you see a stat like this, keep in mind that the two channels significantly overlap.

Anyway, that accounts for social… but what about press and storefronts?

On this front, the data is clearer and far more unequivocal: creators outrank traditional press by a significant margin. That’s not because the press doesn’t matter at all (it does matter… kind of). But it’s increasingly clear that the press matters far less than it used to, because both player trust and media economics have decisively shifted away from it; in 2026, a single well-matched mid-tier YouTuber can generate more wishlist lift than three press features! It’s enormously asymmetrical, and this will only keep widening as the gaming press contracts and creator audiences continue to grow.

As for why creators outperform press and storefront features? It mostly comes down to the former having inspectable incentives. Think about it… when a creator covers your game, their audience can see why: the creator played it, and they either liked it or they didn’t. Audiences can see how the creator reacts and easily reference their track record. Content creators put their reputation (and, by extension, their livelihood) on the line each time they recommend a game, which gives them skin in the game (pun intended) and ends up becoming its own kind of “certificate of authenticity” that greatly inoculates them against player skepticism.

Press outlets, on the other hand, have institutional incentives that are much harder for players to parse, and reviewers also have a habit of alternating between using their masthead as a rhetorical sword or shield when their verdicts aren’t aligned with those of their audience, all of which further erodes trust from players.

Storefront algorithms, meanwhile, are infamously opaque and inscrutable; who really knows why Steam, Apple, or Google surface or bury one game over another?1 And as stores become ever more crowded due to more and more games launching each year, and as all those games compete with each other (along with existing games) for the same slice of finite attention pie, the chance of any particular given game being surfaced decreases accordingly. Obviously. And on top of that, it’s very much an open secret that having the right relationships with the right people at platform holders and storefronts can open algorithmic doors that remain shut for everyone else.2

But unlike press and storefronts, creator relationships are transparent, so players are more inclined to take them at their word. In a gaming scene and digital economy that puts a premium on authenticity, creators’ transparency may well be their strongest currency.

Key Blasts? No, Sir, I Don’t Like It

Studios make a lot of mistakes when reaching out to creators, but by far the most common blunder I see is the key blast: sending unsolicited Steam keys to a list of 500 creators using a templated email, and then waiting to see who bites.

Key blasts fail for three main reasons:

1. Every creator with more than a few thousand followers receives dozens of key blast emails per week (as a creator myself, I can personally attest to this), so yours simply disappears into the pile.

2. Also, a template email signals that you either don’t know or care about the creator’s content… and yes, they can always tell (again, I can confirm personally). If you don’t care about them, why should they care about you?

3. Finally, even if someone does claim the key, there’s no relationship. They might play your game, or they might not… but either way, you have no way to influence the outcome because you haven’t built the foundation for a true conversation.

But there is another way… a better and more effective alternative. It’s called relationship-based outreach, and yes, it can work for you too! Just adhere to the following best practices:

• Work from a smaller list

• Personalize your messages

• Become genuinely familiar with each creator’s content and community before you start pitching

• Adopt a long-term perspective (ie, don’t expect immediate results)

Instead of trying to get 500 people to cover your game once, you want to aim for building relationships with 20-30 creators who’ll cover your game multiple times across its development cycle. Naturally, the earlier you start building these relationships, the better.

Start by identifying creators who cover games in your genre. Forget about the biggest ones (the largest creators are always a moonshot, and will almost certainly want something3 in return for coverage), and instead focus on the ones whose audiences most match yours. A 15k-subscriber YouTuber who exclusively covers survival games is worth far more to your survival game than a 500k-subscriber variety streamer who’ll only play it once and then move on.

Tools like Keymailer, Lurkit, and Terminals.io help with discovery, but a human (and if you’re indie, let’s face it, it’ll probably be you) still has to manually conduct the outreach itself. For at least a few months before you even mention your game, watch and become familiar with their content, and comment as a fan, not as a developer. Then, when you do reach out with a pitch, reference specific videos they’ve made, and explain why your game fits their audience (not how helpful it’d be for them to cover your game… yes, obviously that would help you out, but frankly, they’re not going to care about that nearly as much as how you can help them out). And offer them a demo, not just a key. Your goal is to start a conversation, not to conduct a transaction… so don’t be transactional. Nothing will kill your outreach faster than being transparently transactional.

Oh, and do not wait until launch, or until the game’s “ready,” to start reaching out to creators. Not only will your pitches reek of desperation (and when has desperation ever done anything except push away the very people you’re trying to persuade?), you’ll be forgoing a ton of marketing potential that could’ve happened earlier in your development cycle. Creator audiences can help validate your gameplay loop, jolt your straggling community to life, and catalyze viral moments — all of which are priceless for an indie game in early development. It is never too early to start reaching out to creators.

Do you have a demo? You’re ready to start outreach.

Do you have a teaser trailer? You’re ready to start outreach.

Do you have a prototype? If you’re feeling especially bold, you’re ready to start outreach.

Yes, a creator won’t be able to actually stream your game until they’re able to play it. But they can still cover your trailer! Or your Kickstarter. Or your own content (like a particularly entertaining and engaging devlog). And then, once they’ve covered your game once, it becomes easier to ask them to cover it again. In fact, once you’ve secured coverage for your demo, you should send that creator each new build all the way up to launch. Each new update means more content for them, and more wishlists for you. It’s truly a win-win situation.

And even before you’re ready for them to start any sort of coverage, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from warming up the relationship by engaging with their content as someone who truly enjoys watching their videos. Then, when the time comes to pitch, they’ll be much more receptive because you have an existing relationship; you’re no longer just one of the dozens of random, faceless developers who try to pitch them each week.

Just like with building your community, putting up your Steam page, and marketing your game period, you should start creator outreach way earlier than it feels comfortable.

Steam Next Fest: THE Highest-Leverage Free Event for Your Game

Steam Next Fest runs three times per year, and it’s the single biggest FREE marketing opportunity available to you as an indie developer. Data from the February 2026 edition makes this unequivocal.

Now, keep in mind that’s the median, which means half of all participants earned less than that. But the same goes in the other direction, and once you get to the hits, their results are truly staggering. To boot:

This is an enormous spread, and no it’s not random. So, what did the “winners” do differently than the rest? In a nutshell, they had strong momentum going into the fest! Bottom line, the strongest predictor of your game’s Next Fest performance is the wishlist count you bring to the table before the fest begins. In fact, pre-fest wishlists correlated with fest earnings at r=0.825, which is an unusually strong signal by marketing research standards.

If you want an English translation, what that means in practice is that Next Fest amplifies momentum; it doesn’t create it. So don’t think that Next Fest is going to save you if you’re going in with middling (or, God help you, negative) wishlist velocity; a game entering Next Fest with 5,000 wishlists will earn substantially more during the fest than a game entering with 200! This is because the almighty algorithm reads pre-fest wishlists and recent velocity as quality signals, which it uses to distribute the demo accordingly.

This is partly why I kept hammering on Timing and Community in earlier pieces: your Next Fest performance is a downstream effect of everything you did in the months before. So go ahead and put your page up early, start building your community, pitch to creators, and build an email list and social presence ASAP. Do everything in your power to generate organic wishlists as soon and as much as you can, because Next Fest multiplies the work you’re already doing and have already done.

Oh, and if you’re participating in Next Fest, don’t obsess over your demo too much. I know this sounds counterintuitive, and it goes against a lot of indie game marketing advice I see bandied around the interwebs. But I’m not just pulling it out of a hat! In fact, I bet you (or the folks giving you the aforementioned advice… or simply most studios, period) didn’t know this juicy data piece: 68-88% of Next Fest wishlists come from people who never played the demo. They saw the capsule on the sale page, clicked through, read the description, and hit the wishlist button. The demo unlocks your visibility (after all, you can’t participate in Next Fest without one), but your store page does the actual converting. So if your capsule, tags, screenshots, and descriptions are weak (see Part 6), you will perform weakly during Next Fest regardless of how good your demo is.

(Now do you see why optimizing your Steam page is so important?)

There’s also a major critical constraint that you should keep in mind: you can only participate in one Next Fest per game, and only pre-launch games are eligible (oh, and Steam counts an Early Access launch as a launch; if your game is already in Early Access, then sorry, but Next Fest is off the table). So choose your slot carefully! Most experienced developers pick the last one before launch, when they’re at peak momentum leading into the fest and their Day One wishlist conversion is likely to be tightest.

