Making a game is hard. Getting anyone to care might be harder. That’s why Unity launched the Indie Survival Guide – an evolving archive of Q&As, VODs, and live streams from developers and industry folks. There’s no guaranteed playbook for success, but hearing how others navigated design, business, and getting by can give you better odds.
We interviewed Daniel Zou from Pahdo Labs to get realistic insights into the strategies and tactics behind a top 10 demo in Steam Next Fest.
1. If your game features complex systems, it probably needs a demo.
Starlight Re:Volver isn’t a standard roguelite: Pahdo Labs’ anime-inspired game incorporates base-building, farming, and character customization, all in a deeply integrated social environment. Daniel notes that this mix of genres may not be immediately familiar to potential players, and that it can be difficult to communicate the social aspect of a game. A demo became essential for Pahdo Labs to effectively communicate the game’s innovative design and help potential players grasp its core appeal. Daniel emphasizes this need for clarity:
“If you’re an indie developer, you have to basically choose one of two paths: You either refine a genre, stick to it, and deliver exactly what people in that genre wished for, or you break through the noise by being differentiated in some way.”
He elaborates on how this applied to Starlight Re:Volver‘s genre-bending approach:
“Sometimes, that means mixing game genres, and that’s what we did. With Starlight Re:Volver, we’re mixing Hades-like roguelite gameplay, which is very much a single-player thing, with mechanics inspired by co-op party games. Visually, roguelite games often have these dark, dungeon-y themes, while ours is set in a bright, anime-and-pop inspired city. When you’re doing stuff like this, you’re going to be immediately hit with intellectual confusion on what your game is and who it’s for – and for that reason, we fit a demo into our limited timeline.”
2. Focus on your demo’s performance and stability over polished features and demo-exclusive content.
Developing a game demo alongside the full production timeline can be a strategic move, as it was for Starlight Re:Volver. This approach helped Pahdo Labs manage development costs and ensured a stable build was ready for Steam Next Fest. While the demo, by its nature, still had some of the rough edges expected from an in-development game, its strong performance in the top 10 rankings suggests that players recognize and accept that demos are works in progress. Daniel shares Pahdo’s experience with this balancing act:
“We were still in the process of finishing a lot of the content. For example, there were a lot of wire-framed, grey-boxed UI Screens, which we received feedback on, and these things make a big difference on the demo experience. We tried to make up for it by using the resources we had. We added some exclusive summer-themed cosmetic rewards to the demo players, and added a couple of props to the hub areas that will go away later. These cosmetics didn’t really add much to the player experience and we even got a bit of flak for making the skins exclusive. We’re keeping them to honor the promise to our demo players, but it wasn’t really worth the community management and technical debt.”
3. Take advantage of every opportunity to get players playing your demo.
Pahdo Labs are building Starlight Re:Volver in Unity, and are primarily targeting players on PC. To their surprise, they realized they could reach an additional audience of Mac players during Steam Next Fest without doing any additional work on their PC build. This cross-platform compatibility boosted player engagement and feedback during the event.
“We did all of our QA and development for Windows, but right before Next Fest – because we were using Unity – we realized we had a working Mac build, so we put that out as well, which our players appreciated. Switching from our previous engine to Unity has generally been very good for our development process. Before, we had to do a lot more stuff ourselves, and then all of a sudden, we didn’t, which made development a lot faster.”
Starlight Re:Volver’s thriving Discord has been central to the game’s early success. They grew this community by asking everyone on the team to invite five friends to join, and by leveraging the large social followings of team members like artists. Soon, Starlight Re:Volver had over a thousand Discord members, many of whom were integral to the demo’s success, playtesting it before it hit Next Fest and creating a welcoming environment for new players during the event.
“A lot of our demo players were people in the community who enjoyed the game and were super happy about being able to play for a whole week. I think that forms the basis of the demo’s performance, especially since it’s a co-op game. It created a base of players to engage with – players who want to see the game succeed and are willing to help other people have a good time. They also worked on a community-made Wiki which helped players figure out the basic controls and systems, and were able to help others by providing quick workarounds for a couple of known bugs.”
5. Market broadly for a changing landscape.
In the current games marketing climate, it can be difficult to pinpoint what works best for marketing your game – what works for one game may not work for yours. Instead of putting all of their eggs in one basket, Daniel describes Pahdo Labs’s experimental approach: Allocating resources equally across different marketing channels and monitoring the results closely to see what stuck.
“We ran ads, we did a Discord promotion, a partnership with a webcomic platform, an influencer campaign, and a press preview. In order of effectiveness, I’d probably put the Discord partnership as number one, ads as number two, and then everything else third. Again, I think our community did a lot of the heavy lifting – that initial surge of players into the demo probably got us some kind of baseline ranking that made the game more discoverable during day one of Next Fest.”
6. Use feedback to hone your target audience.
Pahdo Labs organized user feedback on the demo by asking “bucketing questions” in their surveys. This helped them quickly identify what types of players were playing the demo and discern valuable feedback from less relevant input.
“We used bucketing questions to map players onto gamer personas we created internally. This allowed us to better understand who we were reaching and how we were doing, and enabled us to better interpret the feedback by tuning out the ‘noise’ from players we weren’t really trying to target. For example, the intent of Starlight Re:Volver is to be a co-op ARPG that’s fun to pick up and easy to put down. We got some negative feedback early on from roguelite players. These players typically enjoy single-player games where they can take their time and go at their own pace. Because our game is co-op, this style of gameplay isn’t always possible, and so we put that feedback aside and chose to focus on our core audience. We have a numerical rating for whether you’d recommend the game to a friend. During the demo, the number increased a little bit overall, but the rating from our target audience increased substantially faster. I think it’s easier to take feedback into account if you do an exercise like that.”
7. Look at what other developers are doing on Steam.
Pahdo Labs was laser-focused on Starlight Re:Volver’s demo numbers, but they also kept a close eye on the trending lists to see what other developers were doing to improve discoverability. This uncovered some surprisingly simple strategies for making your game stand out on Steam.
“We looked at games every day – games currently in Next Fest, games that had done well in past Next Fests, games that had done well in general, to see what they did on their Steam page, during their livestreams, and so on. This is actually how we found out streaming was even a feature – and then we noticed the banners on either side of the stream, so we made those too.
Another thing we noticed – and this is a genius idea – was some games putting a very faint outline around their capsule art. It makes it look like your capsule is glowing, and we wondered how they did that, but then we realized and added a 3-pixel yellow line to our own capsule. We’re just constantly looking for little things like that. I guess the lesson here is, don’t think your work is ever done, don’t be complacent, and keep looking for little opportunities and paying attention to the details. You never know what can help your game stand out just that little bit more.”
Final thoughts
Although the Starlight Re:Volver demo performed extremely well during Steam Next Fest, Daniel remarks that he thought he’d see more growth considering how visible the game demo was during the event, and how frequently it appeared on aggregate lists.
“We went from 120,000 to 160,000 wishlists, about 1.5 million impressions for the demo, and half a million for the Steam page itself – which is what we cared about most. We also had an unexpectedly low clickthrough rate of around 5%. Considering how much time we spent monitoring our demo performance on Steam, I think it’s clear that you need to really, really, really put in a lot of effort for that last mile.”
Wishlist Starlight Re:Volver on Steam, or dive deeper into the Indie Survival Guide for more hard-earned advice from devs who’ve been there.