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Two guys spent 5 years developing the niche indie game Rail Route. They just hit $2.0M in gross sales and are ranked #117 on Steam. They had some good lessons they shared in their writeup. Here’s a summary of the interesting points:

Their backgrounds:

• They were both seasoned software engineers. One had experience running a marketing agency, but they were all completely new to game dev.
• They had CS degrees. Freelanced for 15 years in IT. Lead teams of up to 50 people. Held higher level corporate jobs. Both burned out and wanted to do something else.
• Their experience: 2 years before EA, 3 years in EA, 1 year after EA

Building momentum while building the product:

• Gradual release helps build a strong community. Releasing on itch.io first was valuable. Transitioning to a Steam demo helped even more. Don’t be afraid to release something for free. If you finish the game properly, players will buy it.
• Start early, share everything. Started showing the prototype after 14 days. Just put your game out there. Try different things, whatever you can think of. The more you showcase, the better. Ask for feedback.
  • Sharing ideas too early and getting them stolen is a question you get asked a lot during the process. But I usually say that you are here to make a great game – and if it is that easy to build a great game – then everybody could do it. That’s not happening often, so don’t worry about it.
  • Believe your knowledge of the space is special and your game is awesome/excellent and work like that.
• If we didn’t do itch.io, we wouldn’t have succeed. We brought our Discord audience to itch.io, which gained us great visibility and launched there. Then we moved that community onto Steam and continue our releases there. Our demo had a lot players – hitting pretty high in ranks for Steam.
• This was all a crucial part of the audience building.
• Yeah, first 5 (community members) are hardest, then first 50 and so on. You just start and get going. You keep grinding for years all the time. If your idea is solid, it’s easier. If you can’t get 50 people in reasonable time, your game most probably will suck.

Idea stealing:

• Idea stealing when releasing early? It’s not happening in their opinion. Your idea doesn’t deliver success. It’s your hard work, your choices, effort, and expertise that will make you a success. Don’t worry about it. Also don’t worry about the piracy. Focus on your success and not on the stuff that is not helping you to deliver it.
• If someone sees your prototype on itch.io and wants to make a game with the same idea without literally stealing your build, then they have to start building from scratch at that moment with none of the experience or foundational tech you gained by making the prototype. You also most likely have a head start as you probably started work on the final product around the time you put the prototype up, ideally beforehand, and have already been planning the final product ideas to some degree long before that. If you’ve also been growing a community then that’s even more of a lead. Not only have you started getting people interested in you and your product earlier, but you’ve also begun building a reputation that any imitator will have to compete with. It’s usually pretty expensive and difficult to overcome those odds.
  Even if someone is somehow motivated enough to do that, it’s a good thing. Let them release, see how they do, learn from their reviews, and release something better when the time is right. Market around your prototype being the OG (without being a baby about “idea theft”) and this being the culmination of all your hard work to perfect that design. Competition is good. As a niche grows, the rising tide of interest in that niche lifts all boats.
• If your success hinges on being the first to market then you’re not in business, you’re just gambling – with terrible odds.

Remote work:

• Scaling a team remotely worked better than expected. We brought in new people fully remote, and it was easier than we thought. It also gave us a chance to learn about different cultures, which we really enjoyed.
• Keys to remote work success – Creative development like game development or marketing require live feedback and interactions. Text (slack, discord, teams) is your enemy, voice & video is your friend.
• We hired via Discord first, then Linkedin as well. It’s super easy. You need a new person / role? You can have them in a few days max.

Money:

• They paid for Early Access out of sales from itch.io. But if you aren’t successful on release, you are done. I can imagine that finishing a game that did not deliver good results in an early access launch is an impossible task.
• Early Access was valuable for funding, but also came with baggage. If we had the money, we wouldn’t have done it. Big changes hurt our reviews because players hate drastic shifts in gameplay. We lacked a clear roadmap early on, which made things harder. If we did it again, we’d leave the 1.0 launch alone and release 2.0 instead of changing so much post-launch.
• It grew really expensive over time. We have used all Early Access money and have put it all back into the game. We should be more cautious with spending those money and manage our scope better.
• We were usually putting 10-25% of our income back into marketing.
• 56% is gross to net ratio for us (total sales less returns less VAT less steam cut)

Advertising:

• If you have money, test ads. We started spending on wishlists, and it worked well for us. If you’re in a position to experiment, try different platforms and track what brings results.
• Ads, targeting, spend – You just don’t develop the game, you develop the marketing along. We’ve ran 80 campaigns past year, trying normal ads, meme ads, AI generated ads, in-game footage ads, everything you name it. We doing this all the time past 5 years. We develop not just our game but our marketing campaigns. We are at $0.07 per click with $3 CPM and around 4-6% CTR. Monthly spending on ads is currently around $3k.
• We are running ads 24/7 on Meta. Sometimes on Reddit as well.
• Once steam page was up, we monitored our cost per wishlist (I think it was around $0.3). We tried to spend as much as possible while maintaining that cost. There was quite a fast ceiling, the audience is finite.
• Our current spend is around $3k / monthly
• You’ll need to try whatever amount. But it must be reasonable big to let you see the differences in your conversions. We’ve tried reddit, twitter, google, youtube, meta. Meta worked best for our game.