Correct, Nobody Reads Your Press Kit (But Yes, It Still Matters)

Press kits feel a little archaic in 2026, don’t they? Kind of like an anachronistic relic of a bygone era (c. 1996–2020), when players still trusted and read gaming outlets, games journalists still curried favor from players, and an IGN feature was, in and of itself, a milestone accomplishment that could make or break a launch. Besides, most journalists straight-up won’t download a huge ZIP file and browse your fact sheet; if they decide to review or cover you, they’ll simply Google your game, land on your Steam page, and write from there.

So why does the Scorecard still ask if you have a complete press kit?

Well, it’s because the press kit isn’t really for the press… it’s for creators, event organizers, and anyone else who needs to talk about your game; it allows them to reference it quickly and accurately. A complete press kit allows anyone who wants to feature your game to do so without asking you for details or assets. And this is important because every friction point you remove from that process increases the chance that someone, somewhere, will cover your game.

The press kit also confers an immensely valuable second-order benefit: it forces you to articulate your pitch in a compressed format, which transfers to countless other marketing contexts (such as writing your Steam page’s short description). At the end of the day, if you can’t describe your game in one paragraph, your messaging isn’t ready... and if you don’t have high-res screenshots that show your game’s actual gameplay, then neither is your visual identity. Your press kit, in and of itself, is a readiness diagnostic. It indicates how ready you are to effectively promote your game… in other words, it tells you whether you’re ready to market your game at all.

Ok, so now that I’ve convinced you of this document’s utility, it’s time for you to put one together! A complete press kit will include, at the very least, the following elements:

• A fact sheet

• High-resolution key art

• Screenshots

• Logo files

• Trailer embed

• A one-paragraph description

And sure, you can throw in that press release you stayed up until 3am writing for the announcement. It’s not technically part of the press kit… but why not?

Oh, and platforms like presskit.gg make it trivially easy to set up a press kit. So really, there’s no reason not to have one. If you don’t have a press kit, that doesn’t mean your game won’t get covered, because if the press (or a creator) finds your game compelling enough, they’ll find a way to cover it anyway. But if someone does decide to cover it, they’ll simply use whatever assets they find… and those assets might not represent your game the way you want it to be seen.4 So… hop to it.

As Usual, Three Failure Patterns

Like with most of the other categories, I tend to see three overarching failure patterns relating to content creators, press, and discovery (I’m not quite sure why… maybe the number 3 really is mystical. Anyway, we’re getting a little too meta with patterns here, so let’s move on). Here’s how they manifest:

1. “We’ll do outreach closer to launch.” This one’s by far the most common one I see. And it doesn’t work because creator outreach has a minimum lead time of 4-6 weeks for cold contacts, and 8-12 weeks for building new relationships. If you reach out three weeks before launch, that window has long closed. Not only do you not have a relationship that would incline creators to help you out, but you’re not even giving them enough time to work with you! Most creators wouldn’t be able to schedule coverage within that timeframe even if they wanted to.

2. “We sent 500 keys and got 3 videos.” Also known as, “Tell me you sent out a key blast, without telling me you sent out a key blast.” To be fair, a 0.6% conversion rate isn’t unusual for blast outreach… it’s actually the expected result! But no, it’s not because creators don’t care about your game, or wouldn’t care about your game… the problem is that your outreach didn’t give them a reason to care about your game. Give them a reason to care about your game by building a genuine relationship with them first, and then by personalizing your outreach.

3. “We’re waiting for a press feature to save us.” You might as well buy a lottery ticket and pin all your hopes for funding your next game on winning the jackpot. You’d probably have better odds! Yes, press coverage can generate significant wishlists (though this is far less of a given than it was a decade ago), but it’s also highly unreliable because you can’t control when or whether a publication covers you. You’re essentially rolling the dice if you build your entire discovery strategy around press coverage. No, seriously… just go shoot craps instead (I made the lottery comparison for a reason); yes, in both cases the upside is real, and it’s potentially significant, but the likelihood of you actually winning just isn’t high enough to stake your future on. Press should be just one channel among many in a diversified discovery strategy, never the entire strategy in and of itself.

How to Build Your Game’s Discovery Layer

If you’re an indie marketer, your game’s organic discovery layer becomes even more critical (given that ads and other forms of paid acquisition are either beyond your budget or ineffective for your audience). So with that in mind, here’s a highly practical sequence for building out your game’s discovery layer, timed against a typical launch window:

1. At Launch Minus 6 Months: Build Your Discovery Infrastructure

1. Set up your press kit: fact sheet, key art, screenshots, and a trailer if you have one.

2. Start identifying creators in your genre by building a list of 30-50 creators whose audiences match yours, across a range of sizes (from micro to mid-tier), and start engaging with their content and communities without even mentioning your game.

3. If you haven’t already, register for your Next Fest slot (if your Steam page is live, it literally takes just a couple of minutes).

2. At Launch Minus 3 Months: Begin Active Outreach

1. Send personalized messages to your top 20 creator targets, offering them demo access. Start building the relationships that will produce the coverage you need at launch.

2. If you have a Next Fest slot coming up, coordinate your creator outreach to land one week before the fest opens. This is not so early that you’re completely forgotten about by the time the fest gets underway, but not so late that you’re buried in the pile.

3. At Launch Minus 1 Month: Fire on All Cylinders

By now, your discovery infrastructure should be fully operational. You should have established relationships with creators, distributed your press kit, and your chosen Next Fest (if applicable) should be wrapped up and completed. At this point, outreach shifts from building relationships to activating them:

1. Confirm coverage dates

2. Send final review builds

3. Coordinate embargo lifts

If your launch is three weeks away and none of this exists, you’re not necessarily doomed… but yeah, you’re absolutely playing on Hard Mode because you’re operating without a discovery layer, and your launch will reflect that. The Scorecard will tell you the same thing. The bottom line is, the discovery layer is non-negotiable for indie games, and in 2026, content creators are the discovery layer.

So I’d highly recommend that you delay launch if you can, because I guarantee the work you do to build your discovery infrastructure in the next 90 days will yield far more dividends than any frenzied and panicked outreach you’d cobble together in the next 21.

Take the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard →

Next Week: Wishlist Momentum! We’ll dissect the latest wishlist conversion numbers to discover what they actually predict, and we’ll learn why 50,000 wishlists doesn’t mean what most founders think it means.

GG,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

This is the sixth article in Ready Check, a weekly series of 12 articles on launch readiness for indie and AA games that serves as a companion compendium for my Game Launch Readiness Scorecard. While each individual piece focuses on themes and provides tips that stand on their own, they also build on and reinforce each other, so I recommend reading them in order. To catch up, start here:

New installments of Ready Check will drop each Monday at 7:00 a.m. Pacific Time. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to Spawn Point Marketing so you don’t miss any:

Subscribe now

Oh, and I’m hosting a free webinar with the fine folks at soon! It’s called “Building a Marketing Engine for Your Game (Without a CMO)”, and we’ll go deeper into how to build a scalable, repeatable marketing engine for your game… even if you have to DIY it!

WHEN: Tuesday, June 9, 2026 @ 9am Pacific Time

LENGTH: 60 minutes total (40 min presentation + 20 min Q&A!)

COST: FREEEEE

Snag your spot here:

+1 for Marketing Knowledge

Steam controls 75% of the PC gaming digital distribution market, which in 2025 translated to over $16 billion in revenue. So if you’re launching on PC, the bottom line is literally Steam. You gotta be on Steam, it’s that simple. And if you’re selling on Steam, that means every ad click, creator referral, press mention, and organic browse for your game will ultimately funnel to one place, where players ultimately decide whether to wishlist or purchase your game: your Steam store page.1

Your Steam page is your game’s product listing, it is its face to the world. Now, that in and of itself warrants care and deliberation regarding how you present it. But your Steam page is also more than that; for any game, it’s also a stupidly powerful conversion engine, assuming it’s optimized as such.

And yet, most studios only set it up once, during a sprint the week before they’re ready to announce, only to never meaningfully touch it again. This is a huge wasted opportunity, kind of like building a storefront on the busiest street in the city and never updating the displays (or even washing the windows).

So don’t do this. Instead, treat your Steam page like the sales conversion machine it was always meant to be, and that’s exactly what it will become.

