Mjeno

Hey! Came here from your Twitter announcement. As an indie dev myself, I wonder about a few things:

• How did the many, many features of your game come about? I was very surprised to discover the whole strategy gameplay aspect and I wondered whether the game had always been planned like that or if you kept piling things on during development as that tends to happen. :D
• How much money and effort did you put into marketing and do you see much value in it all? I have a feeling that a game's quality is by far the most important factor when it comes to sales.
• Any other numbers you could share? I'm trying to build an understanding of how follows, wishlists, reviews etc. on Steam relate to sales.

Thanks a lot, congrats on the milestone and best of luck with your games!

Thank you for the insights! I knew that you were at gamescom because I scored and cut the Indie Arena Booth trailers that year. :D Made sure to put your game in, it was the first time I saw it and found it intriguing.

As for the marketing topic, I asked because it's a topic I'm currently questioning my opinion on. I don't want to go too far off-topic, but I do want to add some context to my question.

From talking to some financially successful devs lately, I've been getting the impression that little marketing (which is very different from no marketing) is all a great game needs to really take off. I quit my game marketing job a few months ago and of course I wouldn't say that all the things I did in those two years were in vain. I'm now doing a lot of marketing for my own game because I do think it has some value.

At the same time, I feel like conventional wisdom (as touted by some publishers) is often wrong and outdated; throwing money at press, influencers, events, merch etc. often yields mediocre results. On the other hand, having a great game that people recommend to one another (and that is often on sale) has worked in several cases that I know of, where little marketing was done. The success of Airships, a good self-marketed game created by a solo dev with no publisher attached, does seem to confirm that as well.

I did mean to respond to zarkonnen's answer and yours at the same time, since you elaborated on the marketing thing and I wanted to add my two cents as well. Sorry for the confusion. :D