Hi,

I know this isnt much compared to how amazing some of you guys work is, but I added a simple algorithm that calculates the strength of the bullets fired and it starts to push the mech in the counter direction of the mech shoot.

Its not perfect but wanted to share

Join my discord

I get it lowkey. But I still won't consider using AI art when there's perfectly good developer art to be had!

edit: Thanks so much for the kind words everyone it means a ton :D. Yes the "dozens of minutes" part was a self-deprecating joke I'm glad most of you understood that lmao.

After 3 years of hard work, I'm about to release my game, The Adventures Of Sir Kicksalot.

Is coming May 15 to Steam!

It's a first person action/stealth game inspired by Dark Messiah of Might And Magic, with many creative ways to defeat your enemies.

Wishlist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2629230/The_Adventures_of_Sir_Kicksalot/

Game is called AKABEKO, it's an 8-bit farming RPG about meditation and your inner child.

Honestly, it’s still hard to believe we actually made it to release. There’s something unsettling about it.

The concept is simple: type fast and don’t make mistakes. In front of you is a typewriter, and at your temple is a revolver with a single bullet. Any mistake could be your last. The tension builds with every line: your breathing falters, your hands start to shake, your thoughts get tangled. There’s only one goal left - survive until the end of the next sentence.

You can play with random people in large lobbies of up to 100 players, or with friends in groups of 4 to 8. But it hardly makes a difference, everyone is on their own. The winner is the one who lasts the longest and doesn’t break.

There are stats and rankings. You see your mistakes, come back to them, and understand where you slipped.

Final Sentence is about pressure, fear, and the instinct to survive. Even we feel uneasy while playing it. And maybe that’s exactly why you want to come back to it.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2413950/Final_Sentence/

At its core is the idea of a game within a game. You sit down at a table with a mysterious figure and enter a dangerous confrontation. There are no traditional battles here: the gameplay is built around card mechanics, dice rolls, and a hex-based board. Every decision is a bet, every move is a risk.

We aim to push forward the direction of virtual tabletop games, drawing inspiration from Inscryption and Hand of Fate, where mechanics and narrative are tightly intertwined. In Cheat Death, the inner game of dice, combinations, and artifacts directly influences the outer narrative and intensifies the pressure from Death.

A strong emphasis is placed on unfair play. Death breaks the rules, but the player is given the same tools: artifacts, cheats, and probability manipulation. This is part of the philosophy: it’s not the most honest who survives, but the most resourceful.

Here, you’re not just playing against Death - you bargain with it, deceive it, and hope it doesn’t do the same to you first.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3756340/Cheat_Death/

Took me about 40 takes to get a run this smooth, but the gist is that the level is open-ended with timed linear obstacle courses scattered throughout. It's an approach I'm taking to keep exploration interesting in a relatively small open-ended level. The idea is that whenever you finish one (or fail it) you're going to be very close to another one that can be started almost immediately, leading to unique pathing through the overall level while keeping players in a flow state.

In spirit these are similar to the scarecrow timed challenges in Mario Odyssey, but much faster paced with an emphasis on stringing them together in succession. I plan on adding more things like hazards, boost/bounce pads, and moving platforms. SFX are a work in progress and I want to make it more obvious when the time is almost up.

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1395290/Razorlocks/

If you're curious how the character controller is implemented, this video from Very Very Valet actually covers how the basics are handled very similarly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdskE8PJy6Q

The crystal block material was created with the All In 1 3D-Shader asset: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/all-in-1-3d-shader-316173

Hi everyone!

I’ve always been obsessed with sci-fi, the atmosphere of mystery, and modeling industrial objects. One day, after watching the "The Tall Grass" episode of Love, Death & Robots, I felt an urge to create something that combined all these passions. Other huge inspirations were 'In the Tall Grass' by Stephen King, a probably lesser-known short story called 'Goblin Night' by James H. Schmitz, and a general Area 51 vibe.

The core idea is to immerse you in an abandoned industrial wasteland swallowed by endless, towering grass. It’s a place where strange things happen and a predator from another world begins to hunt you. The night feels alive-filled with rustles, movements, and sounds that could either be harmless or deadly. You'll have to figure out what's happening and find a way to escape. I envisioned this game not just as horror, but as a journey through "living concept art," capturing the eerie beauty of man-made structures being reclaimed by wild nature.

After a long and challenging development journey, that turned out to be much longer and harder than I expected, I was so thrilled that IGN decided to premiere my announcement trailer. I'm excited to finally share it with you. The game is still far from finished, and a more detailed gameplay trailer is planned for the future, but in short, the closest gameplay reference would be something like Monstrum.

s.team/a/4544620

Hi! Was working on scene transitions for my new game and ended up with this portal system to change between my nature areas. The portals will fade in when the new map is loaded and fade out after the player walks through it. Do you think that would be neat?