The Marketing Equivalent of Scrubbing Behind Your Ears

In Part 2, I explained why I weighted Steam Page & Store Presence at 15% on the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard, less than Timing or Community but equal to Wishlists and Content/PR. The reason is that your Steam page is a hygiene factor, akin to how personal hygiene works in your dating life: having a great one doesn’t guarantee traction, but having a bad one guarantees you lose the traction you already have.

The dating analogy quite perfectly illustrates this, by the way. Let’s say you spend all your time and effort getting in shape, wearing nice clothes, practicing your social skills, gaining confidence, gaming the Tinder algorithm, iterating your DM game, etc. in order to get a date, and eventually, you finally land one. You pull out all the stops, making reservations at the fanciest restaurant, building up tension and anticipation, and generally being real smooth while texting. But you’ve never showered once in your life (or you’ve only washed once, at the very start of your datemaxxing regimen, only to never step into the shower again).

Tell me, when you show up for your date emitting a foul stench that clings to everyone and everything around you… how do you think that’s going to go for you? As your date bolts out of the restaurant, nose plugged and gag reflex kicking in, stopping only to lob a bottle of perfume at you like a grenade, in a futile effort to mask your noxious funk… would you call that outcome anything close to a success? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to conclude that you ultimately wasted all that effort?

It’s the same thing with marketing your game. Think about every dollar that you spend on ads, every creator who covers your game, every Discord member who tells a friend, and every organic search on Google (or even Steam itself!)… all of that traffic has to go somewhere, right? And that “somewhere,” the place where it all eventually lands, is your Steam page.

So if your page doesn’t convert (because you haven’t optimized it), then you’ve wasted not just the page itself but everything else upstream of it.

But remember, this is a hygiene factor, and the solution displays the same asymmetry as the problem. To return to our dating analogy: adding +1 Shower to your daily routine will make all the difference if you don’t usually shower at all, but it won’t really do much if you’re already showering 2–3 times each day. And it’s the same with your Steam page: if your page is weak, fixing it will net you the highest immediate ROI out of almost anything you can do… but if your page is already strong, further optimizing it only yields rapidly diminishing returns.

If you want to get all sciencey and technical about it, you could sum up Steam page optimization as having high downside when neglected, and moderate upside when polished. The Scorecard’s 15% weight reflects that shape.

What Does the Scorecard Measure?

Speaking of the Scorecard, let’s take a look at the questions for Steam Page & Store Presence. Like last time, this category has three questions:

• Whether your Steam page is live, and for how long

• Whether your tags and capsule art have been optimized

• What trailer and visual assets are on it

The first question (how long your page has been live) directly connects to Marketing Timing, which we went over in Part 3. Having the page up for over six months gives you a long enough window to accumulate wishlists, run a Next Fest demo, get indexed by the Discovery Queue, and start appearing in “More Like This” recommendations. Now, remember that time on Steam isn’t the same as marketing on Steam, and simply having the page up won’t get you anywhere… but the page has to exist before any of that marketing can even happen. That’s what this question covers; the rest of the category (and the rest of the Scorecard, for that matter) capture the actual marketing that either is or isn’t happening.

Speaking of, the second and third questions measure the most important parts, which a lot indie studios (maybe even most indie studios, if I’m being frank) fumble way too often: the conversion layer that either nudges curious would-be players into actually wishlisting and eventually purchasing your game, or doesn’t.

For the most part, unfortunately, it doesn’t. But the good news is, optimizing this conversion layer is comparatively easy and a lighter fix given the degree of impact it can have.

Let’s have a look!

Capsule-maxxing for Noobs

Your capsule image is your game’s single most important visual asset (well, at least for marketing purposes, anyway). It’s more important than your screenshots, and yes, it’s even more important than the trailer! If you only optimize one thing on your Steam page [NOTE: Please don’t only optimize one thing on your Steam page], make it your capsule.

Capsules appear on every player-facing Steam surface. Steam uses them to list your game on the Discovery Queue, in search results, in recommendation carousels, on sale pages, on wishlists, and on players’ friends’ activity feeds. When a player encounters your game for the first time, they’ll almost certainly see the capsule before anything else... and they only give it about one second before deciding whether to click through and learn more, or move on to any of the other dozens of listings competing for their attention.

If you want that player to click through, then your capsule needs to communicate three things in that single, solitary, cursed, and fleeting second:

• The game’s genre

• What the game’s visual identity feels like

• Whether the game is worth clicking

If it fails to accurately and compellingly convey any of those, then the player simply scrolls past and your game never gets a store page visit… which means it never gets a wishlist, which in turn means it never gets a sale. And you don’t get second chances; with very few exceptions, once a player moves on, that player moves on for good.

And indie studios, of all sizes and across all genres, make remarkably consistent mistakes with their capsule art. Here are some of the most common blunders:

• White text over a light sky

• A logo that’s unreadable below 200 pixels wide

• Five characters, a vehicle, a building, and a dragon crammed into a single frame

• Elaborate fantasy scripts that become illegible smudges at thumbnail size

But there’s a simple and deliciously counterintuitive fix to all this, and the gist of it lies in the fact that simpler capsules outperform complex ones. With that in mind, here are some good guidelines to follow when designing your capsule art:

• One focal point

• One mood

• One character or scene element

• Bold, high-contrast typography

• Genre clarity in under one second

Balatro absolutely nailed its capsule art: a Joker card and bold text over a dark field. It’s readable at any size, and it instantly communicates what type of experience you’re signing up for!

Stardew Valley provides another excellent case study, in a completely different genre. Here, you see woodsy and verdant type over blue skies and rolling green hills. You know it’s a cozy farming game before you read a single word.

You’d do well to internalize the following rule of thumb, courtesy of presskit.gg’s capsule guide: design for the smallest size first. This means your logo must be readable at 120x45 pixels. If it isn’t, then nothing else matters, because that’s the size at which most players will first encounter your game.

Oh, and you don’t have to get it perfect the first time, either. Because guess what? You can iterate. That’s right, your capsule isn’t locked once you announce your game! In fact, studios that A/B test capsules (whether by swapping art, adjusting typography, testing different focal points, trying different scenes, or whatnot) consistently report that their capsule art performs better the more they iterate.

Your first capsule will almost never be the best one, so don’t ever let that stop you from uploading what you’ve got now and improving it over time. Treat your capsule art (and your Steam page, writ large) like a landing page instead of a painting.

Tag, You’re It!

Tags are the fuel that powers Steam’s recommendation engine; your tags determine which Discovery Queue placements you get, which “More Like This” panels you appear in, and which genre and category pages surface your game.

Bad tags will not only reduce your visibility with your target audience, they’ll also do you one worse: they’ll put your game in front of the wrong audience. This is bad, folks! It absolutely craters your click-through rates, which tells the algorithm your game isn’t interesting, which in turn further reduces your visibility, and so the flywheel keeps accelerating against you. It’s a nasty downward spiral that’s very hard to escape from.2

Prevention is the best cure here, and it comes down to optimizing your tags. There are really only two rules you need to follow here (which far too many studios don’t):

1. Use all your tags. Steam gives you 20 tag slots, but most studios only use eight to twelve. Every unused slot constitutes a signal you’re not sending to the algorithm, and when you’re competing against 20,000 new releases each year, you need all the boost you can get. So use all 20 tag slots.

2. Be specific. A generic tag is only marginally less of a wasted signal than no tag at all. For instance, “Indie” tells the algorithm precisely nothing, because practically every game uses that tag; you’re not telling players or the algorithm what’s different about your game! But “Precision Platformer,” on the other hand, tells Steam exactly who your audience is and who to show your game to. Similarly, “Action” is noise, but “Souls-like” is a signal. You get the idea. What I want you to take away from this is: the more specific your tags, the tighter Steam matches you to your audience, and this tighter audience match leads to higher click-through rates, which in turn spurs the algorithm to boost you even more. It’s the opposite form of the death spiral; now, instead of burying you, Steam’s flywheel is flinging you up to the stratosphere.

To up your tag game, start by researching your tags. Look at what the top-performing games in your genre use, and copy the ones that most apply to your game. If the top five games in your space all use “Open World Survival Craft” and you use “Survival” and “Crafting” as separate tags, you’re needlessly fragmenting your signal and kneecapping your discoverability. Stop it. By the way, SteamDB shows tag data for any title, so this is trivially quick and easy to do.

