Do THIS to get more wishlists

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, it's Chris Zukowski here. Give you a friendly hello. I'm going to answer this question. I've got some secret wish list thing. I'm serious. This is a secret wish list source that not enough people know about. Um, I always see this on Reddit a comment like this where it's like I'm trying and trying I do all the social media posts. I post on Reddit and I get no wish lists. And I'm here to tell you how to actually get wish lists. Let's do it. I'm going to go straight into it. It's festivals. S- virtual festivals. I'm just going to spoil it right here in the first 5 seconds. Um, you got to do festivals. And I'm going to show you exactly how to do it and I'm going to get you wish lists if your game's good. You have to have a good game. So, we'll get there. We'll get there. Now, when I just said I have a secret and the secret's festival, there are people that know this already. All right? I know you're going to be like, "I know I'm going to get a comment down below. This is not a secret. I already knew that. I This that's clickbait. You did you you just clickbaited I know. I know. I know. You

know. You're smart. You're you Mr. I'm going to comment and say that's clickbait. You already know the secret. You're smarter than the average person and that's okay. That is okay. Go. Get out. This This video is not for you. If you already know this trick, um, but the reason I do this is there's a lot of people who don't know this trick. So, you're smarter. Don't leave a comment, please. It hurts my feelings. All right? So, just get out. You've got games to make. So, stop watching this YouTube. Don't comment. You got better things to do than comment on a YouTube video. Get out of here. For everybody who's left, I'm going to teach you the secrets of how to do festivals and all this thing cuz I got a new tool. I'm going to show you this new tool. It's free. Everything here is free except for applying for the festival, but we'll get there. Let me let me go. Okay, so just don't comment. D- d- don't comment. Just be nice. Let's all be nice to each other. It's a hard world. We got to be nice to each other. All right. So, this is a festival. This is the front page of Steam. Well, it's like you click on the thing, but on the front page of Steam you can get featuring and this one is a cerebral festival. And if you scroll down, these are all games that are

puzzle games and this is a puzzle game festival. So, this is how you get it. This is how you get the wish list, right here. Um I'm just I'm just showing you exactly what it is. And when I say festivals, I don't mean these in-person ones like this. Don't do this. I don't know Deep Dish Dungeon. It sounds like a fun game. I'm not saying this game's bad. I'm just saying don't set up the booths. This is not about how to set up a booth. That's not a festival. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about virtual showcases here. I'm not talking about this and ponytail guy. Mhm. We're going to do this right, okay? What I'm talking about when I say festivals are you submit your game, you take your game and you go, "Here's my game." And then people who run these festivals like Alan Hazelden, who runs the Cerebral Fest, looks at it and goes, "Yeah, that's a good game. Bing! I'm going to let you in to Cerebral Fest." And Geoff Keighley, who's a very discerning man and this is a very hard festival to get into like Summer Game Fest, he's going to go, "Nope. I'm sorry. Your game's just not good enough." Well, he doesn't actually say that. He just doesn't let you in. Okay, that's what a festival is. And you get this virtual featuring here and you get

a ton of wish lists sometimes. Here's a game called Glass House. Let's get that that capsule, I got to say, awesome. It just looks like anxiety represented. That is That's making me have anxiety. This is like the representation of anxiety. But anyway, they were in a festival called Turn-Based Fest right here. And over the next uh what how many days is that? Looks like a week. It's basically a week. And I got 2,000 wish lists thereabouts. I talked to him. He said, "That's about how I got 2,000 wish lists during this period." You can see this giant spike of wish lists. Spiked all the way up to about 750 wish lists in a single day. Festival. That is festivals. And then he posted in some really random Facebook group. Got wish lists there, but not as good. Not as good as Turn-Based. Turn-Based Festival. Now, festivals they're random. You never know. Sometimes they turn out This is Best Indie Game Showcase by Clemmy. You know Clemmy. He did a festival on Steam. Not as good. This one got about 25 wish lists per day. I don't know the total, but this game Filthy Animals Zero shared

their wish list chart. And this is their See here's Next Fest. Next Fest got them about 120 spike. It's It's not all It's hard. This is hard. I'm not saying this is easy. Maybe one's weird trick. This is hard. I'm I'm not I'm done trying to overemphasize this, but this is a good source of wish lists. Here's Arms of God. They shared their wish list chart. This is lifetime, so it's cumulative. The other one was daily wish list. This is cumulative. So just to bring a little bit. But every time you see a spike up, look at this. Um trailer for IGN. DevGAMM, which is a virtual festival. You see these big spikes in the cumulative wish list like Bull and Heaven Fest. They get these big spikes here. Bull and Heaven Fest again. Look at that big spike. Now they did other things, but here's Steam Next Fest spike. These virtual online festivals that are very similar to Steam Next Fest, but they're personalized tiny festivals very good and they're some of the best sources of wish lists, okay? This is the secret. I just I'm just telling the

