Is Releasing A Steam Demo Worth It? (My FINAL Next Fest Demo Results)

okay should you launch a demo uh and more specifically should you launch a demo with nextfest so nextfest February 2025 just wrapped up and I launched My Demo I actually launched two demos with nextfest and I have numbers for you so I'm going to share the numbers with you and show you kind of was it worth it was it not worth it and I think you'll be surprised because well I'm not surprised at the end of the day I found that the primary driver of wish lists was audience not necessarily nextfest and I'll explain what I mean so let's jump into the data okay and by the way you can still play the Twisted Tower demo below um I have a goal and I'll tell you the goal at the end of this video I have

a goal of getting a certain amount of wish lists click the link and hey I'm not done yet getting wish list just cuz next Fest is over doesn't mean we don't keep trying to get wish list so please wish list play the demo below if you like it follow it um why would I ignore it uh follow it and also wish list it as well um it would mean the world to me I think you'll love it it's a really interesting spooky creepy Bioshock esque carnival game um with a really interesting story I love this game I'm really really proud of it it's been 3 years in the making so click the link below while you listen to this video and you can just go ahead and start downloading it and also uh wish list it and like it that would mean so much to me now um okay so this is teasing this was teasing right here that was around February 5th is all the way up until Fe the launch of the demo which is February 14th and we're looking at somewhere around 2,000 wishless okay and what do I

mean by teasing well I have a Twitter following I have an email list you know I have a YouTube channel and I'll just sort of tease say hey the Demo's going to drop you know it's coming up go ahead and wish list right so I got 2,000 wish lists from that then I launched the demo now I launched the demo before nextfest though this is a debate that's currently happening right now um with Publishers and developers do you launch your demo two weeks prior to nextfest or do you launch just before nextfest or even right at nextfest well I decided to launch two weeks prior to nextfest and the reason why is because I was told to I was told to by 3D Realms my publisher and I was also told to by valve valve sent out emails that said

hey go ahead and launch your demo so that the Press can check it out before nextfest so that's what I did um and the results were pretty crazy for this pre nextfest demo launch 26,000 wish lists so we're looking at almost 28,000 or no more than 288,000 wish lists before nextfest even started which is interesting now you may wondering what all these different Peaks are this was the launch right now mind you I did not I did not notify my current wish list and by the way these numbers here these are wish list additions so prior to this I had all these other wish lists that I got for years I didn't notify them at launch I did not tell them that the demo dropped okay because I was told to wait and notify

around here okay so we we'll talk about that this was all driven from my social media and more importantly eventually because of the social media traffic it hit the trending tab okay so the new and trending tab which is right here so you can see here on February 12th we hit the trending free so not new in trending I meant trending free we hit the trending free tab we were number four which is really awesome I was really really stoked by that so that's what that little Peak is there so I think we were probably on the on the trending tab for a couple days here which resulted in like 2200 wishlist a day and then we saw a drop and then a big pop the Big Pop

was streamers okay so how did that happen well it's a combination of probably streamers just picking it up from the trending tab but it was also me uh or me and also but mainly my um my team member Hector who was full-time he was full-time just sending out emails to every single um streamer we could find and we you know we got some really big streamers to play I'm going to pull it up here we have some really big streamers to play um let's see if I can find the big ones this is a great video he did so good um let's go to view count if we take a look at the view count sort by views you'll see that yeah super horror bro I believe he posted around this time here says two weeks ago let's see what two weeks ago was two weeks ago

was not the 25th but the 18th um if we take a look at the data here yep it's somewhere around there um so yeah I mean I think there was someone who did it a little a couple days before which also got us plenty of views oddly enough some of the titles of demos when someone titles their video they might not even include your your demo name right so if you type in staying overnight at an amusement park it should show up here let's type in Twisted Tower there it is so Fusion Z gamer I believe this is Fusion Z gamer right here now sometimes you have to go into the streamer video and see if they Linked In the description the game what if they didn't you need to reach out to them and try and get them but uh Fusion Z gamer was generous and put the the link

there so again this is prior to nextfest right this is prior to nextfest 28,000 wish list now for those of you who are curious if do do streamers matter of course they matter of course they matter it's eyes it's eyes on your game that's a huge thing so boom this is proof that streamers matter you know 5,000 wish lists in a day and when one stre stream plays another stream rep plays and another stream rep plays and another streamer plays the other question is does building your own audience matter does it really matter Thomas to to build an audience on YouTube and and Thomas yours your audience is just game developers they're not Gamers well if you could pump and just slowly Drive traffic and build wish lists to say 10,000 20,000 30,000 slowly over time then you can have a nice demo launch

like this that gets you on the trending Tab and then when you get on the trending tab then woo you get a streamer to play the game right and it's like I was about to say it's like magic but actually it's the opposite of magic there's no hope here there's no incantation um it's all manufactured it's you're pushing people to look at your game and if you have a built-in audience you're golden and so I know what a lot of you are thinking and we'll get to the final numbers here for nextfest but I know a lot of you are thinking you're probably thinking well this is really unfair it's not relative to me or relevant to me Thomas because I don't have an audience and my answer to you is then build one um build an audience I've been saying this for I think three years now

you don't have to build a a massive audience just build something an an email list with a th000 people on it a Twitter following of 3,000 followers a YouTube channel and you'll notice I'm not going to talk about subscribers a YouTube channel that gets 2,000 views per video subscribers don't really matter funnily enough with YouTube it's what you really want is the YouTube algorithm to understand who you are and the way you get it to understand who you are is to be consistent it's kind of like Friendship Post consistent content and the algorithm will know who you are um again just like friendship you want to be a consistent friend so that people know who you are and they can trust you the same is true with the algorithm it's not really about subscribers all that said just a small amount of views um th like thousands of views here and thousands of views here and thousands of views here can slowly build up your wish wish list to something like 10 to 20,000