How to Write Compelling Descriptions

Your short description consists of roughly 300 characters, and it appears in search results, category pages, and anywhere your game shows up in a condensed format. Every word counts here, and each character must earn its keep; you must be absolutely ruthless in cutting anything that doesn’t actively push players towards purchase.

The best short descriptions all follow a simple formula:

Take Balatro’s description, for instance. It starts about as short and sweet as you can get:

“The poker roguelike.”

Beautiful, simply exquisite… just three words in, and you already know exactly what it is! Then, the rest of the description clinches the deal and moves in for the close:

“a hypnotically satisfying deckbuilder where you play illegal poker hands, discover game-changing jokers, and trigger adrenaline-pumping, outrageous combos.”

Notice how it names the genre, explains the mechanic, and sells the fantasy. Shut up and take my money.

Studios often mess up the long description even more than the short one, which really sucks because the “About This Game” section is where a lot of conversion work happens; if they’re still on the fence after scrolling down from the header capsule, screenshots, short description, and trailer, this is where you can nudge them over the edge! But if you fill it with repeated logo art, decorative banners, or walls of text that don’t actually advance your pitch? Tsk, tsk, tsk... you’ve just lit those players’ attention on fire. And you won’t get it back, by the way.

So when writing your long description, try following these best practices instead:

• Lead with what makes your game different

• Write for players, not publishers

• Show, don’t tell

  • Embedded GIFs that demonstrate gameplay work infinitely better than paragraphs that merely describe it

• Feature lists should be easily scannable

• Every line should either excite, inform, or build trust

  • If it doesn’t do one of those three things, cut it

Trailer, Trailer, On the Wall

Don’t get it twisted, your trailer is important. But it’s far less important than your capsule, your tags, and your short description… simply because fewer people see it. Did you know that most players make wishlist decisions (in either direction) without watching the trailer? The capsule snags that initial click, while the short description and screenshots confirm their interest. The trailer, if it even comes into the equation at all, does so as the closer, not the opener.

That said, when someone does watch your trailer, the first 3–5 seconds determine whether they watch the rest. With trailers, time is quite literally money, so cut to the chase and lead with gameplay. Don’t waste players’ time with a logo sequence, or a publisher sting (please tell me that one’s not in your publisher contract…), or a cinematic that could belong to any game. Immediately show your future players what playing your game actually looks and feels like; you gotta shock, wow, awe, and amaze them with fun and incredible gameplay.

If you don’t have gameplay footage yet, don’t publish a trailer. Players have long learned to distrust cinematics that don’t show the game actually running. A mood teaser is fine for an announcement, but once your Steam page is live and accumulating traffic, a non-gameplay trailer can actually hurt your conversion rates! So just don’t do it; this is one area where “wait until you have something to show” actually does apply.

Oh, and the same logic applies to screenshots. Now, unlike your trailer, screenshots are very important for driving conversions. But players look for similar things in screenshots as trailers: they want to know “what is playing this game actually like?” So just like with the trailer, you want to show screenshots of actual gameplay moments… and yes, you do need to show the full UI. Otherwise, players will suspect you’re showing them polished promo images they’ll never encounter while playing the game. Again, show them the actual gameplay.

Be proud of the game you’re building! You are proud of it, right? Then show it off! If you’re not proud enough of your game to show it off, you’ve got much bigger problems than a weak Steam page.

Don’t “Set It and Forget It”

There’s another common failure pattern I’ve observed, which doesn’t seem like a big deal in the moment but can quickly sneak up on you and cascade into something nastier if you’re not careful.

It (roughly) goes somewhat like this:

A studio puts up a Steam page, and it seems reasonably good; the capsule looks fine, and the tags match the game closely enough. Screenshots look decent, and the description covers the basics. It’s “good enough for government work,” as they say. And then, because the page feels “done,” nobody touches it again for 12 months.

During those 12 months, the studio develops new features, refines the art style, adds cool new mechanics, and even completely shifts the game’s identity. But there’s a problem… absolutely none of that is reflected on the game’s now-outdated Steam page. As a result, the page is now selling a version of the game that no longer exists.

Meanwhile, the algorithm has been serving that stale page to players for a year. Early click-through data has solidified enough for Steam to render its verdict: NOT GOOD, SHOW TO LESS PLAYERS. Since the initial capsule was mediocre, and the description doesn’t reflect the newer, better, more fleshed-out, more refined, and more compelling game that the studio’s building, the page didn’t convert visits into wishlists. As a result, the algorithm has already learned that this game doesn’t convert well, and it’s therefore showing the page to fewer people. But by the time the studio updates the page before launch, the algorithmic damage is done… Steam has already deprioritized the game in queues and recommendations, based on months of weak engagement data.3

The fix? It’s actually deceptively simple: treat your Steam page like a living document. Update it quarterly, at minimum. Refresh the capsule whenever the art evolves, update screenshots when new features ship, and revise the description as soon as your pitch sharpens. Each update gives you a chance to improve the conversion data that the Steam algorithm uses to decide how many people see your game.4

What If You’re Not Launching on Steam?

Not every game launches on Steam, and fortunately, the Scorecard accounts for this! If you select “N/A — not launching on Steam,” the questions then adapt to your primary storefront or platform. But the principles remain the same, regardless of which platform you’re launching on: your primary store presence, wherever it lives, is still the conversion layer that all your other marketing feeds into. So whether it’s the Epic Games Store, a console storefront, itch.io, or even your own website, your store page fulfills the same function regardless of where you’ve set up shop.

That said, I have to be very blunt here, because I care about your success: if you’re an indie or AA studio launching a PC game and you’re not on Steam, you’re playing on Hard Mode. Not launching on Steam means you’re deliberately choosing to ignore 75% of the market. Now, you may have a good strategic reason for doing that! Maybe you signed an Epic exclusivity deal, or you’re in partnership with a platform holder, or perhaps you’re just philosophically committed to open platforms. And all of that is well and good, those are all legitimate reasons to forego Steam. But the choice you’re making carries significant trade-offs… so make sure you’re making it deliberately, and not by default.

The Quick & Easy One-Week Fix

If your Scorecard shows a low Steam Page score, I have some good news for you: this is the fastest category you can improve. Unlike Community (which takes several months) or Timing (which you can’t recover), you can meaningfully upgrade your Steam page within a week!

All you have to do is work through this list, in order of ROI:

1. Audit your capsule at every size (120x45, 462x174, 920x430, 1232x706). If it’s not readable and genre-clear at the smallest size, redesign it.

2. Fill all 20 tag slots with specific, audience-matched tags.

3. Rewrite your short description using the “hook-genre-mechanic” formula.

4. Update your screenshots to show actual current gameplay, with UI visible.

5. Rewrite your long description so that it vividly conveys the actual gameplay experience, in a way that’s compelling to the player who’ll play your game, not the publisher you’re hoping will fund it.

6. Take a good, hard look at your trailer, no matter how much it cost to commission. If it doesn’t lead with gameplay in the first five seconds, either re-edit it or remove it and rely on screenshots until you have proper footage.

(Do you notice a theme, or a pattern? That’s right! Every element on your Steam page should show the player what playing your game will actually feel like. Cinematics won’t do it, and neither will lore dumps. And unless you’re Capcom or FromSoftware, neither will a logo. So what will do it? Anything that either portrays, conveys, or accurately describes your game’s actual, current gameplay.)

Anyway, that’s only a week of work, but it’s worth far more than that in the increased conversions you’ll get at launch. But again, I want you to temper your expectations: Steam page optimization is a hygiene factor, and there’s only so much it can offset if you’re weak in other categories. A polished Steam page won’t fix poor Timing or overcome a lack of Leadership… but it will fix the crucial conversion layer that everything else in your marketing engine depends on.

So go ahead and fix your Steam page… go ahead and fix it now. Oh, and for the love of all that is good and holy, remember to take a damn shower before you go on a date.

Take the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard →

Next Week: The discovery layer. We’ll learn why content creators now outperform storefront features as the primary channel for game discovery, and what that means for your outreach strategy.

