Okay, not literally staying inside. Every year Chris Zukowski puts on an online conference called Staying Inside about marketing indie games.

I technically watched some of the recordings while outside because the weather’s been great in Portland, but What I Learned From Watching Staying Inside While Occasionally Technically Outside Because The Weather’s Been Great in Portland was too long of a title.

I’m not going to write up a transcript of the entire conference, but I took notes on bits that were relevant to me and figured they were worth sharing.

To kick things off, multiple speakers touched on a big shift in indie game funding that may be of interest even if you aren’t looking for funding.

Table of Contents

Vertical Slices are Dead, Long Live the Demo?

In the past, it was common for developers to self fund the development of a vertical slice, and then send it to publishers in the hopes of securing funding to develop the full game.

Developers have been having trouble with this approach recently. It turns out that publishers have realized it’s much easier to predict the success of a game by waiting until it’s already successful.

Instead of funding vertical slices, many publishers are opting to fund games that already have public demos with traction on Steam. Building a player facing demo is a lot more work than building a vertical slice, so this dramatically shifts risk from the publisher to the studio.

If you’re on the developer side of this relationship, you should be asking for a better deal since the publisher is taking on less risk. I’m in the fortunate position of being able to self fund my studio, but this shift is still of interest to me–if I’m my own publisher, I own all of the risk so I better be able to evaluate it accurately!

I’ve adopted a variant of stage gate for my next title, I might write more about my variant in a separate post.

Details aside, my current roadmap treats the vertical slice as the most important gate. If experienced publishers don’t feel confident in their ability to evaluate a game from a vertical slice, maybe I shouldn’t either.

I’m considering reworking the roadmap so that the public demo is the main gate, and releasing the demo as early in development as is reasonably possible in an effort to de-risk.

Valve Also Likes Demos

Alright, publishers like demos because they reduce publisher risk.

Valve has a vested interest in games selling¹, because they get 30% gross revenue. What do they think about demos?

Steam didn’t originally have support for demos. People would purchase a second app ID and use it as a free “prologue” game as a work around, until a few years ago when Valve added official support.

In 2024, Valve improved this demo support in a number of ways. Most notably…

• You can create a separate Steam page for your demo
• You can enable reviews on your demo
• You can notify wishlisters about your demo
• Demos are eligible to show up in charts like new and trending

We don’t know what exactly qualifies a demo to show up in lists like new and trending. Chris hypothesized it could be tied to concurrent players which seems likely, I’m sure he’ll collect some data on this soon.

Regardless of the selection mechanism, this is yet another reason to prioritize your demo. Obviously YMMV based on game/genre/etc, but Valve wouldn’t be investing resources in these features if they didn’t think they were a good idea, and Valve has more data on what sells than nearly anyone.

The meta here is probably to treat your demo launch like a launch.

Run a private beta, get the polish in, then release it with a dedicated page & reviews enabled and push the notify wishlisters button shortly before a festival. If things go well, maybe you’ll get into new and trending and also get better festival placement.

Speaking of demo driven marketing…

Balatro’s Success Can Largely be Attributed To Its Demo

Okay, if we’re being realistic, Balatro’s success can largely be attributed to the fact that it’s a really good game with market fit.

That being said, unless you want to depend on luck, even a really good game needs to bring in enough converting external traffic to convince Steam that its worth the screen real estate to promote it.

It’s not often that I’m impressed with indie publishers, but I’m impressed with Playstack. Two different folks from Playstack spoke at Inside, and both clearly have deep understanding of the genres they’ve worked with, how games sell on Steam, how to work with content creators, etc.

Playstack came up with a lot of clever strategies for getting Balatro visibility that involved its demo, including a streamer tournament and collabs with other games.

Rather than attempt to summarize all their ideas here, I’ll link you to their GDC talk–I haven’t watched it yet but I imagine it covers a lot of similar ground to their two talks at Inside:

Note that while Playstack signed Balatro before it gained a lot of traction online, it wasn’t pitched to them as a vertical slice. They discovered it via a free demo.

That’s right, releasing a demo might get you a publisher.

It also opens the door to festivals, and importantly, to streamer outreach.

Providing Streamers Value

Historically I’ve been skeptical of spending money on PR. Why pay a middleman to reach out to streamers and YouTubers when I could do it myself?

My CRM has about 300 content creators in it that I reached out to during the development of Way of Rhea. I figured doing this myself made sense–I had the time, and a message directly from the dev is more personal.

There are two big problems with this:

1. The pros are apparently reaching out to the order of 3000 content creators per game
2. The pros have existing relationships with content creators

I used to discount the second factor–doesn’t paying for access to relationships just make PR some kind of weird paid nepotism?

Thinking it through more critically, no, it doesn’t. PR people aren’t just folks who happen to have streamer friends, their relationships with content creators are mutually beneficial business relationships.

A good PR person acts as a curator, they repeatedly provide a creator with keys to high quality games that are a good fit for the creator’s target audience. This benefits the PR person since it’s paid work, it benefits the creator since they need games to generate content.

Content creators know they can trust these recommendations, because a PR person who misrepresented games would develop a bad reputation and make their own job harder.

As a single developer reaching out about your own game, you aren’t offering the same value to creators that a PR person does, and you don’t have any credibility.

At least that’s the theory. I’m not a content creator, and I’m not a PR person, I’m not 100% sure how this stuff pans out in practice.

I have some ideas about how to provide content creators with more value as a developer, but I’ll hold off on making recommendations until I’ve tested them myself. Worst case scenario, I’ll cave and pay a pro!

If you are doing PR yourself, here are a few non-controversial tips:

1. Use Sully Gnome to see who’s playing what on Twitch
2. Maintain a spreadsheet of contacts you’ve reached out to with context
3. Treat people like people

Return Of The No Hit Wonder

Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games gave a GDC talk 8 years ago titled How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit:

He gave a followup at GDC titled Return of the No Hit Wonder. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend watching the original talk.

The followup covered a lot of ground, I won’t try to summarize it all here but here are my key takeaways:

• Building a back catalog is key to long term sustainability
• Small games lead to more games, more games leads to a larger back catalog
• As your back catalog becomes larger, so does the value of owning your engine

Closing Notes

You gotta play the long game.

The long term benefits of releasing a demo outweigh any short term concerns around lost sales. Similarly, while you should do work you’re proud of, the long term benefits of building a back catalog are more important than trying to release the perfect game.

I’ll be writing in more detail about how I implement these strategies in my next game in the future, consider signing up for my newsletter if you want to get notified about new posts.

Footnotes

1. ^

   This isn’t the same thing as having a vested interest in your game selling, but it’s close.