How to Announce Your Indie Game (Without Messing It Up)
TL;DR: Announce 6-12 months before launch with a live Steam Coming Soon page, a trailer, and a ready press kit. Coordinate everything on the same day: Reddit post, social media, press outreach. Early announcement generally beats late announcement for indie devs without existing audiences, since wishlists accumulate over time.
Key Takeaways
- For most indie devs (no publisher, no existing audience), early announcement (6-12+ months out) wins because wishlists compound over time
- Submit your Coming Soon page to Steamworks at least 7 business days before announcement to avoid review delays
- A trailer is non-negotiable since a page without one looks unfinished and reduces press interest dramatically
- Coordinate everything on the same day: Steam page, trailer on YouTube, Reddit post, social media, press emails, press kit live
- Genre-specific subreddits often convert better than massive general subs like r/gaming
Your game announcement is a one-time event. You can't un-announce and try again. There's no quickload on this one. You can't "re-reveal" your game six months later and expect the same level of curiosity. The first time the public sees your game sets the trajectory for everything that follows.
Most developers either announce too early with nothing to show, or too late with no time to build an audience. Both are recoverable mistakes, but they cost months of marketing momentum. The indie game marketing timeline places announcement in Phase 1, roughly 6 to 12 months before launch. That window exists for a reason.
The Two Schools of Thought
The indie dev community is split on announcement timing, and both sides have real data backing them up.
Announce Early (12+ Months Out)
The argument: every month your Steam Coming Soon page is live is a month collecting wishlists. Valve's own documentation says there's "no strong downside to having a store page up for a long time ahead of release." Chris Zukowski's analysis of Song of Iron supports this. That game had its Coming Soon page active for 18 months, collecting 89,082 wishlists. When he analyzed cohort conversion data, wishlists from the earliest months converted at roughly the same rate as fresh ones. Old wishlists don't go stale.
Peglin published their Coming Soon page two full years before launching into Early Access. Those first six months netted 485 wishlists. Hardly viral. But they kept showing up. They entered a Steam Festival, left their demo up, let small streamers find it organically. By launch week they had 76,000 wishlists and sold over $1 million in seven days.
Early announcement works when you have something real to show (even if it's early), when your development timeline is uncertain, and when you're a small team without existing audience.
Announce Late (3 to 6 Months Out)
Some publishers argue you should only announce when you're confident in your release window. Their reasoning: a long Coming Soon period without regular updates creates "is this game dead?" anxiety. Players who wishlist early and hear nothing for a year may lose interest, even if the data says their wishlist conversion rate holds.
This approach works better when you have an existing audience (from a previous game or a publisher's marketing machine), when your development cycle is short and predictable, or when you can generate a massive wishlist spike in a compressed timeframe through paid advertising or influencer campaigns.
Emily Britt of Diva Agency advised developers: "Don't panic something out the door." If your game isn't ready to show publicly, a premature announcement can do more harm than good. Showing rough placeholder art and getting a lukewarm reaction is harder to recover from than waiting until you have something that makes people stop scrolling.
What the Data Actually Suggests
For most indie developers (solo or small team, no publisher, no existing audience), early announcement wins. The math is straightforward: wishlists accumulate over time, and you need all the time you can get to hit the benchmarks that matter. What developers who've shipped multiple games consistently report is that the regret runs one direction—they wish they'd announced earlier, almost never later.
Chris Zukowski's research consistently shows that the games reaching Gold tier on Steam ($250K+ lifetime revenue) had long marketing runways. Compressed timelines can work, but they require either exceptional content that goes viral or significant marketing spend. Most indie devs have neither.
My recommendation: announce 6 to 12 months before your target launch date, earlier if your release date is uncertain.
What You Need Ready Before Announcing
An announcement without assets is a tweet that disappears in an hour. An announcement with assets is a marketing beat that drives wishlists for weeks.
A Steam Coming Soon Page (Non-Negotiable)
Every announcement should point to a Steam page. That's where wishlists live. Without it, you're generating interest with nowhere to capture it.
Submit your Coming Soon page to Steamworks at least 7 business days before your planned announcement date. The review process takes time, and you do not want to delay your coordinated announcement because Steamworks flagged something in your description.
Your Coming Soon page needs, at minimum:
- Professional capsule art (hire an artist if you're not one)
- 5 to 6 gameplay screenshots
- A short description with your hook
- Accurate genre tags
- System requirements (even estimated ones)
A Trailer
You can technically announce without a trailer. Chris Zukowski's research found no algorithmic penalty for a Coming Soon page without one. But the human penalty is real. A page without a trailer looks unfinished. Journalists and content creators are dramatically less likely to cover a game they can't see in motion.
Your announce trailer doesn't need to be fancy. Thirty seconds of real gameplay with good music works. What it needs to do is communicate your hook in the first five seconds. No logos at the start. No slow fade from black. Gameplay first. Check the trailer and screenshots guide for the full breakdown.
A Press Kit
Journalists who see your announcement will look for your press kit within minutes. If they can't find one, they'll write about a different game.
