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Comment by pfisch | Hacker News Reader

If you have a field of dreams mentality it certainly is.

If you are ready to hustle for marketing your game I disagree.

I have launched more small and medium games on Steam than most people, and if you are using the right strategy for the game you're launching you can make decent revenue even if the game sucks.

for example: https://store.steampowered.com/app/96100/Defy_Gravity_Extend...

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Indie dev here. Any chance you could share what the right strategy was for you?

Assuming your game is coming out on switch there is almost certainly tons of money to be made by constantly deal discounting a game to 50 cents or less. When this used to be allowed on Steam we made over a million dollars a year deep discounting tiny games.

The market size of gamers with almost no money is endless.

Prior to "Buy, Try, Return" the sub-dollar games were pure joy. I didn't care that some were shit; most were more than enjoyable enough to satisfy spending a few quarters on them for a brief period.

What I didn't like is that they stuck around my steam library. What I wanted was to throw some quarters at a short-lived arcade experience. I didn't want my library polluted with shovelware.

This seems like a molehill made into a mountain. Just make a collection in your Steam library, dump them all in there, and keep it hidden.

Can’t you just right click and hide it

It really depends on your price point and the game. But assuming very small with little prelaunch marketing you really need to focus on getting on the new & trending list at launch. How do you do that?

You want a lot of people to buy the game quickly at launch. The best way to do that is building up wishlists prelaunch. That has organic second order effects that are helpful, but there are other ways to get lots of sales at launch...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2020/12/04/report-...

A bit offtopic, but considering your approach, do you use a game engine ala Unity to create your games as fast as possible or do you create your own little engine?

I don't make tiny games really. Defy gravity is the only small game I ever made. I make bigger games.

But the answer is use an engine.

I used to both buy the rights and lease the rights to tons of small games though and then release them on steam. They were all made in an engine(unity, rpgmaker, xna, etc)

It is never faster to rebuild the wheel.

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