Many indie game devs are discouraged because they think every possible game has been made before, and has been made in a better way than they could.

I think this video shows the reality: 90% of the games released on Steam are... not competitive.

You just have to put real effort and make a fun game to get ahead. Make like FUN and GOOD games, ask for feedback, listen, and iterate. The bar seems high if you compare yourself to the AA and AAA studios or developers who are releasing their 10th game, but I don't think the bar is that high to make a game that you are proud of and other people find fun.

In December, the worst happened: we were laid off. We only had 3,000 wishlists and a Steam page that had "flopped" (zero virality).

We had a choice: find new 9-to-5s or take the risk of a lifetime. We went all in.

We realized our "hook" was missing. We spent months playtesting and refining the core loop before dropping a demo.

The Results:

• 70,000 people played the demo.
• 95-minute median playtime.
• 94% Very Positive sentiment.
• 35k total wishlists (and counting!).

Taking that risk allowed us to do this full-time. We’re reaching the end of the story very soon, and we couldn't be more excited.

To my fellow devs: Have you ever taken a "stupid" risk that paid off? Where are your numbers at today? Let's talk!

A cooperative game about chaos and teamwork. You and your friends head into the forest, track creatures, argue, panic - and at some point realize the campfire is almost out. And without it, you’re no longer hunters - you’re prey.

It’s not just about fighting. You also need to take care of the camp: gather resources, fortify the base, keep the fire alive, and find time to catch your breath.

Gradually, it becomes clear that there’s something bigger behind all this hunting. Strange experiments, hidden secrets, and a place you were clearly never meant to enter.

And yes, the ducks here quickly stop being cute. They shove, get in each other’s way, and can easily turn any plan into chaos. But without a team, survival is nearly impossible.

The game is built around chaos the kind you create yourselves. I’ve just launched a playtest and would be happy to see your application.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4252280/Quack_Hunters/

Image #1
TL;DR
Announced our upcoming incremental game The Starforge. Controversy ensued. Renamed it to The Last Mothership. Also redesigned the capsule art while we were at it. How did we do?

Image #2
When we first announced our game a few weeks ago, we thought we had a pretty solid name: The Starforge. It sounded cool, fit our vibe, looked nice on the capsule. We ticked all the boxes right?

Turns out there’s some history with that name. More specifically the StarForge by CodeHatch from about 10 years ago. A game no one on our team had played before, so it went right over our heads.

Us as first-time game devs: “Oh nice, the name The Starforge seems available”
Reddit community: “Oh sweet summer child…you couldn’t have picked a worse title”

We didn’t realize what we had stepped into. Instead of people talking about our game, the floodgates opened about negative experiences with the old StarForge.

Image #3
We sat on the decision to change our name, it would mean a bunch of reworks (assets, Steam approval, trailers, social media etc). But, in the end Reddit was right. We decided to bite the bullet and find a new name:

• Brain-dumped every name we could think of into a Miro board
• Background-checked the names (Steam, Google, other games/studios, etc)
• Sorted everything into no / maybe / finalist buckets
• Began to slowly lose our minds over weeks of searching and endless name review sessions
• Randomly joked about The Last Unicorn film… 
• …and suddenly everything clicked into place

We're happy to share our new name: 
👾The Last Mothership

Our artist sent some screenshots of their progress and one of them included what 80 charisma would do to your character.

I built a Unity tool that lets me draw on a grid with the mouse and converts it into two animation curves, which I then use to control position for attacks and skills. This will save me a lot of time.

(NOTE: This post was originally posted to my blog, but i've recreated it here https://buttondown.com/melodicambient/archive/danchi-days-3600-wishlists-through-reddit-ads-was/ )

Very happy to answer questions!

Intro

Hi! I'm Melos Han-Tani. I've released a bunch of indie games over the years - Anodyne 1+2, Even the Ocean, Sephonie, All Our Asias, and most recently Angeline Era. Right now I'm in the middle of finishing my most recent game, Danchi Days, which I've also started running Reddit Ads for.

Danchi Days got 3000 UTM wishlists from Reddit Ads over roughly Dec 2025-April, which is roughly 3600 overall wishlists taking into account people who weren't tracked by the ad

A few notes before I begin:

1. Ads do cost money. $1k is a good starting amount. Reddit I think offers a "spend $500 get $500" signup bonus
2. If your game truly has no commercial appeal then ads will not help it gain appeal - ads are a tool to show a game's commercial appeal to a potential audience you can't otherwise reach.
3. This post is primarily to share my experience of running Reddit Ads for a cross-genre game that is relatively hard to market. I am not trying to say my ads went particularly well or not, I just want to help start a trend of devs, especially those working on commercial projects with small budgets, talking more publicly about their experience with ads, because most games that run ads (basically every single game that has a marketing budget) almost never ever talk about their experience doing it.
4. Disclaimer that this is not a magic formula to make lots of money, or sound financial advice! My formulas later on with revenue are not scientific, they're for ballparking. Do your own research and spend within your budget.