secret right in front. I'm not trying to click bait you. This is the secret and not enough indies know this. Now a lot of you watching this video might know this. Not click bait. It's It's a secret for some people and I'm just trying to explain it because I see enough of it on Reddit that don't know this secret, okay? Now here's the deal. This is why I made this video. Um I and my community track wish lists. Well, we track wish lists and we also track the festivals that give you wish lists. And that's what this is. So I just upgraded this tool and it's free. I'm not trying to sell you something here. This is free. I'm going to pause and I'm going to show you it, okay? I thought I was going to do it right there. What I'm going to do is I'm going to do a Hadouken to get you in there. So ready? Hadouken. I I to I got to warm up. Hadouken! Okay, so man, those Hadoukens, when you really get them right, they just they really take it out of you. All right. Anyway, here we are. This is on my website, howtomarketagame.com /

festivals. I'm going to put it up right here. But let me Hadouken it. Hadouken! That one is a weak I used the weak punch on that one, so I didn't totally blow it up. But see that howtomarketagame.com / festivals is how to get to the site. Um you can also get to it right here. Now, it doesn't exist yet cuz I I it's in beta mode, so I had to turn it off. By the time you watch this video, I will turn it on right here. It'll say howtomarketagame.com Well, it'll say festivals up here. You click that and you'll get to this thing. Okay, this is my new tool, 2.0. I used to just have a little crazy little spreadsheet. Here it is. And I'm going to scroll down. And what we do, um let me let me let me go into here. What we do is we um work together and um uh my community, howtomarketagame, and we track them. And I've been around, folks. People know me who organize these festivals, and they message me and they go, "Chris, can you put your festival

Can I put my festival on your list?" I'm like, "Yeah, come on in." And so what I've done with my community is built this little tool, and it tracks all the festivals, okay? And all you do is you like click it. Like this one is due today. And probably by the time you watch this video, it's closed. I'm sorry. But they have closed They they close. And so this is how you apply. Remember how I said you you show your game, and then some curator smart person is like, "That's a good game. You're in." Or somebody's like, "No, no, no, that's not a good game. I don't like that. Get out of here, kid." Um how do you show it to them? You click this link. It's called apply. You just click it right there. So, for instance, here's Baltic Fest. I'm going to click apply. I'm just going to do this live. I don't know what's going to show up. Well, actually I do. I I did this before. Um So, here's Baltic Fest and this one is good. All right. So, so what I really should do is Frosty Games Fest. But, Frosty is better. The Sometimes the festivals, we can't control it. They're a little hard to Some of them are good and they just go

straight to the application page and some aren't. And you just go in and you just you just apply. Just fill this information out. You know all this information, okay? You know this. All right? You just know this information. You fill it out, all right? Um and what you do is that's that's how you apply for a festival. You you fill out all the information, hit submit, then you wait, and then some smart person who likes video games are like good game, you're in. Bad game, you're out. Good game, you're in. All that stuff, okay? That's how it works. And we curate these. This list is built by people coming to me and go, "Chris, can you put it on your list?" And I'm then yes, I can. Now, let me show you the new features here. This is all new. This is 2.0. Again, this is all free. I'm not selling you. This is a free thing cuz I love indies. I want more of this. So, again, click up click up here eventually. So, these are all upcoming. This is the list of upcoming ones and these are ones that are open and they're upcoming. Now, some of these are like the deadlines in May, that kind of stuff like that. It's sorted by release date. The closer they are, within 7 days they start turning orange, orangey color here. Sorry if

you're color blind. Uh but, there's also data here. The thing is, some of them are paid and we'll talk about the paid, but I'll tell you if it's paid. And then um there's things called limited featuring. That means Valve hasn't given it the thumbs up to say like you are a festival that we are going to showcase. That just means it's coming. Coming, they're going to get it approved, hopefully. But, you just have to go in knowing if it says limited featuring, that just means like um it's probably not going to be on the front page. Same thing with this festival candidate. Festival candidate really is This is what I mean by this is Valve has not given it the rubber stamp that says we are definitely going to host you on Steam, okay? They're saying, "Bring us more games and we'll think about it." I'll I'll talk about this in a second. I'll explain. But, that's what this tag means. It's going to be $300. The $300 release is for the physical expo. It's actually against the rules for Valve. Valve said, "No more charging. You can't charge for entry into the festival." But, what they typically do is I I don't I don't mind the paying. Not that bad. Well, I don't pay. I don't

