Two weeks ago, we released our first game, Prickle, on Steam. We thought it might be interesting for other indie devs to hear about some stats, what we did before and after the release, and how it all turned out.

TL;DR - the stats:

• Wishlists before release: ~2400
• Copies sold (two weeks since release): ~500
• Reviews: Very Positive (55 reviews, 100% positive)
• The main problem: a small target audience for grid-based puzzles on Steam.
• Best method for wishlists: Steam festivals.

1. How Prickle Came About - From a Game Jam to a Steam Release

Fourteen months ago, our indie team of four developers participated in Ludum Dare 54. The theme was “Limited Space,” so we created a small, wholesome, grid-based puzzle game about a father hedgehog (DadHog) trying to bring his mischievous Hoglets back home. The main mechanic was that when two hedgehogs touched, they stuck together, making movement and rotation increasingly challenging.

The jam version had 12 levels and received very positive feedback (ranked 32 out of 2200) , with many players asking for a full game. Well, if a 12 levels game takes 72 hours to make, a 48 levels game should take around 12 days, right?

How hard can that be? (*foreshadowing intensified*)

Fourteen months later, Prickle was ready to release, complete with new mechanics, levels, music, cutscenes, menus, a hint system, undo functionality, accessibility features, dark mode, translations into 15 languages, and support for Mac, Linux, and Steam Deck. Plus, there was a LOT of playtesting.

2. Pre-Demo Marketing

First, let’s address the most important thing we learned about marketing: the market for grid-based puzzle games on Steam is ROUGH.

The puzzle game community is relatively small, and while our game is cute and wholesome, it is also difficult - and not everyone enjoys that type of challenge.

While this genre might be more popular on other platforms (Nintendo Switch, for example), the Steam audience remains relatively small.

Let’s face the facts - even the biggest grid-based puzzle hit, Baba Is You, has “only” 17K reviews, and the second most successful, Patrick’s Parabox, has 3K. These are fantastic achievements for amazing games, but compare it to superstar indie games in other genres and you start to see the problem.

Additionally, while Prickle has a unique and stylized art style that most players find charming, it doesn’t have the kind of flashy graphics that market themselves, so to speak.

We started marketing Prickle 9 months before release by creating its Steam page and aiming to gather as many wishlists as possible.

The world of indie marketing and self-publishing is tricky:

We wanted to get as many wishlists as we could before releasing a demo, but we also knew that the best method of getting wishlists is releasing a demo.

Our primary marketing efforts included:

• Posting on Reddit gamedev forums like r/IndieDev, r/Godot, and r/PuzzleVideoGames.
• Sharing updates on Twitter and Facebook gaming/gamedev groups.

We also started playtesting, which brought attention to the game as puzzle gamers started to play it.

It was also a good opportunity to open a Discord server where playtesters could give feedback and talk with the team directly.

By the time we released the demo, we had ~450 wishlists.

3. Pre-Release Marketing

We launched Prickle’s demo a week before Steam’s Next Fest.

The demo brought in around 115 wishlists, but the real game-changer was the festival itself, which brought in about 100 wishlists every day for the four days of the festival, effectively doubling our total.

Here’s what we’ve done since then and how it worked for us:

• Online festivals and events: By far the best source of wishlists, bringing in roughly 100 wishlists a day. We participated in Steam festivals like Wholesome Games and Back to School and in Devs of Color Direct.

And yet, only half of the wishlists we got in that period were from festivals. The rest were from the slow but constant flow of wishlist from our other marketing methods.

• Reddit: The best way to reach a wide audience, BUT: even though tens of thousands of people viewed our post and thousands of people entered the Steam page, only a small percentage actually wishlist the game.
• Facebook/Twitter: proved to provide a smaller amount of views, but a much higher percentage of view-to-wishlist conversion rate. That being said, Twitter was way more effective both in reaching out to new people and networking with other industry professionals - which even got us a review in PC Gamer magazine!
• Threads: a lovely place and has a supportive community of indie devs, but the small size of the network proved difficult. We still plan to continue posting on Threads, though.
• Streamers: We reached out to Twitch streamers with free keys for Prickle’s current full version build, so they can play it before it even releases.While Prickle was showcased by streamers and had quite a lot of views, none of them was followed by a large peak in wishlists. We assume it is due to the previously discussed small audience of the genre.
• Real-life events: We attended two in-person festivals and one playtesting event. We’ve also showcased Prickle at Gamescom Latam in Brazil (Where it was nominated for the best casual game award!). We’ve found that real-life events are great for networking and playtesting but less effective for wishlists, given the time and effort involved.

By release, we had ~2400 wishlists.

4. Release

We launched Prickle on November 22 with a 30% release discount.

While we hoped the game would attract enough players to appear on Steam’s New Releases page, we were also realistic about it.

In the first 24 hours, we sold ~140 copies. Today (two weeks later), we’re at ~500 copies sold.

Posting about the release led to our biggest wishlist spike - ~250 in one day, with ~600 total wishlists since launch.

Although only a small percentage of wishlisters have purchased the game, the reviews have been extremely positive, earning us a “Very Positive” rating after more than 50 reviews.

Overall, ~1100 people had played the demo and ~320 played the full game.

Prickle, sadly, didn’t end up on the New Releases page.

5. Conclusion

We knew what we were getting into when we started working on Prickle. Neither of us thought that it’s going to be a huge hit and our biggest hopes were that it would be successful in puzzle game standards - so we are very pleased with the results, so far. We are delighted to know that people are playing and enjoying Prickle, and we are thrilled to read the positive reviews. Some players even sent us photos of them playing with their children or families, which is really heartwarming.

Our top priority as a team was to enjoy the process of game making and make games we believe in and love - and it doesn’t always mean making the most profitable games, and that’s okay.

We wanted to thank everyone who playtested, wishlisted, bought, reviewed or played the game - your support really means the world to us.

You can get Prickle on Steam, or just play the free demo 🦔