How to Announce a Game on Steam and Gather 50,000 Wishlists in a Month — The Perelesoq Case Study

The team at perelesoq provided detailed advice on how to announce a game on Steam and shared their own experience.

This material was first published on the team’s Telegram channel “Game Marketing.” With the team’s kind permission, we are publishing it on our pages.

A month has passed since the announcement of our new game “Kiosk on Lenin Street”. During this time, we have received nearly 50,000 wishlists, numerous congratulations on a successful announcement, and many questions about how we achieved this.

Anticipating questions — let me say, we did not spend a dime on paid placements. All resources went into creating a demo and developing a trailer.

We decided to write a small report on how we came up with the new game and what we did before the announcement. We hope our advice will be useful to other indie developers.

Tip 1: Make More Games

Let’s provide a bit of context for those unfamiliar with our studio: we began working on our debut game Torn Away in 2019. At that time, thanks to the idea, we managed to get funding, gather a team of highly skilled specialists, and went through numerous festival selections. Unfortunately, the complex release path of the game delayed Torn Away’s release until 2023. The context changed significantly, and the genre of narrative indie adventures and the chosen mechanics (point-and-click, platforming, puzzles, etc.) in general became outdated and sold less.

Some said what we lacked was a professional publisher and a marketing budget: the game was good after all, won a considerable number of awards at international festivals, and received excellent reviews from players and critics.

We disagree.

Thanks to our team members’ marketing background, we understand the mechanics of promotion and have done enough work. Undoubtedly, publishers have direct contacts with influencers and the press, time and resources for preparing creatives, and funds for targeting. But none of this will help games that are not relevant to the market.

Let’s recall examples of games in a genre close to Torn Away that were released in 2023 and had a publisher, and thus a budget and influence far greater than ours:

In reality, there are many more such games; these just came to mind first.

Promoting games of complex genres and themes is a Sisyphean task. You do a lot, but even when you manage to achieve wide reach (we had successful posts on Reddit and TikTok) — the output is minimal.

Our first tip: make and release games faster. Several less-than-perfect released games will benefit you more than one project that drags on indefinitely. If you don’t like this approach, consider that your first imperfect games can become the production and media platform for your dream game. Always keep in mind that your goal is to release a game and help it find its audience, as we make games for people.

Tip 2: Don’t Grasp the First Idea

The development of “Kiosk” began long before we launched Unity. We spent ample time studying the market and brainstorming ideas to create a game that would be important to us, needed by players, and interesting to the press. If your indie game isn’t selling itself at the idea level, you’re likely to fail as early as the publisher or investor search stage.

We developed the new project, striving to maintain the studio’s identity.

After the development of Torn Away, we got tired of tackling social issues, so we decided to make our next game lighter and more fun. We believe that the post-Soviet setting can be interesting to players worldwide — it has its own aesthetics and a unique pleasant vibe. Therefore, we continue to make games about the places we know well.

It’s also important to us to create beautiful games. This time we chose two visual styles: pixel-art, which has its own audience of enthusiasts, and the PS1 game style, popular in recent years. The game combines first and third-person gameplay — we have used this technique in Torn Away. We find it essential to both showcase character design and immerse the player in the main character.

Tip 3: (Sometimes) Think of the Game as Future Media Content

Indie developers often miss the announcement as a newsworthy event, assuming they’ll engage in marketing later. We saw it as an opportunity to evaluate the virality of our idea in advance and improve something before release.

We created the demo of “Kiosk” so that content from it would become creatives for the trailer and Steam page. Therefore, even at an early stage of the game’s development, we conceived several triggers that would work on the game’s virality. Humor, atmosphere, stylistics, references, memes, partnerships — all should work for both the game’s idea and its virality.

Our audience consists of people who, like us, want to escape from the burdens of life into pleasant memories of their youth and the cozy 2000s. Our team includes both people over 30 and 20-year-olds — each contributed something personal to the game. This genuine approach is also significant. When developers try to “jump on a bandwagon” purely for the hype, the audience senses the insincerity, and the effect is the opposite.