Press Start,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

This is the fifth article in Ready Check, a weekly series of 12 articles on launch readiness for indie and AA games that serves as a companion compendium for my Game Launch Readiness Scorecard. While each individual piece focuses on themes and provides tips that stand on their own, they also build on and reinforce each other, so I recommend reading them in order. To catch up, start here:

New installments of Ready Check will drop each Monday at 7:00 a.m. Pacific Time. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to Spawn Point Marketing so you don’t miss any:

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Oh, and I’m hosting a free webinar with the fine folks at soon! It’s called “Building a Marketing Engine for Your Game (Without a CMO)”, and we’ll go deeper into how to build a scalable, repeatable marketing engine for your game… even if you have to DIY it!

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Did you know that 84% of indie and AA revenue go to the top 10% of titles? That’s from OP Game Marketing’s analysis of over 5,000 games released on Steam in 2024. The other 90% of titles split the remaining 16% of revenue.1

I’m not citing this stat to depress you (I’m sure I’ve already done that more than enough in this series), but to really underscore the type of market you’re launching into. You can’t afford to go in without anything but the clearest of eyes.

I also cite it to sharpen a question I’ve asked a lot (and will ask a lot more) in these pages: what do the top 10% do differently?

It’s a good question, and one a lot of indie devs would love to know the answer to. It’s an answer I try to answer a lot in these pages, and in this series specifically. And a big part of the answer is what we’re going to talk about today.

Because the truth is, they do a lot of things differently, and you may not be able to replicate all of it in your situation. Ad spend is likely beyond your budget, and a full-time marketing leader may well be, as well. Perhaps your demo won’t be ready in time for that retro platformer showcase that the creators you’re targeting are covering. Maybe you’ve even foregone Steam and are selling direct through your website. Or, maybe your game is in an unfavored genre and thus the press is unlikely to write a feature or review on it. Not all of the advice I give you will necessarily apply to you.

But there is one thing that the top studios consistently do differently, and it’s available to any studio, regardless of team size or genre. No, it’s not optimizing wishlists… it’s not securing not press coverage, either… nor is it upping their trailer views… really, it’s not any of those other things that most studios obsess over.

So… what is it?

Elementary, my dear Watson: it’s community.

To verify this lofty claim, let’s have a peek at FirstLook’s recent survey of 250+ senior studio leaders in 2026 (yes, the current year; this data’s fresh!), which asked them which pre-launch signals actually predicted how well their game would sell.

And what did they find out? Well, for sleeper hits (meaning: games that did better than expected), Discord community growth was the number one unseen success factor, with 48% of studios citing it. In fact, Discord growth outranked YouTube views, social media engagement, press coverage, and yes, even wishlists in predicting how well a game would sell. And the studios only realized this with the benefit of hindsight.

Now, I should caveat this: Community isn’t the whole answer, because nothing ever is. There are several interconnected and nuanced reasons behind a game’s success or failure. But community is by far the one that studios most fundamentally misunderstand, underinvest in, and start building way too late.

What Community Is, and What It Isn’t

Let’s start by clearing up one common misconception, right off the bat: Community is not a Discord server. A Discord server is infrastructure. But community is what happens inside said infrastructure, assuming it’s healthy. In a thriving community, people will:

• Talk to each other about your game,

• Give feedback you can act on,

• Build social bonds that make leaving feel like FOMO,

• And (most critically) advocate for your game to people who’ve never heard of it.

Let’s also set the record straight on something else: Community is not an “audience.” An “audience” merely watches, whereas a community participates. Your Twitter followers are an “audience,” but your Discord regulars who argue about your combat system at 2am are a community. That’s a huge distinction!2

I’ve found that a useful way to think about the difference is that audiences consume content, while communities generate it. Indeed, a healthy community creates not just any content, but S-Tier content, along with its many accordant benefits:

• Word-of-mouth

• User-generated content

• Bug reports

• Feature suggestions

• Social proof

Note that all of these things cost money (sometimes, a lot of it!) to produce through other channels.

Oh, and there’s another distinction I want to draw: community is a compounding asset. Every week of active community engagement builds trust, and that trust converts into revenue, brand strength, and player goodwill at launch. A Discord you started 18 months ago with 200 members who’ve watched the game evolve, played the demo, reported bugs, and seen their feedback reflected in the build is worth FAR more at launch than a Discord you cobbled together three months ago with 2,000 members who only joined for a giveaway.

And last, but not least…

Community also compounds exponentially, in the same way that compound interest does. Early contributions feel small and almost insignificant, before they start to build momentum… suddenly, before you know it, all that accumulated trust reaches critical mass and becomes self-sustaining. If you’ve been really diligent, it’ll even take you To The Moon! A Discord’s first month feels empty and awkward, and the fifth month still feels slow... but the tenth month (if you’ve been consistently nurturing it) starts to feel truly alive, because your community has become a thriving and dynamic space where people show up because they want to, not because you asked them to.

That’s when this asset starts truly paying dividends.

Why Studios Start Too Late

Community is one of those things that indie studios know is important; by this point, “start a Discord server” is right up there with “post more on social media” as near-universally given marketing advice. So why do so many start building their communities too late? I’ve noticed three overarching patterns:

1. “We don’t have anything to show yet.” This is the most common reason, and also the most flat-out wrong. You don’t need a playable build to start a community! All you need is a one-sentence pitch and a place for interested people to gather (whether it’s a subreddit, a Discord server, a Patreon, or even a Substack!). Some of the strongest pre-launch communities I’ve seen started with nothing more than a mood board, a design philosophy post, and a Discord channel called #dev-diary. People don’t need to be able to play your game; as long as you can describe it, even just aspirationally, you can get started.

2. “We’ll build community during the marketing push.” This treats community as a campaign tactic — in other words, as something that you spin up, run for eight weeks, and measure by conversion rate. But that’s not how trust works, and you can’t compress 18 months of building relationships into a one-month launch sprint. If you try, you’ll only end up with a Discord full of strangers who showed up for a giveaway, didn’t connect with each other, and will churn after launch week.

3. “We don’t have time.” This one is real, and I respect it far more than the other two. After all, community management is a highly time-intensive job. Showing up in your Discord every day, responding to feedback, posting updates, and moderating conversations takes many hours per week (which also compete with development, to boot). But studios that neglect community are making an invisible trade-off; remember, the time you spend on community in pre-production compounds. The time you spend on a launch-week marketing blitz, however, doesn’t. One is an investment, while the other is an expense… and on launch day, you’ve learned the expense didn’t get you over the finish line.

What the Scorecard Measures

Back to the Scorecard, again! Community is the second-heaviest category on the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard, at 20%, and it consists of three questions:

• Whether you have a Discord (or equivalent community platform) and how large it is

• Whether you have an email list, and how large it is

• How many social media platforms you’re actively maintaining

These are deliberately blunt questions, because they measure infrastructure instead of quality. You can’t capture community quality in a self-assessment, a limitation I acknowledged in Part 2. But you still need the infrastructure, which makes it a workable proxy (you obviously can’t have a great community without a place for it to exist).

The category’s weight reflects the compounding principle we just covered. Just like Timing is 25% because runway determines everything downstream, Community is 20% because it’s the most impactful way you can use that runway. If you have 18 months of runway (Good Timing) and spend it building community, you’ll be in the strongest possible position come launch. But if you have 18 months of runway and don’t build community, you’ve all but wasted the most valuable asset in your marketing portfolio.

I included the email question because out of all the marketing channels your engine leverages, email is the only one you own outright. At any time, and for reasons unknown to you or me or anyone else, Discord can implode, Twitter can change its algorithm, or a major government can ban TikTok. But your email list is yours, forever and always. It’s also, believe it or not, the highest-converting channel for launch-day sales! A well-maintained email list of people who opted in because they’re interested in your game will outperform every paid channel on Day One.

Finally, social media rounds this category off. The importance of social media, I reckon, is fairly self-explanatory at this point so I won’t dwell on it too much… but I will say that, while the social media platforms to primarily focus on will differ for each game, the lion’s share of social media indie game discovery in 2026 happens via short-form video (TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels).

The Trust Reserve Model

Here’s a useful framework for conceptualizing community: think of your community as a trust reserve. It’s a (metaphorical) bank account where deposits are made slowly, and withdrawals happen fast.

Every honest devlog is a deposit, and so is every demo that works. Whenever you respond to a bug report with “fixed in the next build,” and then actually fix it? Deposit. And a community member's suggestion that later shows up in the game? You guessed it: another deposit!

