Marketing a silly puzzler on Steam, pros and cons

Summary · qwen2.5:32b

The developers of "Bulbo's Belief System," a puzzle platformer inspired by a successful game jam entry, face challenges in marketing their unique but less popular genre on Steam, despite positive feedback and appearances in curated showcases. The game has gained 12,880 wishlists but underperformed during Steam Next Fest, highlighting difficulties in attracting organic traffic due to limited genre tags. Notably, the game received a promotional video with 139k views from Icely Puzzles, indicating potential for niche success.

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Marketing challenges and opportunities for an indie puzzle game on Steam

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<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>We are making a cute silly puzzler called Bulbo's Belief System, a puzzle platformer, one of the no no genres of Steam.</p> <p>Why are we making the game? Because we won a judge's choise at a game jam with it (Bigmode Game Jam '25). People that tried the original prototype asked for us to continue it. We love the concept.</p> <p>What's the challenge? This kind of games don't usually sell, so we are not getting organic traffic that games from other popular genres get. Getting a publisher and financing for something</p> <p>What are the opportunities? It's a game made by a really small team (1.7 humans in average). The art style is very unique. The game is refered as a Baba Like (for Baba is You), a somewhat unexplored space in gaming, even though Baba is You was like a huge success. The game is inexpensive to make, so to have success we don't need a million units sold.</p> <p><strong>Pros</strong>:</p> <p>We got into nice curated showcases: </p> <p>- Expo EVA November 2025,</p> <p>- Latin American Games Showcase in December 2025, </p> <p>(here we got to 4.5k wishlists)</p> <p>- Thinky Direct and Cerebral Puzzle Showcase May 2026 and</p> <p>- Latin American Games Showcase June 2026.</p> <p>(Here we ended up with 12.2k wishlists)</p> <p>We launched a demo June 2025 that has gotten us really nice coverage by many small streamers and we got an amazing video by Icely Puzzles in September 2025 (It currently has 139k views).</p> <p><strong>Cons</strong>:</p> <p>We entered Steam Next Fest with 12.200 wishlists, we came out with about 12.880. Not a good showing, How To Market A Game predicted we would get from 1.7k wishlists to 10k or be an outlier. We were an outlier. A bad outlier.</p> <p>We don't get much organic traffic from Steam.</p> <p>Tags are insufficient to really connect our game with other games that are really like us.</p> <p><strong>Conclusions</strong></p> <p>We believe in our product, as we got amazing comments from those that have tried it, we are happy with our current amount of wishlists. We don't expect our product to be a huge hit, but we have been looking opportunities to improve the promotion of the game and we are hopeful that Steam changes in ways that the game can receive more exposure on their platform, because the demo has gotten 44 positive reviews and we feel that this doesn't feed the algorithm. Tags could be expanded to be more expressive of our strange game. Finally we are hopeful that the game might get some nominations to festivals :).</p> <p>We know we got ourselves into a low performance genre, but we are happy with it's current performance. Not impressed, not dissapointed, but still happy. We are also very gratefull of all the new spaces created by festivals and promotion events on Steam.</p> <p>What are your experiences? Any recommendations?</p> </div><!-- SC_ON --> &#32; submitted by &#32; <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/svbrand"> /u/svbrand </a> <br /> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1uodopm/marketing_a_silly_puzzler_on_steam_pros_and_cons/">[link]</a></span> &#32; <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1uodopm/marketing_a_silly_puzzler_on_steam_pros_and_cons/">[comments]</a></span>