Hellow, it’s Mellows!
This is the first post on this blog, so let me tell you how I ended up here.
I’ve worked in marketing for about 15 years. Big brands, big budgets. Samsung, Google, Disney, Activision Blizzard. At one point I was helping Warner Bros. Games look for studios in Spain and Latin America that were worth buying.
So I know how the industry sells games when there’s money behind them.
What I didn’t know was how a solo dev does it. No publisher, no budget, no team. Just a game and a Steam page.
It started with Steam pages
A while ago I got into the habit of opening Steam pages at night. Not for work. I just couldn’t stop wondering why some really good games sold almost nothing, while others that looked pretty average sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
The more pages I opened, the less it looked like luck. Usually it came down to the game itself. Could you get it in a few seconds? Did the capsule make you want to click? Did it look like something people were already buying?
That’s marketing too. It just happens way earlier than most people think.
I’m not an expert on this (yet)
I want to be honest here. I’ve never launched a game on Steam. I don’t have a system to sell you, and I’m not going to pretend I do.
What I do have is a lot of marketing experience, a lifelong love for games, and no problem at all with being wrong in public.
So I’m doing the obvious thing. I’m making my first Steam game, and I’m going to share everything along the way. The wishlists, the Steam page versions, the numbers, the stuff that works and the stuff that flops.
The idea I keep coming back to
Most advice treats marketing as something you start when the game is almost done. You finish it, you cut a trailer, and then you figure out who it’s for.
I think that’s backwards. By the time you’re making the trailer, most of the big decisions are already made. The genre, the hook, how the game looks in a single screenshot. If those don’t work, a great trailer won’t fix it.
That’s what I want to test with my own game. Can you make a game easier to market by thinking about it from day one? I don’t know yet. We’ll find out together.
Who this is for
If you’re a solo dev or a small team and you want your game to actually sell on Steam, this is for you. Even if you’ve never touched marketing and the word “funnel” makes you a bit sick. I’ll keep it simple.
And if you’re a marketer who wants to understand games better, pull up a chair too.
What’s coming
Here’s what I’ll be posting:
- Steam page breakdowns, where we open up real pages and look at why they work, or why they don’t
- Devlogs from my first Steam game, with real numbers
- Small free tools to help your Steam page do its job
- What I learn from Steam festivals like Next Fest
Starting from zero
No audience, no channel, no community yet. Just me, a game and this blog.
Which is kind of the point. If I manage to grow this from nothing, you’ll see exactly how I did it. If I don’t, you’ll see that too.
Welcome to the lab. Let’s figure out how to market a game on Steam, together.
MrMellows