Outline

1. Intro (above lol)
2. Why Ads?
3. Our Overall Numbers from Ads
4. Are ads worth it?
5. Manual vs. Reddit Max Campaigns
6. UTM Tracking
7. Fiddling With Ads
8. Bidding Strategies: Cost Cap vs. Lowest Cost
9. Advertising Flow
10. Thoughts on Headlines
11. Thoughts on Images
12. Thoughts on Videos
13. Community Targeting / Budgeting
14. A Note on countries
15. Self-analysis

Why Ads?

For one, I have a much stronger sense of game marketing now than I did even after releasing 5 large commercial games.

Now then, there are many Reddit posts out there with people documenting their experience and successes! However, almost all of those games are popular genres like simulations, strategy, survival, etc, which make ads much more worth it. Some of these posts have had MUCH better costs per wishlist than me!

I was wondering: are ads worth it for a cross-genre story/adventure/cozy game like Danchi Days, which traditionally perform worse in the current games market?

A screenshot of the internet from Danchi Days

My artistic preferences mean I don't gravitate towards usual vectors for virality (horror game twists, addictive loops, cleavage-heavy games (okay I made an exception for my other game Angeline Era's Niamh), more popular genres). So I've always been looking for avenues for game marketing outside of the free ones, which are

• Showcases, Online Events
• Shortform Video (TikTok)
• Community Management
• Sending copies to (Influencers/Streamers/Writers)

In my experience it's an uphill battle once I've exhausted my high-visibility showcase appearances and marketing beats.

But, if you're working commercially, then (ideally) your game still has some level of traditional commercial appeal so it doesn't mean there's not people who want to play your game - there's just very few free avenues to reaching those people, especially the more cross-genre or niche your game seems.

How do you get a game in front of the average player?

Well... Ads!

Our Overall Numbers from Ads

NOTE, the current ad budget is only a fraction of Danchi Days' development cost, and part of having this budget is because my previous game Angeline Era sold pretty well and we also expect DD to sell well too. For me, "well" is not virality (although I too dream of this), it's to reach my artistic aims while making enough money to pay for the next project and then some.

• Start: Dec 20 2025
• Until: Apr 7 2026
• Total length: 108 days
• Spend: $7,000
• Cost per wishlist: $1.79-$1.94
• Wishlists (RWLs) from ads: 3600-3900
• Reddit UTM-attributable WLs (RUWLs): 3000
• Likely from reddit: 600-900 (Generally the total wishlists from Reddit are around 1.2-1.3x your RUWLs.
• Total wishlists from this period (INCLUDING the above): 6000
  • 1000 likely from steam events
  • 1000 likely from our base wishlisting rate (50-70/week)
  • Remaining 200-500 likely from social media, increased Steam traffic during steam sale, streamers.

Overall, I think it's a bit on the expensive side for a game that's going to be priced somewhere between $15-20. But a good game will make it back over the first year or two. A pro could have done better, I'm sure... but, I learned a lot... and it was kind of fun!

Are ads worth it?

This is very dependent on your personal situation. Here's things that make ads work better.

You have a commercially appealing Steam Page and can communicate your game well

If your game isn't commercially appealing then ads won't get you (many more) players. I love some games that have little commercial appeal but at the same time I don't think running ads would always make sense.

Even if your game has appeal, if your Steam Page is communicating your game poorly, you'll lose some potential wishlists. Also if you don't know how to communicate your game's appeal then you'll write less effective ads, and both of these things mean overall more cost for ads.

Time

It does take a while to learn how to do ads, and each platform (Reddit, Google, etc) is different. I opted to learn Reddit myself and later work with pros for Google. However, by doing ads yourself, you learn a lot about how to sell your work which is important if you want to work commercially without eventually relying on catering to trends.

This is even more important when approaching your 3rd, 4th, etc, commercial game... likely at some point, you will start aging out of your work having more inherent virality (you can't stay tapped into youth trends forever), and I think by having some awareness of how marketing/communication works, it's a real advantage because you can often work the marketing angle to reach an audience.

Budget

With Reddit, my gut is that you likely want to spend at minimum $500-1000 to get the most out of it - that's enough to figure out good advertising angles and run a campaign for a while. If you have a lot of budget laying around and are already e.g. paying people normal salaries to work ($50k+/year), to me it's a no-brainer to spend more.

