As indie developers, we are always conscious of how much money we can spend on marketing activities. Paid media or advertisement is usually one of the last things we will resort to because it is an immediate drain on our finances. Posts like this one have been extremely helpful in deciding how and when to spend ads, so in that same spirit I wanted to share our experience. So in the same spirit of transparency I want to write about my experience spending $500 on Reddit Ads for Glyphica : Typing Survival.
Preface
First off, I’ll talk about what the game is and what other activities we have done before as a basis for comparison and to set expectations. The game is called Glyphica : Typing Survival and it is a roguelite typing survival game. Think Vampire Survivors crossed with Typing of the Dead but with the hacking UI of Nier : Automata.
To establish our bonafides, the game is being made by alias.BLACK/XM Zhou, who is an artist, programmer game designer, entrepreneur, and most recently lead designer of Stellaris DLC Galactic Paragons.
I am Ryan Sumo, and I was the artist of BAFTA award winning Prison Architect. I cofounded Squeaky Wheel, which developed Academia : School Simulator and eventually sold that IP to Paradox Interactive. I then did a 2 year stint at Paradox, handling business for Stellaris, EU4, and Victoria 3, which is where I met XM.
Based on the theory that “your first game is probably not going to sell”, XM planned to make Glyphica and quietly ship it as his first game before moving on.
However after making some reddit posts that went viral, he realized that he might have a good game on his hands. And since my last job was literally about how to squeeze more money out of games, after a few chats we decided to join forces and have Squeaky Wheel handle business and marketing for the game.
In the Beginning
The game’s store page was quietly launched on february 2, 2024, and in the month after that averaged around 5 wishlists per day. Throughout March XM was experimenting with reddit posts that would create a nice little spike of 100-200 WL in a day before sinking back down to around 10 a day.
Then came the monster viral tweet on April 10 r/gifs that netted 5000+ WLs in 2 days until the mods finally seemed to decide that enough was enough and they took it down and seemingly (I can’t verify this though) banned any other game gifs from being posted. Riding high on this The demo launched on April 18 and averaged 82 wishlists per day in the week after that.
Next Fest Marketing Strategy
Although I can’t (or am too lazy to) verify this, it’s believed that Steam features games in the next fest depending on how many WLs you have in the 2 weeks before the fest, so our strategy was fairly simple, focus all our visibility efforts into the 2 weeks before the Next Fest. We had already secured coverage in the Best Indie Games showcase immediately before the Next Fest, and we did outreach to influencers that Squeaky Wheel had worked with before. The last part of the strategy was to have ads running during that time period.
Ads Experience
I’m not a paid media specialist by any means, so our rationale for choosing reddit ads is not particularly scientific. I had used Reddit ads before so I had some familiarity with it, and I liked being able to target specific subreddits. And since XM’s previous reddit posts had resonated with the reddit crowd, hitting that same crowd seemed like a safe bet. The plan was to spend $1000 in reddit ads in the two week period before the next fest.
Ad Targeting
I created 3 separate ad groups targeting steam users in general, roguelite players in specific., as well as a group that showed ads only to people on the desktop.
Broad (Feed) : targeting people in Steam related subreddits (r/SteamDeck, r/valve…)
Niche (Base) : targeting rogulites/bullet hells (r/DeepRockGalactic, r/brotato etc.)
Niche Desktop : same as niche but targeting only desktop users
I assumed that most people are not logged into steam on their phones, and that there is more friction between clicking on the ad on your phone and wishlisting the game versus someone on their desktop. We will soon see whether I was right about this.
I also set the following parameters:
Selected “Traffic” and being charged per click (CPC)
Setting a maximum threshold for CPC of $0.79
Ad Design
I might get some flak for this ad not being particularly inspired, but after doing this experiment I’ve come to the conclusion that an ad doesn’t need to be flashy or eye catching, it just needs to be accurate, and the right people will click it and wishlist.