Conversely, launch day is a massive withdrawal. The instant your game goes live, you’re asking people to spend their hard-earned money based on the trust you’ve built. If your reserve is full, the withdrawal goes through: people will buy your game, leave positive reviews, tell their friends, and even stream it!

But if your reserve is empty — if you haven’t made deposits, because you started too late or didn’t show up consistently — the withdrawal bounces. People don’t buy at full price; they wait for a sale, or wait for reviews, or wait to see if the game is even real. That hesitation is what an underfunded trust reserve will cost you, and its denomination is lost revenue.

Oh, and the trust reserve doesn’t disappear at launch; the account is open for as long as your game is available for purchase.

This means that post-launch patches are also deposits. Pearl Abyss masterfully demonstrated this concept with Crimson Desert; its trust reserves were all but depleted following its rocky initial launch, but far from letting this discourage them, they quickly and visibly patched the game multiple times in its first month. This quickly refilled the studio’s trust reserves because the community saw and appreciated their responsiveness.

If you similarly top off your trust reserves after launch, any future asks you make (whether in the form of DLC, sequels, or recommendations to friends) will also clear, because you’ll draw from a full reserve that you’re actively maintaining.

Three Community Models That Work for Small Studios

Good news, everyone… you don’t need a dedicated community manager to build community (though it helps)! That said, you do need to be consistent, and be willing to show up. I’ve seen three models that work at the indie and AA scale:

1. The dev-diary Discord: This one’s the simplest to execute, consisting of one channel for development updates, one for general discussion, and one for feedback. The founder or lead developer consistently posts, at a cadence of 2-3 times per week; what you post is less important than the fact that you post at all (it can be screenshots, design decisions, progress updates, or honest setbacks… be creative!). Members accumulate slowly, but you eventually end up with an S-Tier community because people who join a quiet Discord for a game that doesn’t exist yet are a self-selecting bunch; they’re actually interested in and excited for your game.

2. The playtest pipeline: This community is organized around access. Early members get alpha builds, they report bugs, and they give feedback. As a result, they feel ownership, and when the game launches, these people aren’t just customers… they’re evangelists. They’ve been part of the process from the very beginning, and they have the stories to prove it: “yea, i reported the bug where the horse walked through walls and they fixed it the next week!” You simply can’t manufacture that kind of social proof!

3. The adjacent-interest community: Instead of building a community around your game (which doesn’t exist yet), you can build one around the thing your game is about. If you’re making a nautical survival game, build a Discord for people who love ocean exploration games. Making a narrative RPG based on Czech folklore? Build a community for Czech folklore enthusiasts! You get the idea: attract the audience first, then introduce the game to all these people who are already primed to care about it. This is harder to execute, but it produces the most durable communities because the community has a reason to exist beyond your specific title.

Some Awkward Math

I won’t sugarcoat the economics here: community-building is the most time-intensive and least immediately measurable marketing activity, which means it’s often the one that studios most deprioritize. It doesn’t produce a dashboard metric that goes up and to the right, which tends to make KPI-focused leaders very uncomfortable. It generates real ROI, but it’s often hard to attribute, and it’s on a time delay… often by 12 months or more.

Most studios that skip it do so because of that delay. Founders are constantly optimizing for the next milestone: the next build, the next funding round, the next event... but community, being ambient and ongoing, doesn’t fit neatly into a milestone framework. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t feel like work until you realize, three months before launch, that you don’t have it and can’t build it in time.

Those Top 10% studios (remember: the ones capturing 84% of revenue) almost all had community infrastructure in place long before launch. Not all of them had massive Discords; some had tight but highly engaged Patreons of a few hundred people. But they had something, and they’d built that something over months or even years (not weeks).

If your Scorecard shows a low Community score, don’t despair; it doesn’t necessarily mean your launch is doomed. But it does mean that starting to build your community is the highest-leverage activity you can do right now. Start today, not after your next milestone (whether it’s the trailer, the vertical slice, or Next Fest). TODAY. Because remember: community compounds, and you don’t get back the weeks and months of compounding that you skip.

Take the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard →

Next Week: Your Steam page is your most-visited marketing asset, yet most studios optimize it once and never touch it again. We’ll learn how to show your Steam page some actual love.

Insert coin to continue,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

This is the fourth article in Ready Check, a weekly series of 12 articles on launch readiness for indie and AA games that serves as a companion compendium for my Game Launch Readiness Scorecard. While each individual piece focuses on themes and provides tips that stand on their own, they also build on and reinforce each other, so I recommend reading them in order. To catch up, start here:

New installments of Ready Check will drop each Monday at 7:00 a.m. Pacific Time. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to Spawn Point Marketing so you don’t miss any:

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Oh, and I’m hosting a free webinar with the fine folks at soon! It’s called “Building a Marketing Engine for Your Game (Without a CMO)”, and we’ll go deeper into how to build a scalable, repeatable marketing engine for your game… even if you have to DIY it!

WHEN: Tuesday, June 9, 2026 @ 9am Pacific Time

LENGTH: 60 minutes total (40 min presentation + 20 min Q&A!)

COST: FREEEEE

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Whenever a studio founder books a discovery call with me, I always ask them the following question:

“Who owns marketing at your studio?”

Notice how I phrased that; I don’t ask them who does marketing, but who owns it. In other words:

• Whose calendar is built around ensuring the game’s successful launch?

• Who wakes up thinking about your game’s market position?

• Who decides which channels to invest in and which to cut?

• Who’s responsible for the studio’s marketing efforts?

• Who’s accountable when the launch underperforms?

Most often, the founder won’t answer with a name… but with a pause, followed by some version of “Well, we all kind of pitch in!”

…which points to the problem we’ll dissect in this piece.

“Everyone Pitches In” Doesn’t Work

The whole “everyone does a little marketing” model feels intuitively democratic, as well as accurate; even marketers, across every conceivable industry, often repeat some version of “everyone in this organization is a marketer!” (usually as part of an exasperated appeal for the rest of the team to help them fill out the social media calendar). It also feels efficient — you don’t need to go through the hassle of hiring someone new, and it’s one less line on the budget, both of which bootstrapped indie studios find highly compelling (for highly obvious reasons). And most of all, it feels like marketing is happening, because marketing-related activities are happening. Someone posts, someone replies to comments, someone uploads a screenshot… it feels like things are moving.

But activity isn’t the same as strategy. As such, this model invariably fails in three highly predictable and specific ways:

1. No one owns outcomes. When everyone does a little marketing, no one is accountable for whether that marketing actually works. The founder checks wishlist numbers once a week, and either feels good or feels bad. But outcomes aren’t attributed to specific channels, there’s no beat calendar, and the team has no way to track conversions. No one is asking “what’s working, what’s not, and what should we do differently?” because no one’s job is to ask those questions.

2. Marketing always loses to production. When a marketing task and a production task compete for the same person’s time, production always wins. And I get it, that’s an entirely rational decision; after all, the game needs to ship, or nothing else matters. But this also means marketing only gets attention when there’s a gap in production, and those gaps shrink the closer you get to launch. During exactly the weeks when marketing matters most, the team almost always has the least capacity for it.

3. Strategic decisions never get made. A studio can easily distribute tactical work; after all, anyone can post a screenshot. But strategic decisions (like defining your audience, choosing your channels, defining your messaging, setting a launch date, picking a price, and choosing which creators to pitch) are hugely consequential and nuanced; you simply can’t distribute them amongst a team. You need one person with the authority to make those decisions and the context to make them well. When no one owns strategy, strategy doesn’t happen. What happens instead is a series of improvised tactics that feel like marketing, but ultimately don’t compound into anything and often cancel each other out.

The Accidental CMO

Oh, and the second most frequent answer I get from founders is “I do all our marketing,” which presents its own set of issues (though they’re closely related, and the ultimate result is the same).

The 2026 GDC State of the Industry survey found that most game professionals work in design, programming, or art roles. That tracks; after all, people start studios to make games, not to market them. As a budding studio founder levels up her skill tree (whether it’s in art, programming, or game design) throughout her career, she almost never has to concern herself with even the most basic tenets of marketing. From her vantage point, marketing is just something that happens to games, an inscrutable black box that magically manifests players out of thin air, or the domain of the dark elf marketing wizards the publisher dispatches.

So when our budding studio founder finally takes the plunge and becomes an actual studio founder — perhaps spurred into action after being laid off, finally squirreling away enough capital to try and realize her creative vision without corporate meddling, or (finally) successfully pitching a publisher or investor — she’s (unbeknownst to her) setting herself up for an entirely predictable failure mode.