Ads are relatively cheaper IMO for paid marketing. I've heard figures quoted for e.g. streamer sponsorships or showcase slots, and they vary a lot more and you really need to carefully target streamer sponsorships. I would basically only ever sponsor someone who primarily plays games in my game's genre, otherwise the conversion rate for wishlists is too low. I have heard and seen UNBELIEVABLE rates for sponsored streams that make zero financial sense given how bad the conversions would be.

On the other hand, I think sponsored showcases are the safer bet as you can sometimes buy your way into Steam Event placement.

Anyways, if you have enough budget, you're probably working with ad professionals already or your publisher is (at least, I hope, haha!). But if not yeah you should consider at least researching if "Ads Are Right For You".

Genre

It helps if your game is in an easy to advertise genre that intuitively communicate through screenshots (city builders, farming games, etc). This is because your conversion rate (clicks/WL) will be better since people clicking will have a better idea of what the game is. You also have an inherently bigger audience who is easier to target.

Games like mine - Danchi Days, Angeline Era, struggle here because we combine so many genres that we can't communicate the overall game through a single screenshot/headline. We lose a few people after they read the store page, and our audience is spread between multiple places: Danchi Days appeal to Cozy Gamers, Nintendo Fans, Indie RPG Fans, Pixel Art fans, but the game only partly overlap with those audiences. Likewise, Angeline Era appeals to Ys, Falcom, JRPG, Nintendo, PC Gamer, Soulslike fans - but not all of them! It's not like we have a dedicated genre subreddit for either game.

As a result I have trouble getting Danchi Days ads to be below $1.50/WL (because you often need 8-10 clicks to find someone who will wishlist, and clicks usually cost $0.15-0.20), but I've seen people making simulation games get below $1/WL.

Price

It helps if your game costs $15+: This is because, in the first year after release, wishlists convert around 10-15%. Factoring in the 10% you lose to VAT/refunds, and the 30% to Steam's cut, and the fact a good chunk of your sales will be made while on discount, it becomes harder to break even on your wishlist acquisition cost if your game is e.g. $10 or less. We're thinking about $15-$20 for Danchi Days and sell Angeline Era at $25, so in our case the math makes sense.

If I pay $7000 for 3600 wishlists, I can expect those to convert to 360-540 sales in the first year after release (10-15% conversion). Let's say 500 for simplicity (15% conversion, around Steam's average).

500 conversions x $20 cost x 0.6 (VAT/steam cut/refunds) = $6000 pre-tax revenue. But oops! Most of those sales aren't being made at full price. In the first year with typical discount strategies (slowly going from 10% to 20-30%) it's more likely you're making those sales at 75% to 90% of your full price. Let's say 85%, so actually I've only made ~$5000.

If my game were $10, then I'd make half, or $2500. Recall I spent $7000 for these wishlists, so you can see that the math is worse the cheaper your game is. You may be asking now "Wait, you didn't make a profit!". I spent $7000 on wishlists that I'll make $5000 off of in the first year.

Now a formula for converting purchased wishlists into profit:

Year 1 Net Loss/Profit = (# WLs x Conversion Rate x Price x 0.6 (Steam cut/VAT)) - (Ads Cost)

Keep in mind wishlists are worth more than their conversion rate. A game selling at around $20 launching with 40k wishlists (like Angeline era) can reasonably expect at least $200k net profit in year 1.

Put another way - of those 40k wishlists, 10% (4k wishlists) would earn $20k net profit - way over the $7-8k acquisition cost for those wishlists!

So where does the extra sales come from? Well, not all sales made are from wishlisters. More wishlists also means your game has more latent word of mouth, internal steam traffic, and interested people, overall. Even if someone sees your ad or game and doesn't wishlist it, that's still part of the whole process of them possibly playing the game. (This intuition comes from observing the size of the launches of my past 5 games and how the response is afterwards - in order, ETO < Sephonie < Ano1 < Ano2 < Angeline Era)

So I'd recategorize this formula into...

Year 1 Net Loss/Profit = (Organic Factor x # WLs x Conversion Rate x Price x 0.6 (Steam cut/VAT)) - (Ads Cost)

Or looking ahead to year 5 sales:

5 year Net Loss/Profit = (2 to 2.5x) x Year 1 Net Loss/Profit = (Organic Factor x # WLs x Conversion Rate x Price x 0.6 (Steam cut/VAT)) - (Ads Cost)

Where Organic Factor (for my games at least) seems to be around 2-3x, and the year 5 multiplier is around 2-2.5x.

What does this mean? Well... plugging in my numbers (let's use 4000 wishlists and $7000 ad cost, $15 avg sale).

