Fist of the Forgotten now has a Steam page!
As a developer, I believe it’s good to get a Steam page up sooner rather than later. This allows people interested in the game to add it to their wishlist. While developing a game, you also need to be marketing it and building up a community of interested followers. If you just share screenshots and videos with no action items, potential players will likely forget about the game or not be aware when it launches. I’m still very new to the concept of self promotion, but I’ve heard that around 30% of a game’s budget should be spent on marketing. When working without much of a monetary budget, I guess that budget equates to time.
I haven’t been very good about promoting my game, if I’m being honest. Now that the Steam page is live, though, I can encourage people to wishlist the game when I post updates, screenshots, and videos. I honestly feel a bit weird talking about marketing. It makes me feel dirty. It’s absolutely necessary these days, though. There are so many games being released that it’s very difficult to rise above the noise. Also, I’m trying to be completely open about all aspects of game development while I work on this project.
So, while we’re being open, I’m going to disclose the current number of people who have added Fist of the Forgotten to their Steam wishlist: 197
I actually made it to 200 wishlists, but there were a couple deletions.
The other advantage to having a Steam page up early is being able to get an idea of how well your game may sell. In one of my videos, I mentioned that I need to sell around 10,000 copies to break even. I need to sell approximately 10 copies per day of development. I think the conversion rate from wishlists to sales is around 20%, so that means I’d need around 50 wishlist additions per day. Unfortunately, after the initial burst of wishlists from the first couple days of the Steam page going live, I’m only getting around 5-6 wishlists per day. I need to increase that by around 10x.
It’s kind of a daunting number, but at least I know where I currently stand. I need to focus more on building up an interested community and promoting the game. Building up the numbers necessary to be successful is a very difficult task. One in which I have no experience in. At least now I’ll have the data to make an informed decision on if I should work with a publisher or PR firm when the time comes.