A game’s launch is incredibly important for its overall success. You will likely never have more eyes on your game than at launch. Online platforms like Steam and our own Green Man Gaming store drive massive amounts of traffic to the new releases section, and press interest is almost entirely based around the launch of a game.
But you can’t wait until launch to start your marketing. The build-up to your launch is an invaluable opportunity to build your brand, grow your awareness, and engage with your community.
A strong pre-launch campaign helps build awareness of the game, and your wider brand. It generates excitement, and gets people talking about you. And most importantly: it lays the groundwork for sales. When you finally do go live, your pre-launch campaign might have made the difference between you getting funding for a sequel, or your studio folding.
A successful pre-launch campaign should be well organised, with timelines, planned content, and a strong visual style and tone of voice that aligns with your brand and the game itself.
Unfortunately, we see many new devs without a marketing plan, just hoping for a strong launch thanks to the merits of the game. That isn’t necessarily surprising: after all, it’s not their area of expertise. They’re not marketers, they’re game designers! They don’t want to mess around making social posts or videos, they want to polish their game as much as they can, and then launch it.
Every year there are one or two indie breakouts that storm the charts without any major marketing. But then there are also thousands of other games that fall by the wayside, starting out with low sales that gradually dry up altogether. This is avoidable, and we want more games to have strong launches, helping drive new studios onto greater success.
We want to illustrate the importance of a strong pre-launch campaign with a case study of one of our partners: Treehouse Games.
Treehouse Games is a new studio founded by former Riot Games product lead Michael Chu and indie games veteran Ryan Sullivan.
Their debut title, Voyages of Nera, is a co-op survival crafting game, and they wanted it to stand out in a crowded field. This made the pre-launch period even more important: it had to get noticed.
This blog will look at what we did, the impact it had, and why it really made a difference for Voyages of Nera.
Treehouse Games themselves also did a valiant effort in building their community over 9 months prior with regular updates on Steam, monthly play tests, creating & engaging in their own discord community & activating a handful of small influencers to play test coop with Michael himself.
Michael would also appear in regular 'meet the developer' style videos talking directly to his audience sincerely. These play tests and regular community helped to shape the develop of the game even before early access.
Voyages of Nera was promoted on our home page as a coming soon game which we also promoted across organic social media channels, our Discord community and via email. The game page has had already thousands of impressions which helped achieve the first step of any successful campaign: increasing awareness of the game.
People have to know your game exists before they can consider learning more about it, so getting as much coverage as you can across store fronts and other marketing channels is vital for growing your audience. It's not just about Steam...
We wanted to target some more players to wishlist and demo the game before Steam Next Fest to help increase our KPI's and to create more awareness. Devs can adapt and change the course of their game based on feedback from early beta testers so it's really important as part of the game development process.
Using Green Man Gaming's data approach to marketing, we targeted only the players who owned or wishlisted similar games to Voyagers of Nera via their email database.
Over 150,000 players we're sent an email which contained a free beta Steam key and highlighted all the core personas and USPs of the game.
This simple but very effective tactic helped to surprise and delight the Green Man Gaming email opt ins and in return Tree House games were able to learn from the testers behaviours and feedback.
We continued to grow awareness by appearing in Steam’s Next Fest in June 2025. This is one of the biggest events in the industry calendar, and if you can afford to participate we'd advise it.
There's a lot of competition during the event season with so many other games wanting attention and demos to be played so it's really important to also do marketing in support of the event campaign and to not put all of your eggs in one basket!
During the build up to the Steam Next Fest campaign we activated a modest budget of paid media support, running ads on Google, TikTok, Reddit, X, and Meta. We also activated a small group of Green Man Gaming content creators at the same time, giving them a free key to stream and give their feedback live to their audiences.
All of the ads call to actions drove gamers directly to the Steam PDP in order to either wishlist, follow or download a demo key. ( in contrast to a campaign to drive sales where we would advise to drive conversions to Green Man Gaming's checkout for clearer attribution. )
We saw a big spike in traffic which converted into more wishlists, follows and downloads of the test during that weekend. Our average CPM was a modest $2.02 which is very cost effective.
All this marketing activity generated 12 million impressions, raising awareness, excitement, and with over 139,000+ clicks on our ads importantly we also converted more wishlists & demo plays before the game was out.
This is something a lot of devs forget: instead of a single blast of marketing, you need a steady drumbeat over time. There are so many games coming out, so many places your audience goes for news, that you can’t afford to pin everything on a single piece of marketing, you need to keep your game in the conversation for the weeks or months before launch.
After the event, we continued to advertise for a further 2 weeks before conducting a full post campaign analysis.
During the campaign we performed numerous split tests, looking at different call to actions, creative types, fomo messaging, and videos. Reactively on the fly tweak and testing what performed best to get the best possible outcome and importantly learning for our partners Treehouse Games.
Within the analysis we broke down every marketing channel, every ad version and every asset type ( video, static image etc) to fully understand what resonated best with the audiences and what could be improved on.
We concluded that over 78% of all Steam product page visits were directly attributed to the campaign!
These learnings will help us when we move to the next marketing beat.
Thanks to appearing in Next Fest, Voyages of Nera rocketed to the top 15 most wishlisted games on Steam, driving an extra 60,000+ wishlists. What’s more, the game’s demo was downloaded 50,000+ times, meaning they immediately had a community and fanbase before the game was even out to engage with. This was a massive boost, as suddenly the game had people and journalists talking about it, driving awareness and engagement with the title.
We’re confident the game will have a fantastic launch when it goes live in September, thanks in part to the success of this campaign.
Read more about our video game marketing services, or get in touch if you’d like help marketing your game for a strong launch like this.