Your announcement-day press kit needs: high-res screenshots (no watermarks), a downloadable trailer, your game description, studio information, and contact details. That's it. You'll add more at each milestone. The timing matters more than the completeness.
Social Media Accounts
This sounds obvious, but: your studio should have active social media accounts before announcement day. A Twitter/X account created the same day as your announcement has zero followers, zero history, and zero credibility. Set up accounts weeks or months in advance. Post a few things. Even a handful of development screenshots gives visitors the sense that a real person exists behind the project.
Where to Announce
The platform you choose for your announcement determines who sees it first and how far it spreads.
Song of Iron's developer Joe Winter posted an announcement trailer to r/gaming. It earned 135,000 upvotes and 13,702 wishlists in a single week. That's an outlier, but it illustrates Reddit's ceiling when the game has strong visual appeal and the post hits at the right time.
For most indie games, genre-specific subreddits (r/roguelikes, r/metroidvania, r/tycoon) convert better than the massive general subs. The audience is smaller but more targeted. A post in r/indiegaming with 200 upvotes can drive more wishlists per view than a post in r/gaming with 2,000.
Post during peak hours for your target audience (generally weekday mornings, US time zones). Include your trailer or a compelling GIF directly in the post. Link to your Steam page in the comments.
Twitter/X
Good for reaching other developers and industry people. Less effective for reaching players directly, unless you have a significant following already. Twitter works best as an amplifier for announcements made elsewhere. Post your trailer, tag relevant curators and outlets, and engage with anyone who responds.
Showcases and Festivals
If your announcement timing aligns with a showcase event (Day of the Devs, Wholesome Direct, Guerilla Collective, or similar), apply. These events give you a curated audience of players who are specifically looking for new games to wishlist.
Showcase organizers are more likely to accept your game if you're announcing during their event. Offering them an exclusive first look is a genuine value proposition. Apply 6 or more months in advance, as most showcases have long lead times.
Press Outreach
Consider giving one outlet an exclusive first look at your announcement. A single article from a mid-tier publication timed to your reveal can generate significantly more wishlists than a social media post alone. The press coverage guide covers how to pitch this effectively.
Coordinating the Announcement
The biggest mistake developers make isn't the timing or the platform. It's treating the announcement as a single social media post instead of a coordinated event.
A proper announcement day looks like this:
- Steam Coming Soon page goes live (or is already live and gets a visibility boost from external traffic)
- Announce trailer published to YouTube
- Reddit post goes up with the trailer
- Social media posts go live across all channels
- Press outreach emails land in journalist inboxes
- Press kit is live and linked from your website
All of this happens within the same window, ideally the same morning. The goal is creating a concentrated spike of attention that feeds on itself. In practice, developers who coordinate their announcement across all channels on the same morning consistently outperform those who spread it across a week, even if the total reach is similar. A combo multiplier, if you will. Reddit users click through to Steam. Journalists see the Reddit buzz and write about it. Content creators see the articles and make videos. Each channel amplifies the others.
Spreading your announcement across a week dilutes the impact. A slow drip doesn't trigger the same compound effect.
After the Announcement
The announcement gets you attention. What happens next determines whether that attention converts into sustained wishlist growth.
Respond to every comment on your Reddit post. Engage with everyone who quotes your tweet. Answer questions on your Steam Community Hub. The announcement is the start of a conversation with your future players, not a broadcast.
Set up tracking so you know where wishlists are coming from. Steamworks provides traffic source data. Note which channels performed best and double down on those for your next marketing beat.
Then start planning for Phase 2 of the marketing timeline: the long middle. The announcement gave you a foundation. Now you build on it, one devlog, one GIF, one community interaction at a time.
Free Tool: Press Email Generator — Generate a professional press pitch email for your game announcement. Runs in your browser, no signup required.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I announce early or wait until I'm confident in my release date?
For most indie developers (solo or small team, no publisher, no existing audience), early announcement wins. Zukowski's data consistently shows that wishlists accumulate over time, and you need all the time you can get. Announce 6-12 months before your target launch date, earlier if your release date is uncertain.
What if I don't have a trailer ready?
You can technically announce without one, but the human penalty is real. A page without a trailer looks unfinished. Journalists and content creators are dramatically less likely to cover a game they can't see in motion. Even 30 seconds of real gameplay with good music is enough.
What's the best day and time to announce?
Tuesday through Thursday mornings in your target audience's time zone tend to perform best. Avoid major AAA launch days, seasonal sales, and E3-replacement event weeks when your announcement will drown in noise.
Can I re-announce if my first announcement flopped?
You can't re-reveal your game, but you can treat major milestones (new trailer, demo launch, launch date announcement) as fresh marketing beats. Each milestone is a chance to re-engage press and players who missed or ignored the first announcement.
Related Guides
This article is part of our series on marketing timeline. Start with the complete guide:
Also in this series:
Your announcement is stronger when journalists can find everything they need about your game in one place. presskit.gg helps indie studios build professional press kits on WordPress, ready before the world sees your game for the first time.