I don't have a game. Uh but, they're people that they work hard, so they need to be paid. So, yes, but but Valve says you can't charge for access to our festival. So, what they people typically do is they have a physical expo and you're charging money for the physical expo. But, again, most of these like Cerebral Puzzle Fest, which is a deadline March 31st, you should apply if you have a puzzle game. It's deadline It's free. And you get some of the best visibility. This is one of the best ways to get your puzzle game seen is getting into Cerebral Fest. But, not everybody gets it. Remember, you hand it and then Alan Hazelden goes, "Good puzzle game. You're in." Or, "Ew, this is a jank AI slop puzzle game. Yuck. Out of here. You're not accepted." That's what happens. Okay? And you just click. If you're like, "Okay, I'll do it." And you just apply to these. Now, uh new features here. The old feature list that I had was very long and it was very confusing. That's why we redid it cuz I had so many entries from years and years ago. So, I've got a section where it says past event. These are the past ones. So, you can see what happened in the past. I don't People like to look back in the past. So, you We hid all the

old ones. They're grayed out. You can't I think the button works, but it doesn't It'll just go to a page that says, "Applications are closed. No more games submitted." Um so, you can do that. New. Now, we're updating all the time and people sometimes come to me and they're like, "Oh my god, Chris. The deadline for applying to our festival is tomorrow. Can you throw us on the sheet?" And I'm I'll still do it. And what this does are new ones that we have added within the last 7 days. So, if you went through this upcoming list and you're like, "Oh, I've I've I've looked at this every single day. I come here every day, Chris, and I look at them all of them. I can't remember which one's new. You go to the new tab and you can see the ones that we added within the last 7 days. Now, these See, this one's not closed until April, but it's new. We added it within the last 7 days. So, that's the difference. New just means we just recently added to the list. So, if you come to my site every day, click the new tab. That's where you're going to see the new the new games on it. I'm just so excited about how awesome this tool is. I just I just got to pause and say I love it. Okay. Anyway, so these are the new ones.

Check it every day. And again, what happens is this list is on a script and we we have a little database where we store all the festivals. And every day at 1:00 a.m. Universal Cut Time, Central Time, I think it's in Greenwich, England, it runs a script and it updates this chart. So, this chart will update every day at midnight or 1:00 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time, which is about 5:00 p.m. US time. This is about to update. We might see it live. Um and that's what that. Now, you might be like, Chris, I'm busy. I can't come to your site every day. Well, okay, first. Back it up. Back it up. Reverse that. If you are organizing a festival, let's say you are Alan Hazelton. Now, Alan always We always put Alan's on it. He If Alan's doing a second one, he's like, Chris, I want to get my second thing in here. You go right here. See at the top? Do you know of or organizing a festival that should be on this list? Submit here. Now, sometimes people are like, hey Chris, I'm not organizing this, but I saw they're doing

this festival over here. It's called whatever Monkey Fest. If your game has a monkey, you get in. Um but it's not on your list. You can submit it here. You click this submit here. I'll do it right now. Do it live. You click here and it goes to a form that we built and you go down here and it's a festival submit form. So, if you want to get your game, if you're organizing a festival and you want to get on the list, you come here and you fill this out. It goes to our moderators. We have moderators and we look at all the things. We're like, ooh, this festival is a festival about AI slot. They want to do an AI slop fest. Get out of here. But this fest isn't going to be featured on this website, okay? So that's what that is. So you can submit it. You you just go through the form and you submit it and then we analyze it and if we like it, we're going to put it up within 24 hours. You get a notification. Now, here's the real tool. This is the thing where this is next level why this is 2.0 version of the festival sheet. Okay, watch this. So, see this get notified when festivals are closing? What you do is you see this thing? You just put your email address in there and you get a special tag assigned to your

email address and every day that there is a festival open, you will get an email if they're closing within 1 day or 7 days. So like these guys, you would get an email that says, "Hey, Baltic Showcase on Steam is closing soon. Do you want to apply?" And it's just so people don't miss it cuz this happens all the time. People are like, "Chris, I didn't see that this festival is closing and my game would have been perfect and now it's closed." Yikes, that's not good. This thing will remind you. Now, I I promise I don't spam. All it does is it tells you once a day. It's only once a day. It runs at midnight midnight or 1:00 a.m. Central Cut Time. If it sees any festivals that are 1 to 7 days in their deadline, you'll get that email. If it turns out that there's no festivals that are closing within 1 to 7 days, you don't get an email. It's just an alert. It's just a simple alert. I'm not selling you anything. It's a simple alert. And if you're like, "Chris, this is too much." Here's the thing, you can just unsubscribe to those. Um and you'll also get subscribed to mine thing and they're two separate things. I write a blog every week