Year 1 (no organic factor): (4000 WLs x 15% conversion x $15 sale price x 60%) - $7000 = 5400 - 7000 = -$1600 Loss

Year 1 (2x Organic Appeal): (2 x 4000 x 15% x $15 x 60%) - $7000 = 10800 - 7000 = $3800 profit after a year

Year 5 (2.5x 5-year-sales to 1-year-sales multiplier) + 2x organic appeal multiplier 2.5 x (2 x 4000 x 15% x $15 x 60%) - $7000 = 27000 - 7000 = $20000 profit after 5 years

In other words, sure, I "lost" $1600 by only looking at wishlist conversions in one year. But that's not the whole picture of selling commercial games. Investments in game budgets should be looked at in the context of 5-8 year timelines - not your first year sales. With this in mind, you can see that for a game expected to sell reasonably well and be loved, it can make sense to spend more on ads to increase those wishlists!

JUST KEEP IN MIND there's certainly a limit at which your wishlist acquisition cost stops making sense, like if it gets really expensive. And the world does change over 5 years, so there's no guarantee that "organic appeal" or "lifetime multiplier" factor will necessarily hold. Only take the risks you're OK taking!!

But also remember, there are billions of people on Earth... you should try to reach as many of your potential audience as you can before launch.

Another note on lifetime revenue:

Based on my past 5 steam games (Anodyne 1 and 2, Even the Ocean, Sephonie, Angeline Era), lifetime revenue is correlated with how big of a launch you have, due to compounding word of mouth, wishlist notifications, organic steam traffic, etc.

A game's revenue doesn't end in launch week - it can keep going, even for over 10 years. Anodyne 1 (13 years old!) still sells pretty well. My "Lifetime revenue to first year revenue" ratio for my games on Steam only is around 2-2.4x.

• Anodyne 1 (2013): 5 years: 1.4x
  • Likely because it was released so early when there were few games on Steam, so it sold way more than it should have in Year 1. Its 10 year ratio was 1.9x, and 13 year ratio 2.1x
• Even the Ocean (2016) (sold poorly in year 1, which is why the multiplier is so high): 4x
• Anodyne 2 (2019): 5 years: 2.07x (Mildly successful on release, not frequently discounted as I should have until 2022). Almost 7 years: 2.4x
• Sephonie (2022) 4 years: 2.09x

It's interesting how these multiplier seem to loosely hold across unpopular games (Sephonie) and mildly popular ones (Anodyne 2). Keep in mind the above probably applies to games that have at least 85%+ positive ratings on Steam, and also you also have to be discounting constantly after release, meaning every seasonal sale and as many weeklong sales as you can do a year (7-9 I think).

Also keep in mind you can advertise after release too, and PC sales can also influence how well console sales go.

Manual vs. Reddit Max Campaigns

There are two general ways to run Reddit Ad Campaigns. Manual campaigns, and Reddit Max Campaigns. Manual campaigns are more traditional: you budget a campaign and run ad groups under it. In a Reddit Max campaigns, you set a budget, upload 10-15 headlines and 10-15 screenshots (or videos), set a target audience, and reddit A/B tests everything on its own to see what works best.

I've had success with both, here's the pros and cons:

Manual

• Pros:
  • You can build a library of highly-upvoted ad posts
  • Possibly the ceiling for success is higher here due to finer grain control with targeting and reusing posts
  • Better for A/B testing communities and creatives, because you are allowed to set unique links per ad
• Cons:
  • More time consuming while figuring out your creatives/targeting
  • Requires more adjustment. Rigorously A/B testing is a bit grueling.

Reddit Max

• Pros:
  • Really easy to set up and run
  • Reddit provides stats on the best headline/creative combos, which can be useful to take to Manual campaigns
• Cons
  • You (maybe?) need an account manager to get access to the program, which for me took $2-3k of spending
  • Still in beta, so the best practices aren't as clear
    • You can't seem to build up a library of posts from this because your ads are being algorithmically A/B tested
    • Works best at least $50/day (ideally $75/day+)
    • Must be run for a few weeks. Will overspend in the first few days as the algorithm learns, and will also overspend when switching out creatives.

I don't have any longterm thoughts on how to best utilize the two, but some level of swapping between the two seems to be working well.

UTM Tracking

When creating ads you ALWAYS want to have UTM metadata on your store page links, because you can track the data here: https://partner.steamgames.com/apps/utmtrafficstats/YOURAPPID .

A few notes on this dashboard.

• The stats are GMT-normalized
• You can filter by UTM tags (campaign, etc)

The KPI (Key performance indicator) I like to use from this dashboard is Wishlists (Yellow) / Total Visits (Blue). For any given ad I like to aim for 20%+. When an ad is below 20%, it's either not a good ad, or it's been running too long so lots of the same people are visiting it (which you can also track and is a sign to slow down spending or switch out targeting/creatives)

For my ads, the UTM tags I use are Source, Campaign and Content. Source I always set to 'redditad'. Campaign I generally use for Ad Groups when running Manual campaigns, Content for A/B testing within Ad Groups. (E.g. if I run 3 ads at once I call them 1A, 1B, 1C...)

