Hey people,
It’s been a rough road, but Luckslinger got greenlit today! We’re so excited about it and happy and tired and many things at the same time. At some point we didn’t think that Luckslinger would still get greenlit. It’s so crazy, just a few hours ago I was thinking that I wouldn’t mind waiting a few more weeks to get greenlit, but then it just happened!
It wasn’t totally unexpected ofcourse, we were getting many votes and we just entered the top 100 about three hours ago. Maybe we were lucky, maybe we weren’t, I also don’t know.
Greenlight is still a mysterious system, many devs claim that they understand how it works, but in reality no one really knows how it works, some games are stuck in the top 100 for a long time and don’t get greenlit, some (like ours) just barely enter the top 100 and are greenlit within hours.
I don’t know what does and does not work for greenlight, but I guess that:
- If you use an animated GIF as a thumbnail it catches people their attention easier. (which might result in more votes)
- If you have a great art style (or 3D game that looks good) you might have an easier time getting greenlit, because many people vote on what they see in the first few seconds. (I’m not even sure how many people actually tried out our demo)
- The first week is very important, after that week greenlight won’t get you much traffic on its own, you need to try other methods to get traffic
- Using paid ads/marketing isn’t a bad idea, for us this was probably the thing that got us through greenlight, before we started an ad-campaign we were stuck at 39% for a while. But after we started the campaign (on ‘Who’s gaming now’) We got way more traffic than before, so it was totally worth it for us.
- Having a demo could help, I’m not sure if it helped us, but I do know that people who wanted to try something out before voting were very happy with it!
- Doing cross-promotion or whatever it’s called can really help. We actually made a demo which we released on Gamejolt and Newgrounds with a link to our greenlight page, so that people who were interested could check it out.
- Reviews helped us, some days we got some really cool reviews and that gave us a nice little votes spike.
- Our kickstarter might have (or might have not) helped us with our greenlight campaign, we’re still not sure (haha)
- Facebook groups with indie devs and stuff didn’t really help us, for some reason most of those people didn’t really care about our game (which is okay)
Maybe we could’ve gotten greenlit earlier if we added our game to some ‘greenlight’ bundles where, if people would buy the bundle and vote on our game, then if the game would get greenlit, those people would get a free steam key on release. We did not want to do this, because to us this didn’t seem fair. We felt that systems like this were hurting the greenlight system (and might explain why there are so many not-so-good games on Steam).
We know that there are many other devs using some of these ‘vote-systems’ to get votes, or they trade votes, or whatever, to get their game greenlit. But we didn’t want to do any of those, we maybe wanted to ‘proof’ that you don’t need any of these systems to get your game greenlit, and we wanted to proof that if you have a ‘good’ game that you don’t need to trade votes, or buy votes or whatever, to get greenlit.
We’re extremely happy that we made it onto steam and from the moment we started working on Luckslinger it was a big ‘goal’ of us to get this game on Steam!
Thanks all of you who helped us/supported us/voted for us/wrote about us/made let’s play videos, we could not have done it without you! <3
