The GDC FOMO Is Real

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This Week: GDC FOMO and What It’s Like To Be Indie and Participate From Afar.

I love GDC. It’s a great show but it is moving away from it’s roots as a place of learning and sharing to a place of convention commerce. Everything is more expensive now that it is a Festival of Games. There are still a lot of opportunities for indies to find their place to breakout of the noice - The Mix, Day of the Davs, Indie Showcase by Gamespot, Indie Showcase by IGDA and Uberstrategist. You have to be ready for these opportunities - great demo, great demo presence (your personality + how you show the game) and fresh looking storefronts.

When you don’t have the $$$, time or game readiness to participate the goal is to participate from a far. Don’t disappear. Comment, support, promote, and let the world know that you’ll be there soon or will be shipping. Shipping>Promoting everytime.

— Erik Reynolds

Danielle Riendeau of Game Developer Magazine writes:

Your Steam Page Needs a Soul: How to Get Your Game's Magic Across on Steam. "The first is that your Steam page is not really a store page, it's more of an algorithm test."

"You maybe have heard this, but Steam is really set on—what they really care about is making money, that's fine, they are a storefront, that's what they do—but they really care about the revenue per impression, they care about the revenue per visit. They really look at 'what makes me, Steam, the most money per second?' and this is how you get judged."

Valve says 5,863 titles earned over $100,000 on Steam in 2025

A breakdown of real Steam, console, or other storefronts, what they’re doing right, what they’re getting wrong, and the small decisions we can make to improve our game’s discoverability.

The PC platform also passed 42 million peak concurrent users a few weeks ago. Offering some context, Tom Giardino, a member of the Steam Business team, explained that only around 3,000 titles earned over 100,000 in 2020—underlining the scale of growth on the platform.

At the top of the talk, Giardino and his colleague Kaci Aitchison Boyle, communications head at Valve and the Steam team, revealed that Steam passed 42 million peak concurrent users just a few weeks ago.

"That's just the count of people who have the Steam client running," clarified Giardino. "If you're like me, sometimes the Steam client is running on your PC, even if you're not shopping or buying a game."

With that in mind, Giardino provided another metric of growth by revealing that in-game concurrents just hit a new record of 13.9 million users. "To put those numbers into context, if you go back about five years to the 2020 phase, this is double the peak concurrent and in-game users from five years ago."

Jason Lovett’s latest short for promoting his indie game has 2 million views. (all organic)

Pretty clever positioning game trailers as viral video slop which gets a LOT of views

“Wishlist conversion is not perfect (about 1 for every 2000 views now, down from 1 in 1000). I realize I should have added a better CTA in the video itself. Learning as I go but there is still a very real and tangible result from making your own viral shorts for promoting your game. “

All the best links that usually disappear into the Reddit ether only to be reposted by the most diligent Redditors and game development and marketing gurus. Link to the website archive of these great resources (GDMR)

ALL THE LINKS - PERMANENT LIVE POST

Have a win, a learning, a question, or an opportunity worth sharing? Send it in. If it helps the community, we’ll surface it with credit. [email protected]