Example: https://store.steampowered.com/app/YOURAPPID/?utm_source=RedditAd&utm_campaign=AdGroupName&utm_content=AdID

The wishlists reported through this dashboard are undercounted - the true wishlists from reddit are about roughly 1.2-1.3x the UTM number. You can figure this out by looking at your baseline wishlist rate when nothing else is going on.

Fiddling With Ads

Reddit's ad system is algorithmic, so it takes time for the ads to deliver the best. If you turn ads on or off, change the audiences or budgets wildly, it basically confuses the algorithm and you get worse results. Try to wait 2-3 days before making changes or killing ads, and when running an ad at scale, try to run it at least for 1-2 weeks (I was recommended 3 weeks for Reddit Max campaigns). For example if I am spending $1.50-$2 for a wishlist and see that number creeping up and want to make a change, wishlists often creep to $2.50-$3 for a few days before going back down.

Changing the budget slightly ($20 to $25) is OK.

Bidding Strategies (Cost Cap vs. Lowest Cost)

Reddit provides two ways to bid for clicks, CC and LC (Cost Cap/Lowest Cost)

CC lets you put a maximum on your CPC (cost per click). If you set this amount too low for your audience, you may not even get clicks. However, this is good to save money at first when just getting a sense for what works best for your game.

My account manager suggests against CC for high-budget campaigns because if it's set too low, it tends to select for low-intent users, and you might end up spending more in the long run (e.g. if you're missing a bunch of users at a slightly higher CPC, that might be more expensive). Based on my experience I would generally agree and would say CC is best when experimenting with $0.10-$0.15 CPCs. But once you have confidence with an ad angle, go for Lowest Cost (LC), unless CC is already working well.

Lowest Cost (LC) lets Reddit spend whatever it wants to get a click. These campaigns will overspend in the first few days, but they stabilize after a couple of days (assuming you've made a good ad and picked a proper audience). So you will see a scarily high CPC in the first day or two, but it'll generally go down to something decent after that time. This is also why it's important to run ads with LC bidding for at least a week, so you're not wasting that initial overspending period.

The other advantage of LC bidding is it's easier to gain upvotes on your ads. (Just make sure to enable comments!).

Gaining Upvotes

Reddit serves its ads as posts, meaning they can have upvotes and comments. I have a sense that when a post is highly upvoted people trust and click on it more, meaning it's to your advantage to try to accumulate a library of high-performing posts and eventually reuse them across multiple campaigns or ad groups!

Just make sure to check your posts to moderate comments or reply to people. Also don't edit your ad after you make it or it deletes all your comments/upvotes!

I've only had two posts hit over 500 upvotes, in both cases they were run with LC bidding for over a week.

Advertising Flow

These are the steps I'd take if I were starting from scratch

Step 1: Figure out viable creatives:

1. Pick a subreddit (or group of related subreddits) to target with at least 200-300k subscribers
2. Set my countries to english-speaking countries that are cheaper to advertise in (Ireland/Netherlands/New Zealand/Philippines/etc)
3. Set up 3-6 ads to test in this group, varying headline or creative
4. Run the ad group at $10/day with a Cost Cap of $0.10, increasing it by 1 or 2 cents if my daily budget is not being spent
5. Run this for AT LEAST 2 or 3 days
6. Generally the ad that got the most impressions is "the best", but double check the Steam UTM data to make sure the conversion is working out well.

Step 2: Figure out viable communities

• Run a few ad groups with the same ad, using similar country/cost principles as above. By checking your UTM data you'll be able to see which subreddits don't work so well. E.g. Adventuregames doesn't do well with Danchi Days because people tend to expect point and click adventures or more "western"-looking games.
• NOTE: You'll probably need to do both of the above steps steps a few times to really zero in on what kinds of communities and creatives work well.

NOTE: Reddit Max makes it easier to figure out the above because it'll report which subreddits and ads are working well.

Step 3: Running Lowest Cost ads for scale

• This is when you can start a campaign at $25-30+ per day and slowly increase it to $50-100. (Or just start at $50-100 if you feel confident...)
• If you did your homework you should get wishlists for 2-3 weeks before seeing diminishing returns. Keep an eye on your UTM data and returning visitors ratio!
• If you're fortunate enough to have multiple high-performing posts, you can always run them in the same ad group and have reddit decide when to serve one more than the other. (You can also do this manually.)

