Freerunners Steam Next Fest Postmortem

Increase in Wishlists & Follows: Before the Next Fest, I was getting very few wishlists on a daily basis, so although I was getting relatively small numbers during the Next Fest it was definitely a nice boost to everything.

Post Next Fest baseline Wishlist Increase: It’s only been a couple of days since Next Fest finished but I am seeing wishlist additions at a higher daily rate than I would normally get. For example yesterday I got 7 wishlists even though everything is over. Potentially this is people who downloaded the demo but are only playing it now or people are seeing let’s plays of the game that were recorded over Next Fest.

Having Localisation: I localised into Russian, Spanish, French and Simplified Chinese. It could be purely coincidence but Russian was my second largest player base with Singapore and China coming in 3rd and 4th respectively (Singapore also commonly speaking Mandarin). So my localisation either helped bring in more players or at the very least the players that played were able to enjoy the game in their own language so seems like a win-win either way.

Having a Demo build-up early: Getting demo builds up on Steam way before Next Fest was very beneficial. Both for refining the demo itself, making it solid and stable but also for getting more confident in putting out live builds to Steam. I saw one Next Fest game that had to take down their game after the first day because of crashing and other issues, in their own words “Frankly, we pushed this demo out in haste to meet the festival deadline”. I feel for them, it’s a real shame because you only get one chance with Next Fest.

Engaging with people on Twitter (X): I saw lots of accounts on Twitter (X) asking what games to play for Next Fest and I spent a chunk of time each evening, searching and replying to people’s tweets, letting them know about my game (with a link to the store page). I think this must have been doing something because around one-fifth of all storepage visits were from external traffic and this was a big chunk of the marketing I did actually do.

Marketing, Marketing, Marketing: By far the biggest mistake I made was being a classic cliche of an indie game developer. Spending a long time making a game only to do very little marketing. I did have a rough plan for marketing and a whole Trello list of things to do but in truth I just didn’t get around to doing them. I could make excuses like I’m doing this solo and that I work very long hours in my main job on Marauders, but realistically with the time I had, I just focused too much on the development side of the game/demo and not enough on the marketing. I didn’t contact press or streamers, I didn't do the suggested Live Stream, I didn’t rework my Steam page assets (The GIFs, images and trailer on my store page are all from when I first launched my Steam page). Realistically, my marketing was a post on Linked in and Twitter engagement. At the end of the day, I’m not going to beat myself up about it, I’m just going to learn from it and do better in the future.

Conversion Rates: Looking at my conversion rates they don’t seem great: A 1.5% clickthrough to my store page and 15% for wishlisting. I’m not sure what good conversion rates are but from my wishlisting rate of 15% percent (which costs nothing for a person to do) I would imagine it probably means a very low purchase conversion rate.

No Explosion of Wishlists and Followers: Although I’m grateful for every wishlist and follow I got, I’m fully aware that the numbers I got are still small and I’m going to have to work hard to increase them.

Have Content / Assets Prepared: I was making the promotional assets (GIFs, images) the night before Next Fest, and during it. Things would have been so much easier if I had stuff prepared in advance. For example, having the images ready for a Steam announcement post would have made releasing the post a much smoother process.

Needing A Second Steam Account To Test Your Demo: If you have the full version of your game in your Steam library then you can’t test the Demo. I had to create a second Steam account (without the full game in its library). Then use that account to test the demo whenever I did an update to it.

Wishlist Numbers Update Once A Day: It may seem silly but I didn’t realise that wishlist numbers are updated once per day. I was checking in on the first day of the Next Fest and was like ah crap I’m not getting any traction at all. But when I woke up the next day and checked I had some, so keep that in mind!

People Arn’t Signed Into Webrowser Steam: I have a button in my demo that prompts players to wishlist the game. When they press it, it launches the Freerunners Steam page in their browser. The problem with this is that very few people are actually logged into Steam on their browser, creating extra friction for getting those wishlists. After playing other people demos I realised that a far better way would have been to launch the Steam overlay with the Freerunners store page, allowing players to wishlist the game in far fewer steps.

Prepare More Content Ahead of Time: Before the Next Fest I should have prepared more content to share. I know I fell short on actual marketing but I should have at least prepped some new GIFS, some videos, had banners prepared for my Steam posts. I did this on the first / second day of Next Fest which ate up a bunch of time.

Working On The Game During Next Fest Wasn’t Realistic: Naively, I thought I would still have time to work on the core game while Next Fest was running. However, this wasn’t the case. A mixture of doing longer days at my day job, while also trying to promote the game in the evenings left me with little time to do any meaty development work over the week. If I had prepared more in advance maybe this wouldn’t have been less of an issue though.

Push Back Freerunners Launch: I’m thinking to roughly August this year (I have a lot of work commitments in Q1 and Q2). Giving me time to unify the marketing and the game development direction, so everything feels aligned.

Concentrate on Marketing: There is so much to unpack here but broadly speaking: make a solid marketing plan, think about the audiences I want to hit and what the angle will be with them as well as most importantly acting on the marketing plan, both consistently as well as building to a launch day. I also want to see if I can increase my conversion rates (click-throughs and wishlists) via making incremental changes to my store page.

Refining the Gameplay: On the game development side of things, I’m going to playthrough my whole game and look for ways that I can reinforce the core concept of the game: Flow and rhythm and of movement. Alongside this I will continue to add polish, juice up the gameplay and fix bugs! With the goal of making the game a very solid product for launch!