Stephen Brenish
More than 19,000 games were released on Steam in 2025, according to SteamDB, and by mid-December roughly half of them had 10 reviews or fewer. Most of those games did not fail because they were bad. They failed because almost nobody found out they existed.
Marketing on a small budget is not about doing everything. It is about putting your time into the few channels that create wishlists for your kind of game, starting earlier than feels comfortable, and not spending money where the math cannot work.
Wishlists are the metric that matters
On Steam, almost every marketing activity pays off through one number: wishlists. Steam emails and notifies everyone who has wishlisted your game when it releases (in Early Access or full release), when it moves from Early Access to 1.0, and when it gets a discount of 20% or more lasting over eight hours. You can also notify wishlisters once when you release a free demo. A wishlist is a standing permission to tell a player about your game at the moments that matter most.
How many wishlists turn into sales? GameDiscoverCo’s October 2025 analysis put the median at about 0.15 first-week sales per wishlist for games launching with more than 25,000 wishlists, and about 0.10 for games priced above $10. The spread between games is enormous, but those medians are the right place to start planning. The Steam wishlist calculator turns them into launch-week numbers for your price.
For years, a common benchmark was that about 7,000 wishlists made it likely a game would appear on Steam’s Popular Upcoming list at some point near launch. Chris Zukowski, who popularized that figure, marked the guidance out of date in June 2026, after Valve launched a personalized release calendar. Treat any fixed wishlist threshold with caution; what matters is building as many genuinely interested wishlists as you can before launch.
Where a small budget should go
With $500 to $1,500, most of the value comes from your time, and the money goes into the few assets that every other channel depends on.
| Channel | Typical cost | What you get | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Capsule art | The biggest line item, if you hire an artist | The image players see before anything else, in every Steam list | Cheap capsule art undermines every other channel |
| Trailer | $0 to a little, for music or assets (DaVinci Resolve has a free version) | Your main conversion asset on the store page | Lead with gameplay in the first seconds |
| Steam Next Fest | Free | Demo visibility to players browsing upcoming games | Registration deadlines come weeks before the festival |
| Creator outreach | Free (your time) | Videos and streams from creators who cover your genre | Key resellers posing as creators |
| Press outreach | Free (your time) | Coverage, quotes for the store page, credibility | Big general outlets rarely cover unknown games |
| Showcases and festivals | Free to modest submission fees | Curated visibility, press attention | Read each event’s terms and deadlines |
| Short-form devlogs | Free (your time) | An audience that follows development | Consistency matters more than polish |
| Paid ads | Whatever you test | Clicks and impressions | Most small games cannot make the math work (see below) |
If you only do three things, make them a store page that converts, a demo for Next Fest, and steady outreach to creators who already play games like yours. The guides on building a Steam page that converts and planning a Next Fest demo cover both in detail, and the Steam sale and Next Fest calendar lists the upcoming festival dates and registration deadlines.
Do the paid-ads math before you spend
Paid ads look affordable until you follow a click all the way to a sale. A worked illustration, with assumed numbers:
- A click costs $1, and 1 in 20 visitors to your store page wishlists the game. Each wishlist costs $20.
- At the median of 0.10 first-week sales per wishlist, and about $9.65 net per copy at $14.99 after Valve’s share and refunds, each wishlist is worth about $0.97 in launch-week revenue.
Later sales and discounts add to that value over time, but the gap is far too wide for most small games to close. Test ads only with money you can afford to lose, measure the cost per wishlist yourself, and stop if it does not improve.
Creators: genre fit beats audience size
A creator with a modest audience who plays nothing but games like yours is often worth more than a bigger channel with a general audience, because their viewers are already your players. Before you send a key, look back through a few months of their videos. If they regularly cover your genre, pitch them personally and briefly, with a key ready. If your game would be a departure for them, skip it.
Key distribution platforms such as Keymailer and Woovit help you reach creators and filter out the requests that come from key resellers, which are common once your game is visible.
Devlogs and short-form video
Game development is interesting to people who do not make games, which makes short videos about it one of the few free channels that can grow on its own. A clip of an odd bug, a new visual effect, or a before-and-after of a character redesign can travel a long way. Post on a schedule you can sustain, and capture moments as you work rather than producing videos from scratch: keep a folder of clips, and when something looks good, cut it and post it the same day.
Communities
Subreddits such as r/indiegaming, r/gamedev and genre-specific communities, and the “share your project” channels on genre Discord servers, can be valuable if you take part before you promote. Comment on other people’s work and contribute to discussions. When you do share an update, it lands better because you are not a stranger.
Plan marketing like production
The biggest budget mistake is treating marketing as something that happens at the end. Put the beats in your schedule as milestones with owners and dates: Steam page live, first trailer, demo, Next Fest, release date announcement, launch, and your first discount. The game development schedule planner generates the Steam dates automatically, and the indie game launch checklist covers the final weeks.
Sources
- SteamDB release counts for 2025, as reported by GamingOnLinux, December 12, 2025.
- Valve, Steamworks documentation: Wishlists.
- Simon Carless, “The state of Steam wishlist conversions”, GameDiscoverCo, October 17, 2025.
- Chris Zukowski, archived launch wishlist benchmarks, How To Market A Game, archived June 2026.
Photo: Tima Miroshnichenko via Pexels