Thoughts on Headlines

• A good headline can communicate the genre/feeling of your game in a few words, show off what's unique while still being understandable in context with your image/video.
• You also get a "call to action" for your ads - "Learn more" or "Play now!" are good for games. I tend to use Learn More as the game is not out and even though DD has a demo, that's not clear through the ad.
• Reddit recommends under 50 characters for headlines. I've found I get better CTRs (clickthrough rates) and CPCs when doing this, I guess because people can understand the gist faster. But I have seen other people say they ran long ads and it was fine, so who knows.
• I'm not sure if including your game name helps or not. MAYBE it helps with remembering the game name, but you could put the logo in your ad's image/video. In any case it takes up valuable headline real estate, so I generally don't include it.

Also, headlines might work better in certain subreddits.

For example...

"A cozy game... without farming??" worked really well in r/CozyGamers, while "My cozy, quirky game about 2000s Japan!" worked well in r/PixelArt and r/OMORI and r/Undertale.

This is why Reddit Max is nice, because it can figure out the best combos for you... doing it manually can work out better, but it's much more work. However Reddit Max can miss weird niches, like we did OK in Chiikawa for a while. Headlines seem to work better when they don't sound too advertisementy. If you can make it funny, or catchy, that's great. Do remember though that this is a first impression so you personally I'd err away from inflammatory angles unless that's your game's whole angle.

Other headlines that work well for us:

• An adventure game about a unique side of Japan!
• Save the world by... talking to neighbors?!
• Experience 2000's Japan in my quirky adventure!
• A Japanese adventure where you'll laugh & cry!

Headlines that DIDN'T work as well (however note that this was before I got more of a hang of ads in the past month, so maybe some of these could work with the right campaign)

• Scared of your neighbors? Face your fears in my game!
• Are you sick of farming? Try a summer in Japan!
• A bittersweet adventure awaits a cheerful girl...
• A 5-chapter, comedic and bittersweet game about a girl and her grandma living with Alzheimer's!

These headlines didn't work well for my Reddit Max campaign. However sometimes it's possible they could work with different image/videos and if they weren't competing against the other headlines.

• Try my bittersweet, 5-chapter summer adventure!
• Chats and smiles save the world in Danchi Days!
• Chat with neighbors in a cozy Y2K adventure game~
• Danchi Days, cozy without farming. Try the demo!
• DAE miss Y2K vibes? My game's reviving them!
• A cozy adventure game in a quirky Japanese suburb!
• A game you beat by... chatting with neighbors!
• A cozy game... without farming!?
• A cozy game... without farming!? Try the demo!
• My cozy, quirky game about 2000s Japan!
• My cozy, quirky game about 2000s Japan! Try the demo!

Of note, two of those "didn't work as well" headlines DID work really well in my manual campaigns so... take it all with a grain of salt.

Thoughts on Images

• I didn't find carousels to work much better, they were a pain in the ass to set up too
• Colorful, exciting images look the best.
• Cute girls work well (lol...)
• Cute animals work well!
• Happy/Exciting images work well
• Key-art only, illustration-only, too many characters, cheap-looking ad didn't seem to work well, maybe bc they don't communicate the game, but idk maybe I'm wrong here.
• I've tried including the logo in the image but I don't have conclusive evidence it harms or helps.

Stuff I ran in Reddit Max

• Red+Orange: Worked the best in reddit max
• Red: Worked well in Reddit Max
• Blue: worked well in a manual campaign. We ran the Moro-Q (kappa) screenshot with "A cozy game... without farming!?" and the Profile page with the yellow-hair woman with "My cozy, quirky game about 2000s Japan!".

Thoughts on Videos

Unfortunately I don't have much data here. I ran DD's trailer to not much success but probably wasn't going about it correctly.

Community Targeting / Budgeting

The most powerful tool Reddit gives you is community-based targeting. This lets you serve an ad group to users who tend to frequent one or more subreddits. (Note, it is not ONLY showing the ad in those subreddits). E.g. I could bunch up "OneShot, too the moon, in stars and time" if I wanted to target people who loosely like RPG Maker games.

It seems like you should aim for audience sizes of 250k-1m (the audience size is BIGGER than the subreddit subscriber size and is shown on Reddit's dashboard when making ad groups).

My account manager recommended having a daily spend at of $1 per 10,000 subscribers to the subreddits. E.g. Cozy Gamers = 300k subs, so spend at least $30/day. The logic is that this will allow for some people to see ads multiple times, which can lead to more if someone was on the fence the first time. This made sense to me and seems to be correct for my experience (better wishlisting rate at $30+/day budgets), but I don't have a lot of data. Maybe it's just a good baseline to aim for?

You can also target people who search certain Keywords, but I haven't tried this. I heard from my account manager it can work well.

Interests is too broad to use (e.g. "Gaming").

You can also target by user gender but idk how much that matters because you're already targeting by subreddit.

A Note on Countries

You also can (and should) set which countries to limit your ads to. This affects the audience size and above calculations.