Ad Timeline and Control Period
That ad ran from May 27 to June 10, roughly 14 days/2 weeks. The data from June 3 onwards is not since it coincided with our inclusion in the Best Indie Games showcase and other things that raised our wishlist count.
However we can compare the time period between May 19-26 and May 27-June 2 as our control period and Experiment period, respectively. Because of this, we are only looking at an ad spend of $500 here, even though my total ad spend was $1000 and lasted for 2 weeks.
Results
Control Period (May 19-26)
Total of 227 wishlists
Average of 28 per day
Ads Period (May 27-June 2)
Total of 386 wishlists (+41%)
Average of 55 per day (+49%)
We got 159 more wishlists in the experimental period versus the control period, of which 91 wishlists directly attributable to reddit ads. Steam UTM links are fairly limited though, and its safe to say that we could attribute more wishlists to the ad.
TV to WL conversion results
One other data point that is of interest is how well we converted wishlists for people who were logged in to Steam when they clicked the ad. Steam shows you these Tracked visits(TV) which we can compare to wishlists (WL) to get the conversion rate per ad.
Broad : TV 148 WL 40 = 27% conversion
Niche : TV 134 WL 41 = 30% conversion
Desktop only : TV 41 WL 6 = 14% conversion
Remember earlier that we had two campaigns, Broad (targeting steam, valve, etc.) and Niche (targeting similar games). Here we see that both the Broad and Niche ads converted at a fairly similar rate. So while there is some advantage to targeting niche subs, it’s not as big as I would originally expect
The biggest surprise to me was desktop only ads. As mentioned earlier I had assumed that desktop ads would do better since most people are logged on Steam on their desktop but not their mobiles. I concluded that there would be less friction when clicking on the ad and the wishlist button.
But as we can see, the desktop only ad had a 14% conversion rate. What’s worse is that for some reason the CPC for desktop ads was much more expensive:
Broad : $0.07 (interestingly, this is lower than the lowest amount reddit lets you bid)
Niche : $0.10
Desktop only : $0.19
It also had far fewer impressions:
Broad : 341k
Niche : 362k
Desktop only : 91k
So in all aspects going for desktop only seems like a big mistake, and soon after this I deactivated that ad and duplicated the niche ad but targeting different game subreddits.
Conclusions
So what are my conclusions from this experiment?
First, it costs a lot to “pay to win”. We got 91 confirmed WLs out of 386 total. If we round both those number up to the nearest hundred we can say we got 100 Ad WLs from a total of 400, meaning 25% of the total WLs we get might be attributed to ads. Wishlist increases with ad spend aren’t really linear, but we can maybe say that spending $5000 (ie 10x my spend) might net you 1000 WLs.
This on its own wouldn’t be enough to get you on Steam’s Popular Upcoming list. But in combination with other marketing activities like working with influencers and joining steam events, it’s a good supplemental marketing activity that increases the chances of future wishlists, and we plan on continuing these ads with that in mind.
Second, if you were trying to convert ads into sales, this is definitely not the way to do it. We paid $500 for around 100 wishlists, which is around $5 per wishlist. Wishlist conversion at launch is usually around 10-20%. Lets be generous and assu,e 20% conversion, that means we assume 20 sales from the 100 Wishlists. Here’ s what your ROI would be depending on the price of your game (without steam cut for simplicity’s sake):
20 WL x $5 = $100 : -$400 ROI
20WLs x $10 = $200 : -$300 ROI
20WLs x $20 = $400 : -$100ROI
20WLs x $25 = $500 : $0 ROI
Since the value of a click or wishlist doesn’t go higher depending on the price of your game, in general its better value to advertise a game that has a higher price. But our goal for this was not necessarily to convert sales, but to get enough visibility to get up the rankings in the Steam Next Fest. We had a lot of activities that contributed more to that goal, and ads were only one part of them.
Thanks for reading, and hope you found this interesting! If you want to support us, you can buy Political Animals or Ruinarch, and wishlist Glyphica!