{"id":1093799,"date":"2026-01-25T11:59:22","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T11:59:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.polygon.com\/?p=506967"},"modified":"2026-01-25T11:59:22","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T11:59:22","slug":"how-did-these-hit-games-find-their-first-1000-players","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/how-did-these-hit-games-find-their-first-1000-players\/","title":{"rendered":"How did these hit games find their first 1,000 players?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n

<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Push to Talk is a weekly newsletter about the business of making and marketing video games, written by games industry veteran and marketing director Ryan Rigney. Subscribe here<\/a> for eclectic and spicy interviews and essays in your inbox every Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

One poorly understood aspect of the modern games industry is the question of how players find new games. Particularly for smaller indie devs with little or no advertising budget, it\u2019s sort of miraculous that any game can go from 0 players to thousands, let alone millions.<\/p>\n

Most people give the credit for breakout hit indie games to streamers and YouTubers, and those are definitely important. But for PC games in particular, I believe strongly that the #1 place people are finding games is through Steam itself.<\/em><\/p>\n

Valve\u2019s platform is thought of primarily as a storefront, but it\u2019s also a vast, algorithmically-powered discovery engine.<\/p>\n

When you build a game on Steam, you get access to metrics that show where your store page traffic is coming from. The platform tells you whether people clicked in from an outside link, or whether they searched for your game directly. Maybe they heard about it from a friend, or a content creator. Some of this stuff is fuzzy. But other stats are easier to follow, especially the ones related to the promotion that Steam itself does on behalf of your game. I\u2019m referring to things like the Discovery Queue, the More Like This promo slots on store pages, and even that little pip that pops up in the bottom corner of your screen when your friend boots up a game.<\/p>\n

All of those display surfaces are effectively ad slots for promoting games, though Valve (to their great credit) doesn\u2019t allow developers or publishers to buy up ad space in these channels. Instead, you have to earn it. You\u2019ve gotta have strong metrics, namely by making money,1 earning good reviews, and keeping players engaged. If your game can do all that, the Steam algorithm decides it might have a hit on its hands and works overtime to show it to more people who might like it.<\/p>\n

For the last game I worked on, Omega Strikers<\/em><\/a>, something like 70% of our store page traffic came from Steam itself promoting us. Some devs give me a surprised look when I say this, because we had outsized success with content creators<\/a> and pulled off some wild marketing stunts (particularly our Studio TRIGGER-produced trailer<\/a> that Nintendo promoted). But the data doesn\u2019t lie: Every marketing tactic we ever did combined<\/em> brought in fewer Omega Strikers<\/em> players than the Steam algorithm alone did. Many millions of people found out about OS<\/em> just because Steam showed it to them.<\/p>\n

So if you want to sell millions of copies of a PC game, you\u2019ve gotta get picked up by the algorithm. The twist, of course, is that somebody<\/em> has to find, buy, and play your game before that happens. So how do you find those first players?<\/p>\n

This week I reached out to four successful indie game devs to ask where they think their first 1,000 players came from, as well as the tens or hundreds of thousands after that. Each of their games have at least a couple thousand \u201coverwhelmingly positive\u201d reviews\u2014very successful projects, given the small size of their dev teams.<\/p>\n

These teams all took very different paths to get their first 1,000 sales, but there are some clear common themes in their responses as well.<\/p>\n

First up, an adorable game about cleaning up the ocean and raising alien critters:<\/p>\n

TikTok brilliance with Loddlenaut<\/em><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

My four-year-old son is already a serious gamer, and when I showed him Loddlenaut<\/em> he immediately fell in love. After trying it once, he\u2019s continued asking me when we can play \u201cthat really nice game where I don\u2019t have to fight any bad guys.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s a pretty accurate description of Loddlenaut. It\u2019s a peaceful game about cleaning up the ocean and also raising weird little creatures inspired by axolotls. The closest comparison point might be the Chao Garden in Sonic Adventure 2<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’d say our first 1,000 sales almost entirely came from wishlist conversions on Steam,\u201d says Ricardo Escobar, cofounder of Loddlenaut<\/em> studio Moon Lagoon.<\/p>\n

