A month ago I posted a day-one postmortem: 450 wishlists, almost all of it traceable to a single r/godot post. A lot of you asked for the follow-up. Here it is, 30 days later.
Game: Everfront, real-time roguelike strategy on procgen maps, built in Godot. The Steam page went live May 5. Still solo, still learning the marketing side as I go.
Same caveat as last time: one game, one first launch, n = 1. Everything below is "what I observed," not "what works." Your launch will look different.
Headline numbers
- 10,378 wishlist additions, 309 deletions (~3% churn) → 10,069 outstanding
- From 450 on day one to 10,378 in thirty days, roughly a 23× multiple
- Two surges, not one: the page broke out around May 16, then TikTok peaked May 27–29
- The geography inverted: the US fell from 39% of wishlists to 9.5%; Russia + Ukraine went from under 4% to ~24%
- Only ~5% of the month's wishlists were attributable to any link I posted (day one it was ~44%)
- No demo yet (it lands July/August), so every wishlist this month converted off the trailer and screenshots alone, with nothing to play
The shape of the month
Day one was a spike and then a week of crickets. I assumed that was the launch: a candle that flares and gutters. It wasn't. Here's daily wishlist adds for the whole month:
May 05 █████████████ 323 ← launch (Reddit) May 06 ████████ 190 May 07 ███ 80 May 08 ██ 56 May 09 █ 19 May 10 █ 22 May 11 ██ 40 May 12 ██ 52 May 13 █ 19 May 14 ██████████ 262 ← second Reddit post (r/StrategyGame) May 15 ████████████ 289 May 16 ███████████████████████████████████ 872 ← the break May 17 ███████████████████████ 583 May 18 ██████████████████████████ 659 May 19 █████████████████████ 516 May 20 ██████████████████ 458 May 21 ████████████████ 404 May 22 ████████████████████ 489 May 23 ████████████ 291 May 24 ██████████████ 341 May 25 ██████ 150 May 26 ███████ 171 May 27 ███████████████████████████████████ 866 ← TikTok takes off May 28 ███████████████████████████████ 780 May 29 ████████████████████████████████████ 908 ← best day May 30 ████████████████████ 499 May 31 ███████████████ 378 Jun 01 ████████ 205 Jun 02 ██████ 144 Jun 03 ██████ 153 Jun 04 ██████ 159 Gross adds per day. Deletions ran ~3% and aren't shown.
Two mountains. The first I half-expected: a second Reddit post in a genre sub (r/StrategyGame) on May 14 lifted things, and then on May 16 the page simply broke containment, 872 adds in a single day, almost none of it pointing back to a link I'd posted. It held 400–650 a day for a week. The second mountain, May 27–29, is TikTok at full volume, and I'll come back to it. The thing I keep staring at is the floor: the month is settling around 150 a day. That's a third of my entire launch day arriving every day, and it isn't passive. I'm posting to YouTube and TikTok daily to hold it there.
The audience flipped from West to East
On day one this was a Western, English-speaking, Reddit crowd: US 39%, then Germany, the UK, France, Canada. One month later the single biggest region is what Steam files under "Central Asia":
Central Asia ████████████████████████████████████ 3,062 Western Europe ██████████████████████████████████ 2,920 Eastern Europe ████████████████ 1,383 North America ██████████████ 1,149 South East Asia ███████ 629 Latin America ██████ 530 Middle East ████ 381 Oceania ██ 146 Asia █ 120 Africa · 39 Steam's "Central Asia" bucket = Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus & neighbours.
By country, the top of the table is almost unrecognisable from day one:
Russia ████████████████████████████████████ 1,364 Ukraine ████████████████████████████ 1,077 United States ██████████████████████████ 987 Germany ██████████████████████ 854 Poland ███████████████████ 715 United Kingdom ████████████ 471 Kazakhstan ███████████ 412 France █████████ 342 Sweden ███████ 250 ← home Turkey █████ 174
The clean before/after:
Day one Month one United States 39% → 9.5% Russia + Ukraine <4% → 24% Top region N. America → Central Asia
I want to be precise about what changed, because it's easy to misread. Western Europe didn't shrink; it's still 28% of the total and Germany is still my #4 country. What happened is that the East showed up in force and took the top two slots. I didn't target any of this. I don't speak Russian. I've never run an ad. Steam's own discovery, plus my own TikToks (I'm the only one posting them), did it for me. The natural home for a wordless, map-painting strategy game turns out to be a lot more global than the launch crowd suggested.