and this thing. So they're two separate emails that you'll get. Two separate ones. And if you get that um if you're like, "I don't like these alert emails anymore." You can unsubscribe to this but still say stay subscribed to my blog. They're two separate email things, okay? Or if you don't want to listen to my blog, you only want to get about events, you can unsubscribe from my blog and just get these. I'm here I'm here to support you. No matter how you want to hear from me, no matter what you want to do, I'm here for you. All right, so that is the formula. Let me make sure I I didn't miss anything. Um but really, folks, do it right now. Subscribe to this thing. Don't subscribe to my YouTube channel. YouTube sucks. YouTube does not tell you when Baltic Steamfest is happening. You know what does? A mailing list. So, subscribe to the mailing list and hear about Baltic Steamfest. Don't subscribe to YouTube because YouTube can't tell you about Baltic Steamfest. See how much better email is than YouTube? Ugh. Don't subscribe. Do not subscribe to my YouTube channel. Um let me just make sure that I got all the stuff. These are my notes of what I have

to cover. I think I got it all. I got it all. Okay. Give me Give us your festivals. Uh really, we want we only it's a volunteer situation. Um I just wanted to give a shout-out, personal shout-out to Arthur. Arthur of uh Jupiter Moons Mecca. I just want to take a minute to say, "Thank you, Arthur." And he splashes big logo up here. This guy is awesome. This guy created the original version of this. He's helped me through uh setting up this stuff. And he What he does is when uh he's still reviewing them. So, like if you sub- you submit your festival, he's going to Arthur's going to look at it. He's going to be like, "This one's good, Chris. Put this one." I'll put it on there. So, just a tip my hat to Arthur. I don't want to I don't want to let him go without praising that guy. Guy's awesome. Um Let me Let me Hadoken back into the finish of this presentation. I got I'm jump- jumping out of the demo here. Demo mode's over. I'm going to I'm going to explain a couple more things. So, Hadoken. It's about in the Hadoken. It's It's kind of sorrowful. That's what I love about the Hadoken. So, ready?

Ready? Here we go. Hadoken. Okay, that that Hadoken, that was a that was a serious one. To change the background, you got to really you got to use the fierce. That's the That's the most one, right? I don't know. I I just looked at the I never looked at the buttons. Anyway, so here Okay, now here's the thing about festivals. They're not all the same. Some do very well for you. Some you just get like 100 wish list and you're like, "Uh, that's a little too much." It's because of how much featuring they get. That's one of the factors. Um, and we track all of this when you submit your festival, we find out. And let me explain what these festival types are. There's festival candidate and these are all on Steam, all festivals on Steam. It's just how much featuring they get on the Steam platform. And let me go through. There's festival candidate, limited featuring, regional featuring, pop under, daily deal, weekend deal, banner. These are all ways that you could get your festival featured that you participate in. And they wildly differ in their visibility. All the way to the high visibility. And so, let me explain. Festival candidate, some festivals, like I said,

Steam, Valve, curates these festivals and says, "No, no, your stupid festival can't get on here cuz it's too stupid." Uh, but what The way you get it is these organizers have to get a bunch of people to sign up. And they need people who have made a lot of money to participate. We call them the anchors or the like, uh, tentpole games. Like they they are they make a ton of money on Steam. They like they made millions of dollars. And they participate in the festival. And basically that they pay by them being in this festival, they earn thousands and thousands of dollars for Valve. And Valve's like, "Well, it's worth us to feature that game in this festival." That's That's the secret behind it. That's the secret. I told you I'd tell you secrets. And so, what they need is the organizers of these festivals need people who have made a lot of money to be in this festival. So, what these organizers do, if they're festival candidate, they put out calls to organizers like, "We don't We haven't gotten approval from Valve, but we need games that have made a lot of money to do it." And you'll see this when you apply to some of these festivals. You'll see language that says like this, "Steam

event page subject to Valve approval." That's big. Uh, this event is subject to approval and negotiation with Steam. See, Valve has to say, "Yep, this game's good. I see the list of games that you've provided, and they're all awesome. You got a spot. You're getting your festival featured on the front page of Steam. So, we call these out. And this festival might not happen. It maybe not enough cool people will apply. And then the guy says, "Hey, they go to Valve. Can we get our feature our featured festival?" And Valve's like, "Nope, get out of here." You will apply, you did it, and nothing happened out of it. The festival just disappears and never happens. It's sad, but we do call this out. So, you'll see a tag on those those things. It'll say festival candidate, okay? Basically, they don't work because Valve wants to see a tentpole game that has made lots of money. So, if you've had a hit game, register for these festivals. Even after you've launched, you should apply for festivals because you could help make a festival happen because you've got a lot of money. And by your game getting being in that festival, you're going to make that festival a lot of money through Valve. Valve will see a lot of money will come