wish lists and then you can hopefully hit some trending tabs and then get uh people to play uh streamers to play your games like this and there was other streamers who played bang bang bang bang and we just started slowly getting more and more wish list leading up to again a total of 28,000 interestingly enough I'm not sure why this is but leading up to next nextfest we just started getting an increase of wish list I may have been streamers again it's hard to know for sure there's not really a way to track this stuff um but there's you know a bunch of uh streamers who have played some small ones right not a ton of use but I'm still very grateful for it and some bigger ones right um if we filter by view count

you could see the kind of views we're not getting we're not getting like Mega views we're not like getting millions of views we're looking at 110,000 here 107,000 from splatter Gat 990,000 from Alpha Beta 73,000 from horror game movie 65,000 from Sev right some of these aren't even in English which is totally fine who cares um 53,000 from I can't read that so A a a non-american channel I've never seen this one this is awesome did they include a link in the description I'm done spending an obene amount of M I'm just curious at this point yeah Isn't that cool now what's so funny about some of these uh foreign relative to me foreign channels is some of them they can translate it in game with some kind of tool I don't I saw one I think was like a Russian player all of the game text was in

Russian it was crazy I had no idea how he did it um so it localized it in game but you can see here look they've got subtitles for the video which is awesome um so yeah just slowly getting you know different different YouTubers to play over time and again and we'll we'll we'll move to the final numbers here um again this is a combination of of my audience right the the the steam algorithm my email list and also a team member that I was willing to pay full-time he's not full-time with me all the time I just said hey can you work full-time for two weeks and just email email email I think we sent out maybe 200 emails um to top streamers and that's not a ton but they were precise emails finding people who love horror games who love like mascot

horror uh who also love Bioshock and we found those and uh pushed pushed them to play the demo um so yeah let's look at the final numbers so again do you launch your demo two weeks prior to nextfest or do you launch right at nextfest well we're going to we're going to see a bird's eye view here of the final numbers and I have no idea if this is relevant to you or not I I can't tell you I I don't have the Silver Bullet I don't have a blueprint for this I really don't I like to have Blueprints and Frameworks for things I don't for this so we're just going to look at the numbers together and you can come to your own conclusions so here is next Fest so it's pretty straightforward are pretty short actually it's just a week right so this

is next Fest here and we got 21,000 wish lists from nextfest now these are good numbers I think I think they're good numbers but uh you know what what makes um what makes this all worth it to me is the combined total right so we added about 50,000 by teasing by doing the pre nextfest demo launch and then nextfest I in my in my book I'm going to say all of this is classified as nextfest because this stuff here I don't I I really don't know I don't know if this would have been as powerful or as strong had I just launched a demo randomly but I think because because it was before nextfest you had the

press and streamers gearing up to play nextfest demos and getting sort of an early access to the demos with our Outreach I think was really really valuable because of streamers hitting and playing the game prior to nextfest I can't say for sure though I really can't but overall we added about 50,000 because of the demo and also because of nextfest and we are really close to 100,000 um I can I can't give you the exact numbers I don't I'm not sure if my publisher wants to share me share any of that but I can just say we're we're approaching 100,000 pretty quickly um which is awesome that's that's been my goal all along so that that's that's nextfest and that's the demo launch what are what are the things we've learned here we've learned that a demo is incredibly valuable I think a demo is the future or

I'm sorry it is the present marketing strategy for indie game developers uh an audience building an audience is the present marketing strategy for indie game developers uh the steam algorithm relying on the steam algorithm understanding the steam algorithm is the present marketing strategy I say present because it's changing so quickly right um it used to be hey reach out to the Press reach out to the Press reach out to the Press PC Gamer Kotaku polygon now it's like no build your own audience build those wish lists early launch a demo keep those wish lists coming and get streamers for pops right so that you can hit the the new and trending tab on Steam um there's a plenty of other ways to Market your game but uh that's that's the one that worked for me for this this next Fest so we've got a game with almost 100,000 wish lists uh I think it's going to do well the the beauty of I'll close with

this the beauty of launching a demo is that number one you can get wish lists and wishless kind of determine for you if your game is worth your time purely on a financial level right you might you may just love making games I get that but on a financial level are you going to get enough Revenue your wish list will determine that so I'm hopeful that we end up at 200,000 250,000 wish lists but the fact that you know Twisted Towers approaching 100,000 I feel I feel good I feel like it's it's been worth my time um and I think it's going to do well uh another reason why you want to do uh to drop a demo is yes you want wish list but you also want reviews you want to know how your game is like do people enjo like do they enjoy it it's good to get wish list data because you can look at wish list data and it can kind of it's a metric for okay people are people enjoying this or not but getting tan ible paragraphs from actual

players who will play the full game explaining in detail why they despise your game is wonderful it helps you so much it hurts it makes my stomach hurt it makes my body hurt it makes me feel sick reading negative reviews about something I've spent three years on but it's so important to get uh because you can take that data and you can quickly fix those things before you launch the game um and believe it or not not it's it's funny because it's not like you're going to get a thousand negative things it's usually the same thing over and over and over again and so it's like oh I'll just fix that one thing so in the case of Twisted Tower we have some optimization work to do I mean that's that's the main issue with Twisted Tower so there you go there you go play Twisted Tower below click the link below play the game leave a review wishlist it it would mean the world to me hey I'm not done getting wish list yet we want to approach 100,000 so please or we want to hit 100,000 so play the demo below to

help uh get 100,000 I'll do a a post about getting 100,000 um and that'll be because of you so thank you so so much um I'll talk to you guys later cheers