After years of watching indie games launch, patterns emerge. The same mistakes show up repeatedly, from solo devs to small teams to studios with actual budgets. These aren't obscure edge cases. They're the five most common ways indie developers sabotage their own marketing before launch.
The good news: every one of these is fixable if you catch it early enough.
Mistake 1: Starting Marketing Too Late
The most common marketing mistake is also the most predictable. A developer spends 18 months building their game, then wonders why nobody knows about it three weeks before launch.
What happens: You announce your game a month before release. Your Steam Coming Soon page has been live for weeks without any traffic. You send press emails and wonder why nobody responds. You participate in Next Fest but enter with 400 wishlists and leave with 600.
Why developers make this mistake: Game development is consuming. When you're deep in debugging, polish, and "just one more feature," marketing feels like a distraction from the real work. The game isn't ready to show, so why show it?
The fix: Marketing and development run in parallel, not in sequence. Your Coming Soon page should go live 6-12 months before launch. Your press kit should exist from announcement day. Content creator outreach should start months before release, not weeks.
Chris Zukowski's research consistently shows that games reaching $250K+ lifetime revenue had long marketing runways. The games that compressed their marketing into the final weeks rarely broke through.
Think of it like this: marketing is accumulating compound interest on attention. Every month you're visible is a month wishlists can accumulate. Starting late means starting with less time for that interest to compound.
Mistake 2: No Press Kit (Or a Bad One)
Your press kit is the infrastructure that makes coverage possible. Without it, every journalist, content creator, or festival organizer who wants to cover your game hits a wall.
What happens: A journalist hears about your game and searches for press materials. They find a bare Steam page and your Twitter account. No high-resolution screenshots. No downloadable trailer. No logos. No description longer than 50 words. They move on to a game that made their job easy.
Why developers make this mistake: Press kits feel like "marketing overhead" that doesn't directly affect the game. Or developers assume their Steam page is enough. Or they plan to "add one later" and later never arrives.
The fix: Create a basic press kit on announcement day. Not a perfect press kit. A functional one: 5-8 screenshots, a trailer, your logo, a description, and a contact email.
The bar for "good enough" is lower than most developers think. Journalists don't need 47 screenshots. They need 8 good ones they can download quickly. Content creators don't need a 20-page design document. They need b-roll footage they can use as overlay.
Tools like presskit.gg make this a one-afternoon project. The only acceptable reason for not having a press kit is "my game isn't announced yet."
Mistake 3: Bad Capsule Art
Your Steam capsule art is the most-viewed image in your entire marketing campaign. It appears in search results, the Discovery Queue, recommendation carousels, wishlist emails, and every widget Steam uses to surface games. If it's bad, nothing else matters.
What happens: Players scrolling through Steam search results see your capsule and keep scrolling. Your genre isn't clear. Your game looks amateur compared to neighbors. At 120x45 pixels (Steam's smallest capsule), your logo is unreadable or your character is a blob.
Why developers make this mistake: Capsule art requires graphic design skills that many developers don't have. Or developers don't realize how small the capsule appears in most contexts. Or they create beautiful full-size art that falls apart when scaled down.
The fix: If you can afford anything for marketing, afford capsule art. A professional capsule costs $300-800 and has the highest ROI of any marketing spend.
If budget is genuinely zero, study capsule art that works. Look at successful games in your genre at actual Steam search sizes. Note what survives the scaling: simple compositions, readable silhouettes, clear color contrast, minimal text.
Test your capsule at 120x45 pixels before publishing. If you can't immediately identify the genre and visual style at that size, iterate.
Mistake 4: No Wishlist Strategy
Wishlists are the metric that matters most for Steam launch success. They determine your launch day email blast, influence your Discovery Queue placement, and predict your first-week sales. Yet many developers treat wishlist accumulation as something that just happens.
What happens: Your game launches with 2,000 wishlists. At a 20% conversion rate, that's 400 first-week sales. Your game barely registers on Steam's radar. The algorithm doesn't amplify you. Reviews trickle in slowly. You hit the Silver tier ceiling and stall.
Why developers make this mistake: Wishlist strategy feels abstract and overwhelming. There's no single action that generates 10,000 wishlists. It's death by a thousand cuts in reverse: you need dozens of small visibility moments across months.
The fix: Treat wishlist building as the primary goal of your marketing phase. Everything you do should answer: "How does this generate wishlists?"
The playbook that works: announce early (6-12 months out), participate in small Steam festivals to test your demo and accumulate wishlists, do content creator outreach, save Next Fest for your final push before launch when you have maximum existing momentum.
Zukowski's benchmark: 7,000 wishlists gets you on Popular Upcoming. 30,000-50,000 wishlists is Gold tier territory. Know your target and work backward from it.
Mistake 5: No Follow-Up After Coverage
You got coverage. A journalist wrote about your game. A YouTuber made a video. This is the moment to capitalize, and most developers let it pass.
What happens: An article publishes. You see the traffic spike. You post a thank-you tweet. Then you move on to the next thing. The journalist who covered you once never hears from you again. When your game launches, they've forgotten you exist.
Why developers make this mistake: There's always something urgent competing for attention. The coverage feels like a win in itself. Following up feels like pestering people who are busy.
The fix: Track every piece of coverage in a spreadsheet. When an article or video publishes, send a genuine thank-you email. Not a form letter. Something specific that shows you actually read/watched their coverage.
Then maintain the relationship. When you have a new trailer, major update, or launch date, circle back to journalists and creators who covered you before. A warm contact converts at dramatically higher rates than a cold pitch.
The creators who covered your game once are your best prospects for covering it again. Treat them like the valuable connections they are.
The Meta-Pattern
All five mistakes share a common root: treating marketing as an afterthought instead of a parallel workstream.
Development gets 95% of your attention because development feels like the "real work." Marketing gets the scraps. When scraps aren't enough, the game underperforms regardless of how good it is.
The fix isn't spending more money on marketing. It's spending attention earlier and more consistently. Start when you announce. Update continuously. Build relationships before you need them. Track what works and do more of it.
The games that break through aren't uniformly better than the games that don't. They're better marketed. That's not cynicism. That's opportunity. Marketing is a skill you can learn, a system you can build, and a process you can improve over time.
Start now. Your future launch will thank you.
Free Tools: Build your marketing foundation with our Launch Checklist and Wishlist Calculator. Both run in your browser with no signup required.