into the festival by showing your big money game. If you've made a lot of money, apply to these festivals. You're helping out other indies. And then the little indies who haven't released also are in the festival, and they get the visibility of your coattails. They ride your coattails. That's what a festival candidate is. It might not happen. So, you're going to see a little tag on my festival tool 2.0. You're going to see something called festival candidate. That's what this means, okay? Let me explain the next one. Limited featuring. I couldn't find an example of this. Um but sometimes there's a you'll there'll be a festival and it'll have a Steam page that says like, "You know, games of Tucson, Arizona," right? And Valve's like, "Nobody cares about Tucson. I don't care about Tucson. Nobody cares about Tucson. We're not giving it any featuring." But what they do is all the games can still participate. And what happens is your Steam page I couldn't find Again, I couldn't find an example, but they'll put a banner up here that says like, "Games of Tucson." And that's it. So, all the games in the festival cross-link. It's kind of like the old web rings of the old internet. And you'll see this, and you click it, and you see the festival page, and then

the other games. So, you're kind of pooling and cross-promoting each other. But let me tell you, it doesn't work very well. That's what limited featuring is, and we'll put that cuz Valve will say, "You get it, but you're not getting any featuring." And so, we ask the organizers tell us that, and so in the caps or in the little tool, you'll see some tag that says limited featuring. That just means this festival is just going to be a banner here. Now, it's not great, but I would still apply for these. Don't don't look at this and go, "Oh, I'm not applying for festivals that have limited featuring." Do it. Even festival candidates, apply to all these. Okay? Do them all. What else are you going to do with yourself? Spend time watching YouTube? Ugh. This is a better use of your time. You apply for these. Even if they don't get mega visibility. All right, let me go to the next one, which is what I call regional featuring. Valve does this I can't take a picture of regional that featuring. So, this is what we call pop under, and I'll talk about this. But, sometimes Valve will say like if it's a very specific region like uh like games of Bangladesh or something, uh Valve will put this banner, but they'll limit it to only Bangladesh. So, if you log into Steam and you're in

Bangladesh or you know, maybe uh only games of Brazil, and so only people who say say I speak Portuguese will get this. This is what we call limited featuring. Now, I bet I didn't get it. But, sometimes festivals will only appear here. Again, it's not the best, but it's still good, still worth it. So, that's how that's what regional featuring is. And we'll tag, if we know the festival is getting regional featuring, we'll tag it that way. So, you can understand. The main thing is just have expectations right because if your expectations aren't right, then they're not. Okay. Now, pop under, it's not mutagenics. That's just cuz I can't speak. This is a pop under. Which just means it's like, here's the big show, here's the next big show. This is pop under. This is good. This is good featuring. I like this. I actually don't know if this one is better than daily deal, but it's above it, so I think it's better. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Okay, so you might see something Valve will say, "You get a feature spot, organizers of a festival. We're giving you the pop under." And that's what they mean by a pop under. See this PvP PvP Fest? That's

a pop under because it's under. It's still on top. It's mostly on top, but it's That's a pop-under. I'm just That's it. The next thing is a daily deal weekend deal. See this Quebec game celebration? This is a festival. They got a daily deal weekend deal spot. You see how it says weekend deal? They just inject it into this existing thing called discount and events, and you'll get a little festival here. So, sometimes they take the daily deal These are daily deals. And sometimes your festival will be featured in here for a couple days. Weekend deal is a big one. See, cuz uh Quebec, there's a lot of very famous developers in Quebec. So, they make a lot of money for Valve. So, Valve is like, "Well, you make us a lot of money. We'll give you this weekend deal slot." See how big it is? It stays for the entire weekend. It actually goes Friday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, even into Monday. So, for 4 days this festival is going to be featured here. That's a weekend deal spot. So, sometimes features will Valve will say, "Oh, okay. Your festival's in. You get the daily deal weekend deal slot." And that's what this is. See?

