Tiny Glade 'built' its way to >600k sold in a month

Really impressive. I wonder if the fact that it's one of the only graphically cohesive games built with Rust/Bevy has anything to do with its relative success.

I'm jealous. My indie VR game Rogue Stargun has sold abysmally on Steam.

Sorry to hear that! I just checked out the game and I don't see anything immediately off-putting on the store page that could explain it. It may just be a matter of visibility? Can you elaborate on how you attempted to market or get the word out about your game?

What kind of marketing or outreach have you done for your game?

Edit: I ask because the devs on Tiny Glade are ex-DICE (I think?) and definitely ex-Embark Studios, two very well-known AAA studios, and they've been very active both in the Rust community (Discord, Meetups, etc), the Houdini community (conferences and meetups) and elsewhere to promote this game during development..

So they already had a personal brand and an audience built-in, which I'm sure helped.. Plus it's a great game.

If you want to give the marketing side a real try for your game, this is a decent resource if you're not already familiar with it: https://howtomarketagame.com/

(No affiliation but I know a few indie devs who were not well-known and had no pre-existing audience, and had success with the approach).

I have to imagine much of this comes down to the fact that VR games, which have additional hardware requirements, necessarily cater to a much smaller segment of the market. Selling an indie game is already hard enough!

Yeah, I was going to suggest something similar. It seems many successful indie titles these days are born from people working social media to create some sort of following before or during development so you already have an audience aware of the game and possibly excited for it on launch. Just standard marketing probably isn't the way to go these days.

From my observation, their youtube views have been really high. Whenever I see a video review on youtube, it was on average ~100k views with lots of engagement.

Quite honestly, virtually no marketing and no more than $200 in paid ads.

I actually have a full time job so spending time on making the game decent and marketing and raising a kid is currently impossible.

As long as my game is out in the world creating a bit of entertainment, I'm content

Quite honestly I have no time to market the game nor add significant features since becoming a father. My day job as a machine learning engineer pays more than I would expect to ever make from this game

Have you given copies away to streamers? Have you considered giving Fanatical 200 licenses to put in a bundle?

VR is a niche segment, so it's harder than a general purpose game.

> As long as my game is out in the world creating a bit of entertainment, I'm content

Wow; great attitude! If that's the case, then why not make it free for a couple weeks and try to build up some review volume?

That's great! I mean you shipped a game, that's more that the majority of people who do gamedev as a side hustle or hobby, so congrats!

Sounds like you've got the right attitude.. :-)

The reviews are already at 4.9 on Meta Quest. I'd rather not go straight into commoditizing the product.

What's Fanatical?