Examples of triggers we used:

1) Iconic nostalgic brands. For instance, “Chipsos Crunchy” — a nod to “Cheetos Crunchy.” This product is frequently mentioned in Dima Sayenduk’s videos. We like his content and find it quite close to our game, so we hoped Dima would notice our trailer and support us with a repost (spoiler: he did).

2) Voice actor and a platinum meme. We contacted the legendary Andrey Gavrilov and invited him to provide the authentic single-voice narration for our trailer in Russian. It naturally included a nod to his signature meme phrase.

3) Used (and licensed) a track by the band Mumiy Troll. The track “Vladivostok 2000” is a true hit: it was the opening song for the Russian launch of the MTV channel and loved by people of all ages.

4) Added a cat that can be petted. Always do this; it’s never a bad idea.

To some indie developers, these kinds of collaborations seem very expensive, so they don’t even try to organize them, and that’s a mistake. Look for contacts, write, ask. Maybe someone will agree to support you for free, or the amount will be affordable.

Tip 4: Don’t Neglect Social Media

Everyone talks about it, everyone tries it, many fail. But there’s no escaping the need to maintain your social media. Here are our media inputs before the announcement:

Studio community and social networks. As it turned out, our first game isn’t very suitable for forming any kind of gaming community or fandom. We didn’t have the resources to dedicate a lot of time to SMM and community management in the last year after the release. Our social media audience is small, and we haven’t managed to grow accounts on the social networks whose algorithms are best suited for promotion (Twitter, TikTok). So the contribution of the studio’s social networks to the success of the announcement is minimal.
Personal social media of the studio’s head. Artem Koblov has an influential network of game development channels on Telegram. There, Artem strives to maintain a balance — 80% useful content, 10% promotion of others' projects, 10% self-promotion. Thanks to this, the channels have an active audience that appreciates the content and is interested in materials about the studio’s games, willing to support us with a like or a wishlist. Being useful or interesting and regularly posting is the most reliable way of promotion. Possibly more reliable than maintaining active SMM pages for a game set to release years later.
The studio’s brand itself. The penultimate major news about perelesoq was the release of Torn Away; the last was about the studio’s financial challenges. This created an interesting narrative of overcoming difficulties, which is appealing to the press. In our opinion, without the prior release of Torn Away, the announcement of “Kiosk” wouldn’t have been as loud. This reflects our first tip about earlier projects potentially paving the way.
Another announcement… of another Russian game about a kiosk, but with a doomer aesthetic. It occurred two weeks before our announcement and became quite viral. At first, we were tense — it seemed important to be, if not the only one in the market, then at least the first — but in the end, the other announcement greatly helped us. Both the press and commenters compared the two kiosk games, aiding the promotion of both. Moreover, we realized our projects aren’t direct competitors: we offer players different emotional and gameplay experiences, which is more decisive for purchase than the setting. Now we even have a joint chat for the two kiosks.

Tip 5: Spend Time on Preparation

Below we list everything we did while preparing for the announcement. The volume of tasks demonstrates why even indie studios might need a dedicated media specialist.