It roughly plays out like this:

The studio launches, and as is usually the case, our intrepid founder handles everything from game design and hiring to funding and operations. At some point (usually too late, again unbeknownst to the founder), marketing becomes urgent. It’s three months to launch… but wishlists have flatlined, the Discord has become a ghost town, and no streamers are playing the demo (or even answering her emails). The game is barreling full speed towards a Day One bloodbath, but the team has no budget for a marketing hire, no network to find one, and no time to onboard someone even if they could. So our overwhelmed founder becomes the CMO by default.

She irregularly posts on social media, in between code reviews. She writes press releases on the weekends and cuts trailers well after midnight. She manages the Discord when she should be managing the sprint. And the worst part is, she may not even be that bad at any of these things; but she’s doing all of them, and thus doing them badly, on top of everything else.

Behold: The Accidental CMO, the single most common marketing leadership model in indie studios.

Mind Math the Gap

I’m not exaggerating, by the way. Consider that the same GDC 2026 survey also found that 35% of developers are self-funded, which means no publisher, no investors, and no external marketing support. They really are building the game, running the business, and doing all the marketing themselves.

But even studios with publisher deals aren’t immune. Publishers provide marketing support, but the quality and quantity of that support varies wildly. Some publishers run full campaigns, while others just slap a logo on the store page and squeeze a short blurb into a bundle email. So the studio’s marketing leadership problem doesn’t always disappear when a publisher's name is on the contract.

You might be wondering why more indies don’t just hire a marketing lead. Well, that’s because the brutal math of game dev economics creates its own trap: marketing leadership is expensive. A full-time marketing director costs $100,000-$160,000 per year, while a VP of Marketing will set you back at least $120,000-$180,000. For a studio generating just $2-5M in annual gross revenue, that’s a huge chunk of its total budget — and worse still, it’s a fixed cost that doesn’t flex with project cycles. You need marketing leadership most during pre-launch and launch, and you need it least during early production… but a full-time hire costs the same each month, regardless of how much value they’re providing at the time.

So the founder stays in the seat. Not necessarily because they want to, but because they literally can’t afford not to.

What the Scorecard Measures (and What It Can’t)

Let’s pivot to a slightly cheerier topic: the Scorecard! Marketing Leadership is the lightest category on the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard, weighted at 10%, and it consists of just one question:

• Who is primarily responsible for marketing at your studio?

This question is scored straightforwardly: a dedicated senior marketing leader (whether a full-time or fractional hire) scores highest, while studios with no marketing leadership score lowest. In between are studios with a founder-who-also-does-everything, studios with a team member who handles marketing as part of a broader role, and studios with more junior marketing support (like a community manager or marketing coordinator).

I covered my full weighting rationale in Part 2… but it’s been a few weeks, reinforcement never hurts, and in any case it’s well worth restating here: Leadership is weighted at 10% because it’s a prerequisite, not a standalone contributor. Without marketing leadership, the other five categories either don’t get executed well or don’t get executed at all. But leadership alone doesn’t produce wishlists, build communities, or increase store presence. The weight, therefore, rewards having someone in the seat without letting it substitute for all the work said person in the seat is supposed to do.

Nevertheless, this isn’t a perfect assessment, and the Scorecard can’t measure something I nevertheless see in every conversation: the emotional cost of an Accidental CMO bearing the burden of marketing accountability. It manifests in different ways, but they all point to the same fundamental issue. Some common incarnations include:

• The founder who feels guilty for spending time on marketing instead of the game.

• The developer who knows the Discord is dying, but doesn’t have the energy to revive it.

• The studio lead who watches competitors with better marketing eat their lunch and doesn’t know how to close the gap.

Those are all very real frustrations that can do a real number on both individual and team morale. And they’re all structural in nature — they spring from a system that puts all the marketing accountability on the person least equipped and least available to carry it.

The Three Models that Actually Work

If the Accidental CMO model is broken, what should replace it? I see three viable options for indie studios, ranked here by budget in ascending order:

1. Publisher with Real Marketing Support [Least Expensive]. Not every publisher delivers this, but the ones that do — among them Devolver, Raw Fury, and Annapurna (while it lasts) — provide the critical strategic layer that most indie studios lack on their own. But there’s no such thing as a free launch lunch, and the price of admission involves giving up a chunk of your revenue and often relinquishing some degree of creative control. Some studios will tolerate these trade-offs better than others; for those who find them unacceptable and therefore opt to self-publish, this option is fully off the table.

2. Fractional CMO [Middle-of-the-Road]. “A fraction-what-now? I haven’t done fractions since middle school!” Ok, let me explain: a fractional CMO is a senior marketing strategist who works with your studio on a part-time retainer basis, typically 10-20 hours per month for about 3–6 months. You get strategic leadership, a beat calendar, channel strategy, and someone who fully owns outcomes. You don’t get a full-time employee, which means you also don’t get the overhead that comes with one. The engagement can also flex with your project cycle: heavier in pre-launch, lighter in early production. This model works best for hybrid or self-publishing studios in the $2-20M revenue range that need CMO-level thinking, but can’t justify CMO-level compensation.

3. Dedicated marketing hire [Most Expensive]. At sufficient scale (usually $10M+ in revenue or 50+ employees), a full-time marketing director or VP starts to make sense. Note that in this context, “marketing hire” doesn’t mean a junior community manager; they should have strategic authority, a decent budget to work with, and a seat at the leadership table. If you hire a junior marketer to execute tactics without anyone providing a strategy, you’re back to executing the Accidental CMO model… only now you’re paying far more money for the privilege.

You might have noticed what I left off this list: marketing agencies. Or more specifically, agencies alone. This is because an agency without a strategic layer (meaning, without someone at the studio who owns the marketing vision and can direct the agency’s work) is a Pokémon without a trainer. Agencies execute; they don’t set direction. Without someone in the leadership seat, agency spend tends to produce generic and ineffective outputs: they’ll send templated press releases to their entire media list, post trite and undifferentiated social content, and blast out a bunch of keys to random creators without generating any coverage.

Oh, and if an agency offers to do the strategy and the execution? RUN. FLEE. SPRINT. Run as fast and as far as you can in the other direction. This is a huge red flag. I don’t want to get off topic here, so I’ll detail more in a footnote in case you want to read my honest and unfiltered take on this; if not, just take my word for it and save yourself the hassle and the expense.1

Your launch numbers will thank you later.

What Self-Assessment Problem?

Anyway, back to the Scorecard. Besides weight, there’s another big reason Marketing Leadership is only one question on the Scorecard: because this is a self-assessment, and self-assessments come with inherent… challenges that you must mitigate when designing the test.

Specifically, studios routinely overrate their marketing leadership. The founder who handles marketing during the gaps between production sprints really believes he’s doing it well. He’s working hard, and hey, at least he’s thinking about marketing. Oh, and he clearly cares deeply about his game’s success, how dare you suggest otherwise?

Please know I’m not calling any of that into question.

But hard work and caring aren’t the same as strategic ownership. And speaking of caring, the market doesn’t care whether you’re doing marketing activities; it’ll ultimately test you on whether someone is accountable for your marketing system — the architecture that connects the audience you defined to the channels you’ve chosen to the beat calendar you developed to the tactics you executed.

Is someone on your team responsible for building and maintaining that entire system, and accountable for its results? If the answer is “no,” you don’t have marketing leadership. You might have marketing activity, sure… but activity without architecture, again, is a wild Pokémon about to get its butt wiped by the Elite Four. And if you don’t believe me, just ask whichever studios land in the bottom half of launch outcomes this year.

Well, This Is Awkward…

I’ll be upfront with you here, because I’m sure you’ve picked up on something… and even if you haven’t, I owe it to you to be direct and transparent about it: I’m a fractional CMO. This piece describes, in vivid and gruesome detail, a problem that my services just so happen to solve. And I’d be lying if I told you I wouldn’t be thrilled if you hired me for it.

But the honest truth is that I’d tell you all of this even if I never wanted your business. The nature of the services I offer doesn’t make anything I said less true: the marketing leadership problem really is the root cause of most of the other problems this series covers. Low wishlists are usually a result of no one owning the wishlist growth strategy. A dead community? Likely a symptom that no one owns community as a marketing function. And a weak Steam page, more often than not, means that no one on the team has the authority and expertise to fix it.