Right there. That's the spots. So, we'll we'll tell you. I'll put in the tool. If we know that this festival is going to get that spot, there. But, it's all based on how much information those festival organizers tell us. So, if you're a festival organizer, tell us the details, and we won't we won't do it. And the big one is banner. This is the banner. PVPfest, this is the banner. It's at the top of Steam. It's the biggest thing. It's gigantic. Usually, most festivals don't get it. This is an official Steam See where it says Steam PVPfest? These are the official festivals. And they get the best banners. They get so much visibility. But, every game is allowed into it. We do not track official Steam festivals here. We just don't, because Valve actually tracks these. And you see them Go into Steamworks, and there's a certain page I think it's right on the front. They'll list all the festivals that are coming up. We're not going to track it, cuz that's Valve. Okay? I'm I'm not going to track Valve. They're going to track themselves. So, you This is already tracked. Just go into Steam

Works. You can see what the next big takeover event is, but I'll just tell you folks, these sometimes don't do very well because so many games get into them. Okay? Um but if you're a big game that makes lots of money, sometimes you get special featuring in these and they do make sense. So, still apply. Here's the thing, folks. I know you're like, "Ugh, look at this trash. It's festival candidate limited featuring. I am too good for that." No, don't be too good for any of this stuff. Here's the secret. I told you I was going to tell you secrets. Apply for all of this. Apply for all of this. And if people are like, "Oh, Chris is just giving information we already know." Did you really? Be honest. Be honest. Tell me. Okay? Did you really know that a feature festival could get a daily deal? Did you know that? Uh okay, so don't I I really am telling secrets. This is a real secret. I have to do research to figure this out. Okay? This is hard. This is hard work. All right. So, like I said, all

any festival that you get into is worth it. Just do it. Go with for everyone. Don't don't do too much. Don't don't be too good for this stuff. You need all the wishlists you can get. Now, this is kind of a very rough formula. So, how good your game is times the festival featuring times the festival genre cohesion. This is a big thing. This is a secret. Secret. I'm I swear I'm telling you secrets. I know I've talked to Valve people and I've talked to people who have applied for festival got their festivals rejected. You know, they're like, "Oh, can I do this festival?" And Valve is like, "Nope." Valve is getting very stinky and they find the best performance are for genre-specific festivals. So, if your festival is like tower defense festival, Valve is like, "That is awesome." Because it's a very cohesive festival and fans of tower defense games are going to be like, "Yes, this festival's awesome. I'm going to buy all of these games." But if your game is like game if your festival is like games that are primarily blue, that's like that is doesn't have a good genre cohesion, genre cohesion. And so

people are going to be like, yeah, I like RPGs and yes, that's a blue RPG. That one looks cool, but all these other blue tower defense, blue cozy games, I don't don't even like those games. Why am I looking at this? That's bad. Valve has found, this is a secret, Valve has found uh festivals that don't have a tight cohesion of their genre don't do as well. So, that these are the three main factors. And then the number of games in the festival is kind of your denominator and then it's divided. All this stuff is divided. Now, this is very loose math. Don't try and figure this math. But what But what I'm saying is these factors all go into whether you're going to get a lot of wish list during the festival or not a lot. And here's the thing, folks, apply to all of them. Don't Don't be like, well, you know, the genre cohesion of this festival is not very good, so I'm not going to apply. No, apply to them all. You don't know. It's It's just apply to them, okay? Just go for it. Um Now, there are going to be festivals where you have to pay. Remember how I said you have to pay for them because they pay for a physical booth?

I still think it's worth play- paying because when you pay, you usually have fewer people in the festival. So, with these free festivals, oh my god, there's so many people that apply for them. They're like hundreds of people say, yeah, I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it. And so these festivals have thousands of games. And so it kind of divi- as the divisor is the bottom, it divi- it spreads out visibility among all the games. But when you have a paid premium game or pre- paid premium festival, it reduces the number of games in it cuz a lot of people like, no. And so you don't And so there's nobody else in there. And sometimes these paid ones get more featuring like a PAX. Like if you have to pay to get into PAX, uh they they have a festival, uh PAX gets a lot of featuring when you get into showcase on the front page of Steam, they they have usually have better um a a featuring. So, these two values go in your favor when you pay for a festival, even though behind the scenes is like, "Valve, here's a secret." Valve is like, "No, you cannot pay for them."

