Case study: how Pawnbarian's "chess" bagel collected over 10 thousand vishlists on Steam

Indie developer Jan Wojtecki shared his experience in promoting his Pawnbarian bagel. Having no funds for at least some marketing, he managed to collect more than 10 thousand vishlists on Steam by the release. The developer spoke about working with streamers, game festivals and other effective promotion channels.

Briefly about the game

Pawnbarian is a puzzle with roguelike elements, the average race in which takes 15-30 minutes. Movements on the game board and battles with monsters here take place according to chess rules. The player has cards with figures at his disposal that allow him to perform various actions.

Voytetsky worked on the development alone, and his brother Peter helped him with the art.

Pawnbarian will be released on September 24. Later, the developer plans to release the game on Android and iOS.

The main thing about the marketing of the project

Voytetsky shared his experience on Reddit.

• In the early stages of development, he tried to find a publisher, but regularly faced rejections. After Pawnbarian attracted attention, publishers themselves began to turn to Wojtecki. However, at that time he had already decided to publish the game on his own: “Being a tiny indie developer, publishers began to take me seriously only when I stopped needing their services.”
• To promote Pawnbarian, the developer did not hire marketers, did not purchase advertising and did not spend money on other paid activities.
• In 2019, the Rock Paper Shotgun portal wrote about the project. Together with participation in the Polish exhibition Poznań Game Arena, this gave the project the first vishlist.
• Since the game had short sessions and was not demanding on hardware, the project was ideal for creating a small playable demo. Voytetsky released a trial web version, which collected 230 thousand launches on Kongregate, 43 thousand on itch.io , as well as 26 thousand — on Newgrounds.

Pawnbarian vishlists growth chart: turquoise line — new vishlists; lilac line — the ratio of new vishlists and deletions from the wish list; red line — deletions from vishlists; yellow-green line — vishlists converted into real players (so far these are just a few testers who were given keys before the release)

• From social networks, the developer decided to focus on Reddit. He deliberately didn’t post anything to the popular r/gaming section, choosing more niche and genre subreddits. Some of Voytetsky’s posts scored from 100 to 1000 upvotes.
• He also tried to cover Pawnbarian on Imgur, but was unable to achieve any success there. At the same time, the developer notes that there are games for which this promotion channel turned out to be effective.
• Voytetsky made several posts on his personal page and in a closed group for developers on Facebook, as well as in some Discord channels. It is unknown exactly how these publications influenced the vishlist.
• Participation in Steam festivals turned out to be quite effective. Pawnbarian was presented twice as part of Tiny Teams from Yogcast Games, which added several thousand vishlist to the game. Earlier, Valve itself noted that participation in demo festivals increases additions to vishlists by 421%.
• Most of all, the growth of the vishlist was influenced by streamers. In the spring of this year, Northernlion conducted a stream on Pawnbarian, after which he uploaded the video to YouTube (now he has 155 thousand views).
• As a result, other smaller streamers and bloggers also paid attention to the game. Before the first Northernlion video, Pawnbarian had less than 4 thousand vishlists. Within a few months, their number exceeded 8 thousand.

In comparison with streamers, Wojtecki calls the influence of gaming media a drop in the bucket.

“Of course, it’s nice to read a positive article from a person who knows his job. I can show this kind of material to my mom, but I wouldn’t hesitate to exchange it for a video of another Northernlion, who didn’t even particularly like my demo. With all due respect to journalists, but it seems that the modern press writes for people from the industry, and not for gamers,” the developer says at the end of his post.

While Wojtecki does not know how these thousands of vishlists are converted into purchases. He promises to tell you about it after the release.