Don’t hide your game, your audience is not big enough to tire of it

I have been shipping games for 12 years and to this day I have not lost anything by showing something early. What I lost by showing things late, I can count.

There is a fear going around. One person says “let me not open the page yet, let it blow up at launch.” Another says “if I write to a content creator now, they will be sick of me by launch.” Both are afraid of something that does not exist.

All of these fears are imported from AAA. Over there franchise fatigue is a real problem, they try to sell the same game to the same audience every year and that audience really does get tired. You have nothing like that. If ten similar games came out at the same time there would be enough visibility for all of them. Your problem is not saturation, it is not being seen at all.

Steam has 132M monthly active users and over 1 billion registered accounts. On your own, or with your team of five, you cannot reach even 1% of that crowd. To wear an audience out you first have to reach it, and there is nobody there to get tired.

Dustpile is not even a Steam game, it is a free web tool. On the day I put it out it took 165k swipes in the first 12 hours and I planned none of that traffic. That is my point, you do not pick the day you go viral. If you have nowhere to send people that day, the interest does not get credited to you, it just passes by.

Plenty of people also say “if I open early my wishlists will go stale.” In Zukowski’s sweep of cases wishlists do not age, the one exception being the game’s genre or tone changing completely. Someone who wishlisted a wholesome game and finds gore in front of him two years later does not convert. Other than that, the list keeps waiting for the game.

The “they will steal my idea” part is, unfortunately, an excuse. To steal the idea someone first has to see you, and they cannot. On top of that, your idea is already a variation on something somebody else made. The hard part of this job is not the idea, it is finishing.

To the person saying “but it looks bad right now,” let me say this. You uploaded a buggy build, you posted a bad screenshot, it happens. The number of people who saw it is a drop in the ocean, and next month completely different people show up in place of that audience. Nobody remembers your screenshot from six months ago. You remember it.

On the content creator side the issue is not boredom either, it is performance. These people cover a game that does 2.5 times their channel average again and again. If they do not cover you a second time, the reason is not that they got bored of you, it is that the video did not land. The same goes for your posts. Most of your followers do not see what you post anyway.

Understand this in particular, showing does not wear anything down. The developer of Choo-Choo Charles made devlogs while he was still building the game and those devlogs brought in 200k wishlists. He shipped after showing his game for two years straight, and instead of getting bored the audience grew.

The thing you should actually be afraid of is somewhere else. Nobody gives up on buying your game because they saw it too much, they scroll past because they felt nothing when they saw it. Most of what you take for a reach problem is, unfortunately, a concept problem, and nobody is honest with themselves about this, because saying “the execution was bad” is easy and criticising the concept feels personal.

Hiding has one more side that nobody talks about. The day you show your game you also get the answer, people either stop or scroll past. As long as you do not show it that answer never arrives, and you can work for two years assuming the game lands. What showing early really gives you is not wishlists, it is that answer, learned while you still have time.

So what do you do? Open your page the day you share the first thing about the game. Post the same clip again on different platforms at different times. Write to a content creator today, write again when the demo is out, write once more at launch. None of it uses you up.

There is nothing to gain by hiding. The only thing you lose is time, and you do not get it back. Show it today, show it again tomorrow, show the same thing one more time.