But, behind the scenes secret, I'm telling you, is that uh the organizers of these festivals are like, "No, no, no, Valve, they're not paying. They're not paying for the festival. They're not paying for the showcase. They're paying for um the physical thing that we're doing cuz we're doing a physical convention." And Valve is like, "That's a secret." I'm telling you secrets here. Um okay. So, um usually, here's the payline. I say uh if if it's below a lot of things where you have to pay and if you get in, then you do it. If don't pay for festivals if they have limited featuring or festival candidate, don't pay for those. So, now some of some festival candidate, read the fine print. Some they'll say, "Hey, you got to pay, but if we don't get you if we don't approve you or you don't we don't get this featuring from Valve, we'll return your money." Read the fine print. Uh I don't know about those. But, if if they say we're going to get regional featuring or any of these other types of visibility in the application, they usually say this. Read the Read the application cuz they'll tell you what

kind of featuring. I think it's worth it to pay at least 300 bucks for a lot of these. Like, and as you get further down, I'd pay more and more. Like, if if somebody says, "We definitely have a daily deal secured. Valve is giving us a daily deal for our festival." Oh, yeah, I'd pay for that. Because these these kind of pop under daily deal ones can get thousands of wishlists. Like, I'm serious. Like, like that game that got like 7,000 wishlists in a week. Or was it 3,000? Okay. Thousands of wishlists. Calculate It's kind of roughly a dollar a wishlist or a dollar 50, somewhere in there. Just the economics of Steam. So, if it costs you 300 bucks and you get a thousand wishlists, that's a win. Even if you paid 300 and you got like 200 wish lists, I still it's you're gambling. You're you're an entrepreneur. Here's the secret. Why don't you just take a chance? You're gambling. You're you're an entrepreneur. You got to take these chances because the upside is very good. Like if you find a festival, you get in, they like your game.

Serious wish lists. Real wish lists, okay? Now, sad indie boys always go ah If Steam were curated, this whole video game thing would be so much easier if Steam were just curated. Back in the day of Greenlight and oh, you know, original Steam, it was curated and it was so good back then. Let me tell you folks, all right? Here's the secret. It's actually curated. Steam is curated. Steam's curated. Here's the secret. I'm telling you secrets here. I just call it passive-aggressive curation. Um I'll be Steam's curated. I'm going to let me explain. Um in in this is kind of a philosophical way of thinking about it. Wish lists are basically curation tokens. Every time you get a wish list, the big wish lists come in after you've been curated. In Valve's economy of wish lists, it's basically when they see a ton of wish lists come in, they're like, "I bet somebody got curated." Cuz you don't get

that big influx of like a thousand wish lists without some big important person curating you. Let me Let me just explain what I mean by curation tokens. Okay. So, remember how I said there's a festival candidate where it's like, "Hey, I'm organizing a festival. Valve, can I have featuring for my festival?" And Valve's like, "No." It's a real curator. Like there is It's not It's not Gabe. It's not Gabe in there. But this is I I stole the I blacked it all out, but this is an actual email exchange between an organizer cuz I know these organizers, the people who organize the festivals. And they're like, "This is what Steam is saying." They It says You they get these messages. Message from the Steam team. And in this discussion that I've blacked out it's private. Is basically like, "Hey, you don't have enough people who are good." And this guy's like, "But I got more common." And I was like, "Not really. You don't really have some good people." I was like, "I'll get some more." And they're like, "Okay, you tell us when you get some more good people to join your festival." That's why you apply. And so this is curation. This right here is literally curation. It's just a secret curation. This is the

secret This is I'm giving you the secret of how Valve negotiates for curated visibility. And so that's the discussion for curation before festival candidate becomes one of these other visibility things. This is the secret of curation, okay? I'm just telling you how it goes behind the scenes. And then even if Valve says, "Yeah, you're a good one." Guess who had to organize it? Somebody who runs the festival. Like a Geoff Keighley, okay? He's a third-party curator. Like you apply with your game and Geoff Keighley Well, not literally Geoff Keighley, but his staff is going to be like cool. It's in the festival. Come on in. So this guy's curating you. Okay? And guess what? Me. Guess what I'm doing? I am curating the festivals that show up on how to market again.com/festivals, okay? Do Do you Do you see the stack of curation that is happening here? I am literally curated the festival curators who are

curated by Valve. We are curating the curators who curate. That's That's what we do. That's the secret. I'm telling you the secret This wasn't clickbait. I'm literally telling you the secrets of how this works. So how to market again.com/festivals is my curation of curators who have cure been curated, okay? A side note, we're not talking about content creators. Also a great source of wish list. Guess what they are? Content creators are curators. They curate which game to play. Like Splattercat or Northern Lion. They curate the games that show up on their channel and when they get it, what do you get? Wish lists. Festivals that I'm talking about turn into wish lists. Content creators give you wish lists. Remember the wish list tokens and then basically Steam looks at the algorithm. They see when you get a lot of wish lists and they give you Steam featuring. Okay? This is the curation. This is how the Steam algorithm works. The curation tokens. And this is what I mean. I'm going to get out of the way so you can see this. See this big red box? See this red box here? I tripped on my

