Hey everyone!

I'm sharing a post that my team recently published on Reddit in the hopes that it helps some of you here as well. :)

We’re a small indie team working on Dark Queen (a 2.5D action-adventure inspired by Croatian history & mythology) and wanted to share our wishlist growth so far with a total breakdown of what worked for us.

We’ve recently crossed 5,700 wishlists, and while we’re still learning, we wanted to give back to the community by sharing our numbers, what caused spikes, and how our baseline WL growth improved after localizing our Steam page. Let’s dive in!

📈 Our Wishlist Spikes & What Caused Them

Spike 1 - Announcement Trailer + Reddit Post

We launched our first trailer and posted about it on r/Croatia (since we’re making a game based on Croatian history & mythology). This brought us around 250 WL's. Solid initial spike, but nothing crazy - still a great first step!

Spike 2 - “Games from Croatia” Steam Sale (biggest spike)

We were featured under "Coming Soon" during Steam’s Games from Croatia event. Result: ~2000 WLs in just 2 days! After that, the numbers dropped significantly but still had some trickle effect for the rest of the festival.

Spike 3 - Reboot Infogamer 2024 (Game Show Presentation)

We showcased an early prototype at Reboot Infogamer (biggest gaming event in our region). Saw a small but noticeable bump in WLs (around 120 new WL's in 2 days of the show).

Spike 4 - Featured in a Best Indie Games YouTube Video (178K Subs)

Dark Queen was featured in Top 25 EPIC Upcoming 2D Action Platformers - 2025 & Beyond.

Result: ~400 WLs in a single day after the video went live!

Spike 5 - Myths & Legends Steam Sale

We were again featured under "Coming Soon", but this time, we had a much lower spike compared to the Games from Croatia sale (Myth & Legends brought us ~650 WL's). This was expected since this event wasn’t front page promoted, but it still gave us decent visibility.

The Big Change - Localizing Our Steam Page

Just before the YouTube video that mentioned us, we launched an updated Steam page with multiple language localizations:

🇨🇳 Traditional & Simplified Chinese

🇰🇷 Korean

🇯🇵 Japanese

🇷🇺 Russian

🇫🇷 French

🇮🇹 Italian

🇪🇸 Spanish

🇧🇬 Bulgarian

🇨🇿 Czech

🇭🇺 Hungarian

🇳🇴 Norwegian

🇹🇷 Turkish

We didn’t expect immediate results, but this turned out to be a game-changer. It seemed like a perfect storm: we got a boost from the video that mentioned us, and our Steam page was ready to be shown to players across the world (I believe ~60% of Steam users don’t use English, not sure about the exact number but it’s pretty high). Our baseline has improved significantly since then and we are getting steady 30+ WL’s daily (sometimes even going to the ~100 range) and we are sitting at ~5700 right now without any marketing effort from our side besides following Chris’ advice on how to set up the game page and participating in Steam festivals.

🌟 Baseline WL Growth:

• Before localization: ~1-10 WLs per day
• After localization: 30+ WLs daily (sometimes hitting 100 WLs/day!)

What’s interesting is that we haven’t spent anything on paid marketing - we just followed Chris Zukowski’s advice on optimizing our Steam page, participating in festivals, and localizing our store page to reach a global audience. And it worked!

Our biggest takeaway? Visibility matters, and small strategic changes (like language localization) can have a huge impact on baseline wishlist growth.

Now, we’re curious - have any of you seen a similar boost from localization? Also, if you have any tips or suggestions for further improving our page or marketing strategy, we’d love to hear them!

Thanks for reading, and wishing you all big wishlist numbers! :D