Demo. This early demo version of the game was intended solely for creating creatives and showcasing gameplay to potential publishers and investors.
Trailer. We made three versions of the trailer — in English, Russian, and Chinese, not just adding subtitles but choosing unique 3D models of nostalgic items for each language and translating the textures with names. We also made subtitles for YouTube and versions of the trailer with embedded subtitles for Steam pages in planned localization languages: Japanese, French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazilian), and German.
Steam pages. Creatives on the Russian, English, and Chinese versions of the page were unique and fully translated. We tried to make the Steam page “step-by-step explanatory” of the gameplay and considered that some players only look at screenshots and text under the capsule, while others prefer to read the page and pay attention to gifs. We notice that the conversion from social media post views to wishlists is quite high, and we believe this is strongly linked to the page’s appeal and clarity of the expected gameplay experience.
Press kit. We prepared a press kit in three languages, drafted a press release text in case someone in the press preferred to make a copy from a ready-made text, and added unique images to the screenshot folder that aren’t on Steam. Our press kit for the announcement turned out to be as comprehensive as Torn Away’s press kit was by its release. Here’s an example of our press kit in Russian.
Video creatives and gifs. Our trailer is two minutes long, so it gets cut in some social networks and doesn’t hold viewer attention as well in networks like TikTok. Thus, we created shorter gifs for Reddit and a shortened trailer version for vertical videos.
Activity on Reddit. We joined Reddit long before the announcement: Artem maintained his personal account, used since Torn Away’s development days, posting in game dev subreddits with strict policies against self-promotion. Another account was created solely for “Kiosk”: posting things we find atmospheric and nostalgic, and discussing “Kiosk” in subreddits dedicated to games and art. It hasn’t yielded large reach yet, but promoting Torn Away taught us to value every click and wishlist. Plus, we use Reddit to test western audiences’ reactions to the game itself. We worried the post-Soviet aesthetics and nostalgic themes might be misunderstood by foreign audiences, but received many positive comments about the game’s appeal.
Collecting press and influencer contacts, target groups, and channels. We began doing this back in summer, so some contacts became outdated, but the databases still proved useful. We started the mailing a week before the announcement from various emails: one for the English press, one for the Japanese and Chinese, and one for other languages. We translated the emails into all languages using ChatGPT, assuming such letters attract more attention. We understood the translation might be inaccurate, so we clarified that the game itself will be localized by professionals, ensuring the press doesn’t develop a biased view of the project’s quality.

Tip 6: Plan the Announcement or Release Day

This will help you stay organized. Here’s what we did:

Pre-launch. We published the game’s page 12 hours before the official announcement time. This doesn’t affect the algorithms but allowed us to avoid breaking an embargo and ensure the wishlist button works as intended;
Coordinate with the media. A few days before the announcement, we coordinated publication times with press representatives and influencers, and on the announcement day, we sent reminders to all email addresses;
Content. Scheduled YouTube trailer publications for a specific time to avoid distractions on a busy day. We pre-wrote and drafted an article for DTF, and actively responded to comments. Uploaded vertical videos to various social networks, and posted several times on Reddit in the evening.
Media coverage. Throughout the day, we tried to collect mentions of “Kiosk” to better understand how widely the news spread and where wishlists were coming from. Due to time zone differences, Russian editions engaged first, with international media following. Coverage in Telegram channels significantly expanded audience reach.

Results

Here are some of the most viewed publications. This isn’t all, but the most indicative posts. At some point, tons of posts began growing organically.

TikTok

Telegram

Reddit

Japanese X

Chinese YouTube:

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14oftYyEvZ/

Standard YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udx3RtsUt1I

The trailer in Russian got into recommendations and became a superb source of regular wishlists. It currently has over 120,000 views and the numbers continue to grow.

We estimate that the total reach exceeded 2 million impressions.

You can view Steam analytics here:

From this, it’s clear that almost every third person who came to our page added it to their wishlist. Such a high conversion from page views to wishlists indicates that the page is optimally designed and meets audience expectations.

Due to the large amount of external traffic, Steam is actively showcasing our page on other games’ pages.

What brought the most results? We think the initial boost was secured by Telegram, and a stable rate over the week was provided by the trailer on YouTube. We got into recommendations there too — the video now has 120,000 views.

***

Thank you for reading, and we hope this was useful!

In general, you can work with us: write to perelesoq@gmail.com or DM our founder Artem on Telegram. We help with announcements and other marketing activities, consult, and are generally open to various collaborations.

And don’t forget to follow our game marketing channel on Telegram: https://t.me/marketagame