The game had around 55,000 wishlists when it launched, Escobar says, with most of those coming from either the game being featured in Steam events or from the popularity of the Moon Lagoon team\u2019s Tiktok account, which had a number of viral posts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So that accounts for the initial wave of sales. And after that? Mostly Steam.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring our launch week, we were lucky enough to earn a spot on Steam’s \u2018New & Trending\u2019 tab, which gave our game enough traffic for Steam’s algorithm to start putting Loddlenaut<\/em> in people’s Discovery Queue,\u201d Escobar says. \u201cThat got us on Valve’s radar, and they later offered us a front page midweek deal slot in January 2024, which ended up being our biggest month of sales.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since then, the Moon Lagoon team has been discounting Loddlenaut<\/em> as frequently as possible (which sends a notification to everyone who has wishlisted) and participating in every Steam event they\u2019re eligible for.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn our experience, organic Steam traffic is by far the biggest driver of sales and wishlists,\u201d Escobar says. But he still thinks there\u2019s a place for social media platforms in terms of driving sales and wishlists. His ranking in order of effectiveness: TikTok, Instagram Reels, X, and Reddit.<\/p>\n

Popping off in France with Chants of Sennaar<\/em><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The first game from French developers Rundisc was a local multiplayer arena shooter called Varion<\/em><\/a> that earned just 17 reviews on Steam. But the followup, Chants of Sennaar<\/em>, has over 17,000 reviews, implying something like half a million copies sold on Steam alone.2 For a $20 puzzle game, that\u2019s a major<\/em> breakout hit.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think we had any problems reaching the first 1,000 players very quickly,\u201d says Julien Moya, Co-founder & Creative Director at Rundisc.<\/p>\n

Moya says that the game launched with a \u201cfairly large\u201d number of wishlists, which he credits in large part to the team\u2019s decision to release a demo version of Chants of Sennaar<\/em> on Steam. \u201cThis demo had been tested by several French journalists from the video game press, who had given it very good feedback, so our game was already somewhat anticipated by a part of the French public that loves puzzle games,\u201d Moya says.<\/p>\n

In recent years it\u2019s become unusual to hear devs say that press coverage made a big difference for them. But Moya has another even more contrarian hypothesis for why Chants of Sennaar<\/em> took off shortly after launch: launching alongside a much bigger game.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were released the day before Starfield<\/em>,\u201d Moya says, \u201cwhich could have been a disaster, but paradoxically we think it actually helped us: since nobody wanted to release during that week, there were very few indie games announced, so we climbed very high on Steam’s “Popular upcoming” list. That gave us a lot of visibility, which really helped to boost our international wishlists.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s evidence to support this theory. I watched some content creator coverage of the game, and Canadian streamer NorthernLion explicitly says in his video about CoN<\/em><\/a> that he found out about it through \u201cthe Steam new releases list.\u201d<\/p>\n

Getting enough traction on launch to make it into Steam\u2019s new and trending charts is huge, but it doesn\u2019t guarantee hundreds of thousands of sales, especially for a $20 puzzle game about decoding languages.<\/p>\n

So where did all those hundreds of thousands of players come from?<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are so many factors that it’s hard to summarize,\u201d Moya says. \u201cThe biggest driver was obviously the player reviews, which were dithyrambic.3 On Steam, it’s very much a \u2018critical mass\u2019 thing: when something starts to get attention, it gets pushed out and attracts even more players. That’s what happened with us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moya also specifically credits Stephen Totilo of Game File<\/a> and Jason Schreier of Bloomberg as journalists who helped raise awareness of the game in the US. Schreier \u201cpublished a very positive review of Chants of Sennaar<\/em><\/a> on Bloomberg calling it one of the best games of the year,\u201d Moya says. \u201cI’m pretty sure that article helped a lot to get us known in the US.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the release of the game \u201cwent much better than we’d hoped,\u201d Moya says. \u201cWe thought we’d made a good game, but we expected it to be more divisive. The fact that it appealed to virtually all players, including people who weren’t necessarily fans of this type of game in the first place, was a real surprise. Looking back, I’m not sure what could have gone better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Making streamers cry with Lil Gator Game<\/em><\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Another adorable, kid-friendly game: Lil Gator Game<\/em> became a breakout hit on both console and PC when it launched in 2022.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe blew past 1,000 pretty quickly,\u201d Connor P Quinn, Game Director on Lil Gator Game<\/em>. To drive wishlists on Steam, Quinn says that his team followed the conventional wisdom: \u201cposted on Twitter pretty regularly, put together a discord community, mentioned wishlisting a lot, went to some events, gave keys to big streamers, and had a small launch discount.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, Quinn says, the game\u2019s power to move people emotionally was the real difference maker. \u201cI don’t think there’s any substitute for someone popular getting excited about you,\u201d Quinn says. \u201cYou can be dead in the water for months and someone with a big following getting excited about you will bring a whole fresh host of customers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lil Gator Game<\/em> seems to be particularly good at this, as every once in a while streamers find it and post gameplay with titles like: \u201cI Played 100% of Lil Gator Game\u2026 <\/em>It Made Me Cry.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n