Win some, lose some

Win some, lose some

After a month and a half of pestering my friends and acquaintances, FLIES FLIES FLIES hit 10 direct-through-Steam user reviews!

Sure enough, impressions from the Steam discovery queue are way up now. It seems the rumors are true and Steam cuts off exposure shortly after launch, only turning it back on once you hit this 10-review threshold. That's pretty sucky, but at least it validates how much legwork I put into getting people to review it. It seems the trailers and Steam page are good enough to get people curious when they see it--this wave of impressions has corresponded with a dramatic uptick in wishlist additions. I was hoping it would also come with a sales boost, but I was forgetting that Steam users only buy on sale--Even I almost never pay full price for games unless I've been following them through development.

Another little victory for marketing -- getting the first Curator recommendation from Nonbinary Haven here. Their reviewer wrote this:



A somewhat less effusive review than some of the ones my friends and family members wrote, but still positive, and fair!

I'm glad I found this curator because now I can follow their recommendations for other cool queer projects. 

One piece of bad news for the project--IGF announced this year's finalists, and FLIES FLIES FLIES didn't make it.

With where my financial situation is at, I'm very grateful I was given the entry fee waiver. My hope was that entering the contest would at least bring some attention or interest from contest judges who might also be involved in publishing or press. So far, none have reached out to me, so I think that's been a bust. As far as the effort goes, submitting to IGF was about 100x easier than the labor involved in publishing on Steam, so I don't regret taking the swing.

And of course, the games that WERE chosen as finalists, surely deserve every bit of congratulations and hopefully I'll find time to check some of them out.