You don’t necessarily need me, specifically.2 But you do need someone… whether you sign a publisher, hire a fractional CMO (again, even if it’s not me), or bring on a full-time hire. Hell, go build a time machine find a co-founder who’s fluent in marketing and will own that as their domain. It doesn’t really matter who that specific person is (and the best person will be different for each studio). What matters, far more, is the principle: someone at your studio needs to wake up every morning and go to bed each night thinking about how to get people to know and care about your game before it ships.

If that person doesn’t exist, the Scorecard will tell you… and so will your launch numbers.

Take the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard →

Book a Speedrun Strategy Session →

Next Week: Community as a pre-launch investment, not a launch cost. You’ll find out why the studios that land in the top revenue tier almost always had a functioning community before launch, and why starting one three months before ship is too late.

GG,

~Jay

Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com

The discourse around Mixtape has been nothing short of exhausting, and I’m going to do my best not to add to it. YouTube has already beaten the culture war angle into the ground. Furthermore, the whole “is it even a game” debate is decades older than Mixtape (and won’t be resolved by Mixtape). And don’t even get me started on the conspiracy theories about who funded what and who got paid by whom. Give me a break.

But there’s a marketing story here that’s actually fairly interesting and somewhat instructive, which I feel is very much worth pulling apart. I don’t think Mixtape is a referendum on the medium, but I do believe what happened around it is going to keep happening, and if you’re an indie dev in particular you need to think very carefully about what to learn from it (and more importantly, what not to copy).

I’ve Got 10/10 Problems

Mixtape absolutely dazzled the critics, earning it a veritable tsunami of 10/10 scores from almost every prestige gaming outlet. It was the type of inescapable, unanimous critical praise that leads to the marketing team popping champagne in the break room.

But a critical sweep can backfire.

When I see a wave of perfect scores roll in for any game, my first instinct isn’t “Wow, this must be an incredible game!” Maybe 10 years ago, sure. But now, in the year 2026? I’m more apt to think “Huh… this is unusual.”

That’s because perfect scores from major outlets are vanishingly rare. For instance, consider IGN, the outlet that’s memed itself into a 7-out-of-10 stereotype (yes, we’re going to pick on them again today!). It was one of those outlets that gave Mixtape a 10/10.

Meanwhile (and let’s make this a clean comparison), they gave What Remains of Edith Finch an 8.8 back in 2017… and Edith Finch is a far more refined work by almost any narratival or gameplay measure. It had much better dialogue, for one, and its vignette structure was far more inventive. The game also feels like it actually earns its emotional payoff without industrial-grade nostalgia crack or a stellar soundtrack doing all the lifting.

Keep in mind this game is from the same publisher (Annapurna Interactive), is in the same broad genre, and has the same approximate runtime as Mixtape. They share a ton of ludic and thematic DNA. So it does make you wonder… why this one, but not that one?

Now, that’s not to say Mixtape is a bad game. It really isn’t! It won’t appeal to everyone (though that statement’s redundant on its face, as no game will ever appeal to everyone), but overall it’s a mostly enjoyable experience that doesn’t wear out its welcome.

Mixtape: The Good, the Bad, and the Theatre Kid
[A Spawn Point Marketing Mini-Review]

Yes, I played Mixtape. Yes, I finished the game (it only takes, like three hours). And yes, I have… ahem… MIXED feelings about it. Here’s a quick rundown of what I liked and didn’t (”loved” and “hated” are too strong; I just didn’t feel that strongly about it either way).

I really enjoyed the art style and found the choppy stop motion-esque animation charming. True to its genre, the presentation is pleasingly cinematic. And true to its name, Mixtape’s soundtrack is phenomenal, easily the highlight of the game. Thematically, it nails the mood of a late 20th-Century coming-of-age movie, and gets a lot of the 90s details right, down to manually rewinding a cassette tape. The Blockbuster video rental store sequence also had me chuckling the whole way through.

The story was… eh, it was ok? Decent and serviceable for a game. But on its own merits, the narrative was decidedly mediocre: it leaned too hard on played-out adolescent movie tropes, tried way too hard to be angsty and cool in that disaffected art-kid way, and was utterly drenched in a particular flavor of sheltered, Millennial-coded solipsism that I find increasingly insufferable as I age (oh geez… I suppose I’m a Boomer now). I do wonder if reviewers would’ve been this generous had Mixtape been a movie or prestige TV miniseries. That said, it had its moments, rarely got boring, was paced well, wrapped at the right time, and successfully evoked the feels more than once.

The characters were a similar mixed bag. They nailed the sheltered, angsty alt-kid archetypes the writers were clearly going for, and on a human level I could sympathize with their quaint interpersonal and familial struggles (which, I’ll grant, take on a far more existential quality in the throes of puberty). The trio’s friendship felt truly genuine, and it did a lot to sell them as protagonists.

But individually, they really grated on me, and if the game had lasted any longer I’m not sure I’d be describing them this generously. I can’t tell whether the cringe MFA-workshop dialogue or their overall pretentious and indulgent affect did more to sour me… much in the same vein as I absolutely cannot stand Holden Caulfield. These kids aren’t quite that insufferable and can even be likable at times, but they’re absolutely on the same spectrum.

The gameplay sequences, namely the baseball minigame and skateboarding bits (let’s just pretend that horrible kissing minigame didn’t happen), were enjoyable if not particularly challenging. Which, to be fair, is standard operating procedure for this genre. Walking sims center narrative above all. You don’t play these to get on the leaderboards; you buy into the genre for an experience closer to reading a book or watching a movie than “playing a game” as gamers traditionally understand it. If you saw Mixtape’s capsule art, read the Steam description, plunked down $20, and expected something else… then frankly, I don’t know what to tell you.

TL;DR: Overall, this was a competent linear visual-novel-esque walking sim telling a somewhat passable if lowkey cringe slice-of-life vignette about three sometimes-likeable, often-irritating angsty sheltered kids coming of age. It’s flawed: shallow gameplay, barely-likable characters, MFA dialogue galore, and that one awful kissing minigame I swore I wouldn’t mention and I’m so sorry for reminding you of it again. But it also gets a lot right: visually pleasing, well-paced, killer soundtrack, the nostalgia bait actually works, the story is genuinely evocative in places, and it’s an engaging experience for the most part (even if, as I suspect, it’s mostly the soundtrack, nostalgia, and visuals doing most of the lift here).

So, there you have it. I personally wouldn’t replay it, and I probably would’ve stuck to Crimson Desert if the discourse hadn’t compelled me to try it and form a real take on it… but if you’re into this genre and have a tolerance for ouroboric adolescent solipsism, it’s nice to unwind with for a few hours while jamming out to its surely-expensively-licensed OST. It’s enjoyable for what it is, and there are certainly worse games you could spend an afternoon with.

I wouldn’t have scored it a 10/10, though. Think about what that score means: as close to perfect as a game can be, a game that has earned a spot amongst the pantheon of greats. For comparison, here are some other games that IGN has bestowed with that honor:

• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Skyward Sword, Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom

• Pokémon Red and Blue

• Metal Gear Solid 4 and 5

• Grand Theft Auto IV and V

• Super Mario Galaxy 2

• Uncharted 3

• The Last of Us (1 and 2)

• The Witness

• Undertale

• Super Mario Odyssey

• Celeste

• God of War (and God of War: Ragnarok)

• Red Dead Redemption 2

• Persona 5 Royal

• Overwatch

• Crusader Kings 3

• Disco Elysium

• Pentiment

• Metroid Prime Remastered

• Resident Evil 4

• Baldur’s Gate 3

• Stardew Valley

• Elden Ring

I’m sorry… but Mixtape is just not in the same league as those games. And before you say this is because I’m somehow biased against walking sims, I offer you Edith Finch once more as a counterpoint, which I would’ve absolutely scored a 10/10.

In any case, back to the topic at hand: Mixtape got a 10/10 from IGN… and from several other outlets as well. Meanwhile, its aggregate landed at 85 (lower than Edith Finch’s 89), which means there were also plenty of 7s and 8s in the mix. But the 10s are what got amplified to the corners of the earth… and that gap between the loudest, most glowing reviews and the middle of the pack is what spawns the type of discourse we’ve been seeing.