Pocket Cat Desktop gathered 777 wishlists in a week—this is a small number, but it exceeded the expectations of its creator
Social networks, by themselves, generate a rather modest number of wishlists. This was confirmed by the CTO of the Balancy service, Andrey Apanasik, who recently announced his own game called Pocket Cat Desktop.
Pocket Cat Desktop is an idle game about a cat that roams right on the user’s desktop, reacting to actions and taking notes. At the same time, the cat needs to be fed and generally taken care of.
In his blog, Apanasik shared statistics on the game's wishlists. We have highlighted a few points.
- Apanasik announced Pocket Cat Desktop on September 27 and launched the game's Steam page at the same time.
- To promote the project, he posted on two personal Telegram channels (with 11,000 and 3,600 subscribers), which were then picked up by several other gaming channels. Additionally, Apanasik wrote about Pocket Cat Desktop on Reddit, DTF, Pikabu, and X.
- During the first week, the game was added to wishlists 777 times. The developer initially expected to see around 100 wishlists, so even these not-so-large numbers were encouraging to him.
- According to Apanasik’s calculations, posts with UTM tags generated a total of 269 wishlists. Of these, 141 came from his own posts on Telegram and their reposts, 64 from X, 28 from DTF, and 22 from Pikabu.
- Slightly fewer, around 200 wishlists, were generated by posts from two major third-party Telegram channels ("KB Games" and "Tech Chat"), whose editors independently noticed Pocket Cat Desktop and decided to share it with their audience for free. It is worth noting that although these channels brought a noticeable number of wishlists compared to other sources, the conversion rate was low — posts about Pocket Cat Desktop there gathered over 40,000 views, but only a few subscribers ended up being interested in the game.
- Reddit also contributed a solid share of wishlists, where the promotion did not go entirely smoothly (a post in one subreddit was removed) but was relatively effective. According to the developer, it is quite possible to find an audience on Reddit, with relatively good results coming from postings in small communities centered on specific genres.
- Regarding the breakdown by countries, most wishlists for Pocket Cat Desktop were generated by gamers from Russia (411), Kazakhstan (182), and Ukraine (53). U.S. residents added the game to wishlists only 17 times. In the future, Apanasik wants to attract more attention to it among gamers from China, Japan, and other East Asian countries, but they are currently not showing much interest.
In conclusion, Apanasik urged other developers not to neglect marketing. In his opinion, promotion is as important as the actual creation of games. Ignoring this can risk a lack of sales.
The release date for Pocket Cat Desktop is still unknown, but it is expected that a demo version will appear during 2027.