Where it actually came from (and why I mostly can't tell)
Here's the uncomfortable part. On day one I could hand you a per-subreddit breakdown because every wishlist came through a link I'd tagged. This month I can account for 545 of 10,378. The other 95% arrived through Steam's own plumbing:
Where the 10,378 came from UTM-tracked (my links) ██ 545 5% Steam's own discovery ████████████████████████████████████ 9,833 95% Of the 545 I can actually trace: reddit ████████████████████████████████████ 308 (~21% of clicks) tiktok █████████████ 108 (~3% of clicks) website █████████████ 107 youtube █ 8
Read that carefully, because it's a trap. Reddit "wins": it converts clicks to wishlists at ~21%, seven times TikTok's bio-link rate. If I trusted this table I'd pour everything into Reddit and quietly write off TikTok. That would be a mistake, and the reason is the rest of the iceberg. Here's how people actually reached the Steam page all month, by Steam's own numbers:
Steam search auto-complete 10,719 Direct navigation 6,971 Google 5,166 Wishlist page 2,274 TikTok 1,757 "More Like This" / Coming Soon 1,074 Reddit 582 Yandex 573 Discovery Queue 404
The biggest single way people arrived was typing "everfront" into Steam's search box (10,719), followed by going straight to the page (6,971). Those are people who already knew the name. Nobody is born knowing the name. Something put it in their head, and then they wishlisted through Steam's search, where my UTM tag doesn't exist.
That something is almost certainly TikTok. I'd started posting short "🇽 vs 🇾: who wins?" map battles, and the wishlist peaks on May 27–29 line up exactly with the days those videos popped. TikTok sends the most raw traffic of any channel (3,300+ to the bio link alone), and the bio link is the least of it: most viewers don't tap a link in a bio, they remember a name and search it later. The bio-link's 3% conversion isn't TikTok being weak. It's TikTok's measurable sliver being tiny next to its unmeasurable bulk.
And May 16, the first break? I genuinely can't fully source it; my links didn't do it. The honest, boring answer is that it's probably TikTok here too. I'd started posting daily to TikTok and YouTube in early May, and the same dynamic that drove the late-month peak almost certainly drove this one: the videos never show up in my bio-link numbers, they show up later as people searching the name on Steam. It doesn't make for a satisfying second story, but it's the likeliest single driver. Steam's own discovery stacked on top once the page crossed some wishlist-velocity threshold (the Discovery Queue and "More Like This" shelves), as did organic spread in Russian-speaking communities; Yandex alone sent 573 visits, a lot of people for a tiny indie page to be arriving through a search engine I'd never thought about. (The bigger Steam tailwind, "Popular Upcoming," didn't kick in until much later, around 8,000 wishlists.)
So the lesson reversed on me. On day one, attribution was the whole game. I could tell you which sub drove which wishlist. At any real scale, attribution dies: the better it works, the less you can measure. The honest metric stopped being "which link converted" and became "did the line go up."
What I'd tell day-one me
- Don't over-index on your launch audience. Mine was US / Reddit / English. My actual audience is global and found me on TikTok and Steam search. If I'd "doubled down on what worked day one," I'd have starved the channel that built the brand.
- Wishlists are not sales, and not all wishlists weigh the same. Regional and impulse-social wishlists could convert to purchases at lower rates than US/Western ones at release. That's a risk I'm watching, not a certainty. 10k is a lovely number; I'm discounting it a little until I see how it converts.
- Keep the UTM tags anyway. They're how I know Reddit out-converts TikTok per click. Just don't expect them to explain your big days; by month one they explained 5% of mine.
- Boring consistency compounds. The single best thing I do now is post a short country-battle video to TikTok and YouTube every day. No clever campaign, just showing up. The floor under the whole chart is built out of that.
One-line takeaway
As before: I hope this is useful to fellow devs staring down a launch. Happy to dig into any of these numbers (the daily curve, the regional flip, the attribution) in the comments or by email.
Wilhelm Tranheden, Gothenburg