Jordan, an indie game developer
O’Leary posted on Reddit today (July 28), sharing the game he developed, “Spersson(“Spellmasons”) suddenly became popular two and a half years after its release, including the preparations made for it and the results achieved. This beforeSteamAt the same time, the number of online players has hovered in the dozens for a long time, and suddenly ushered in dozens of times the influx of players, which has attracted widespread attention.
According to Jordan, one day he received an email from Steam proposing to include the game in the “Daily Specials” event. As for the reason for his selection, he said it was not very clear, and it was speculated that it might be due to the popularity of the videos he posted on foreign short video platforms around December 2024, which drove sales. The “Daily Deal” is a game promotion selected by Steam, and its information will be displayed on the homepage of the platform in the form of a daily update. Although the number of daily special slots will increase from 4 to 6 after February 2025, this is still a special promotion slot that is extremely difficult to select. Once selected, it is expected to gain more than 10 million impressions, and its publicity effect is extremely huge.
However, Jordan foresees that if the game goes straight to the daily special without preparation, it may not achieve the desired results. There are some mechanics in “Spersson” that can cause a high load on the server, such as player clones, enemy splitting and proliferation, etc. If player numbers surge without any countermeasures, the multiplayer experience can become poor, leading to an increase in bad reviews. In addition, Steam’s documentation on daily specials mentions that promotions with game updates are more effective. Jordan therefore set the date of the daily special at the latest allowed time (about 6 months later) to allow enough time for careful preparation.
First, he rewrote the core parts that underpin multiplayer to cope with the influx of players. At the same time, in order to coincide with the event’s major eye-catching update, he also plans to add two new playable characters that can bring a new gaming experience. It was also chosen to be released two weeks before the promotion (July 15) to address possible bugs after the update before the start of the daily deal. In addition, to promote the big update, Jordan used the “art overlay” (temporarily changing the store page thumbnail) feature and re-reviewed the translated text of the store page in languages other than English.
Daily special promotions are on. The effect was remarkable: the game received about 19 million impressions, of which about 246,000 people (about 1.3% of impressions) visited the game store page. During the event, about 14,000 wish lists were added and about 12,000 games were sold. This day alone generated about $38,000 (about 270,000 yuan) in revenue, which can be described as a great success.
Nowadays, there are a large number of new games released on the Steam platform every day, and it is extremely difficult to stand out from them. For a game that has been on sale for a while, the difficulty is doubled. Jordan’s post about the surge in player numbers two and a half years after its release attracted widespread attention and received a lot of praise. It is worth mentioning that Jordan’s preparations for the daily special and post-event data analysis and other details are based on his detailed report on Reddit. He said he hopes to help independent developers who are also facing difficulties.