own mic cable. I'm so excited about this new tool that I gave you. See these are all these little things this is basically curated featuring that Valve gives you when you get a lot of wish lists. You see? That's why I call them tokens. They're like It's not like curation yes binary you are curated or you're not. It's like all these little curation events happen and they pile up and then Valve's like, "Oh yeah, you got a lot of curation tokens in a short period. We're going to throw you in the discovery queue." If you don't know what the discovery queue is, search my blog for discovery queue. But I don't have time to explain it here. But this is all this stuff, okay? Um and that's why I call it passive-aggressive. Nobody at Valve tells you this stuff. Nobody at Valve says, "Hey, you got to do more." And there's this thing called festivals. Go check Chris's blog how to marketing game festivals and then you get into the festivals and you get a lot of curation tokens and then you do Nobody at Valve tells you this, okay? That's why I call it passive-aggressive. They're just like, "We don't know. We don't know why your game didn't do it." I'm telling

you. I'm right here. I'm telling you the non-obvious secrets. I'm telling you the secrets here, folks. Of how you get visibility and it's through festivals and curate Steam um content creators like Splattercat. But then Valve's like, "Ah, you got a lot of wish lists. Okay, we'll put you in popular upcoming." You're in popular upcoming and nobody knows that. Like I know you do. Who's ready to type Chris's clickbaiting secrets. There's not really secrets. I knew all this stuff. Well, if you knew it, again, get out of here. You already know this stuff. You're just a smart. If you knew this stuff, you're just a smart dev who knew this stuff. But, not a lot of devs know this. Like, if you just search Reddit and just search on Reddit like, why don't I have wish lists? Whoever wrote that, that OP didn't know this stuff. Okay? So, it's okay if people don't know stuff. We shouldn't yell at them. Just send them a link to this video, okay? Um okay, so here's here's how you get Here Here's a secret. Make a good game. Don't make a bad one. Register at howtomarketagame.com/festivals,

my new tool. Put your email address in there, okay? And you'll get tagged, and then I will send you when a new festival is about to close. Like, hey, this festival is closing in a 24 hours. You better sign up, okay? So, you apply for those festivals, then you get curated into the festival, and then you get wish lists, which are aka curation tokens. And then Steam curates you into visibility because they saw those curation tokens and like, oh, this game's got a lot of curation tokens. We should curate it onto the front page. And then you make the money, and then you get to quit your stupid job. And I'm not saying you're going to this is get rich quick. This is not get rich quick. This is hard, okay, folks? This is the hardest part, making a good game. This is not get rich quick. And I'm not trying to make you a millionaire or to sell out or to like ruin your vision or your dreams. I just want you to quit your stupid job. Just just quit your stupid job. That's enough money. If you can just quit your stupid job, you're a winner in my book. I mean, you're a winner in my book if you just finish a game, but this is kind of my goal. I just want you to make enough

money to quit your stupid job. All right. Um so, here's my call to action. Don't subscribe to YouTube. This YouTube channel does not get you into festivals. You know what gets you into festivals? This. howtomarketagame howtomarketagame.com/festivals Click this get notified when festivals are closing. Click that, and then put your email address in there. You'll get the You'll get the secret emails about the festivals, okay? It's all free. There's no There's no upsells. Like, you get your first three notifications. It's 100% free. Like, every single festival gets it I It's not like I charge you. And there's some There's some services uh like on Patreon and stuff, they'll charge you for access to their list. This list, 100% free. I'm not charging cuz this is like critical. Crucial, crucial, crucial. You got to sign up for this stuff. So, I'm not going to paywall this stuff. This is the good stuff, okay? Do it. Okay? All right, that's it. With that, don't subscribe to my YouTube channel. Just subscribe to that previous thing, how to market a game.com/festivals. What I want you to do next after you've filled out that form and

you're signed up for the the alerts, I want you to close YouTube and work on your game. You've watched too much YouTube. You're done. There's nothing left to learn. This I told you so many secrets, your brain is probably out. Um watch this next video. This next video that I'm linking here is a uh a basically a 1-hour Pomodoro timer of just sound so that you can work on your game. I want you cuz YouTube is trying to hijack your your dopamine sensors and they want to show you another video that's addictive. I don't like that. I'm here for you. You need to finish your game. I don't want you to watch any more YouTube. So, click this video. It's just some nice white noise. You get an a 25 minutes and then it tells you to take a break and then you do 25 more minutes. It's awesome. It gets your game done. You should do that. Don't watch any more YouTube. You're done. There's no more secrets to learn. That's it. Bye. Hadouken!