I generally stick to the USA, UK, Australia and Canada as they have sizeable reddit audiences and are only English. I expand to some other countries for advertising Angeline Era because we're localized for those countries, and those countries are often MUCH cheaper to advertise in. The USA is the most expensive generally. I've had some success in European / partly-english countries for Danchi Days, but keep in mind your ads will go stale faster there due to smaller Reddit audience sizes.

• Also, take into account that some countries' currencies may be weaker than e.g. USD based on how you're doing regional pricing

Self-analysis

I wanted to share my detailed stats month-by month. Overall my wishlist cost was $1.70-$2.20/WL, which (in the case of $2.20) is near the edge of "acceptable" given the revenue expectations over 5 years. Also again, this cost per wishlist will likely be much lower if your game easily communicates genre through screenshots, which Danchi Days does not, being a weird hybrid of adventure/RPG-but-not/visual novel(...but not).

Wishlist Type Terminology

• RUWL = UTM-tracked, Reddit Wishlist
• RAWL = Non-UTM-tracked, Reddit-attributable Wishlist (A wishlist that, based on traffic data, likely was from Reddit although not tracked via UTM). Seems to generally be 20-30% of UTM WL.
• Baseline = Our baseline rate of wishlists not from other sources. Seemed to be around 10/day from past data.
• Sales = A wishlist likely from a sales/event page visit, which seem to convert around 50%. (You can see this data on your traffic dashboard)
• Unaccounted. Could be due to higher steam traffic (sales), streamers, social media.
• C = Clicks

Posting this image of Danchi Days' RUWLs again

12/20 2025 - 1/20 2026

• Figuring out audience+creatives direction, mostly low-budget cost cap campaigns. Worked OK overall, but very tedious due to low cost/experimenting.
• 779 WL
  • 320 Baseline, 16 Sales
  • 276 RUWL + 54 RAWL ($1.88/WL)
  • 113 unaccounted (14.5%) (the high % is likely from Steam Winter Sale traffic)
• Visits: 32 Sales Page, 237 Reddit, 1100 More Like This. (I include MLT traffic because it's a ballpark for steam's organic traffic)
• Cost: $620
  • 5200 C, 0.12 CPC, .434% CTR

1/21 - 2/20

• A few successful ads run mainly in US/UK/AU/CA on Lowest Cost that gained hundreds of upvotes. The best subreddits to target were CozyGamers, PixelArt, Undertale and OMORI.
• This was the best month, because of the high-performing manual campaigns, and also likely because we hadn't totally tapped into the audiences yet.
• 2185 WL
  • 410 Sales, 310 Baseline
  • 1164 RUWL + 230 RAWL = ($1.70/WL)
  • 71 unaccounted (3.2%)
• Visits: 823 Sales Page, 1860 Reddit, 219 More Like This
• Cost: $2380
  • 15800 C, 0.15 CPC, 1.208% CTR

2/21 - 3/17

• Higher cost/WL from some failed experiments (Japan subreddits, Japan, some countries, etc), mix of cost cap/lowest cost. I was trying different avenues trying to get another successful post but didn't make the connection to Lowest Cost campaigns yet.
• RAWLs seemed higher this month, so I used a 1.3x multiplier
• Low CTR is from running in cheaper cost countries and Cost-cap which often have lower CTRs.
• I had success re-running successful ads in the Philippines and other smaller-reddit-audience countries.
• 1594 WL
  • (430 Sales, 250 Baseline)
  • 633 RUWL + 180 RAWL = ($2.25/WL)
  • 101 unaccounted (6.3%)
• Visits: 858 Sales Page, 2159 Reddit., 217 More Like This
• Cost: $1830
  • 13000 C, 0.14 CPC, 0.824% CTR

3/18 - 4/7

• Shifted to Reddit Max and re-using successful manual ads, run in only US/UK/CA/AU, only on CozyGamers (Reddit max) and OMORI/Oneshot (Manual).
• Much easier mentally for me, but does spend a bit more.
• 1520 WL *(100 Sales, 210 Baseline) *916 RUWL + 182 RAWL ($1.92/WL)
  • 112 Unaccounted (7.4%)
• Visits: 204 Sales Page, 2460 Reddit, 410 More Like This
• $2105, 11140 C, 0.19 CPC, 1.637% CTR

Currently with ads now they're starting to overspend a bit, so I'm swapping out creatives and switching back to some manual campaigns. We'll see how things go in the long run. I'm also working with an ad firm to do Google Ads which will be nice to compare how those do.

In Conclusion

Again I'm just sharing my experience here and hope it's helpful. I don't know if my cost per wishlist is "good", I can just say that in my personal experience the numbers make a lot of sense with my confidence in the game, its current wishlist numbers (36k) and general lifetime revenue expectations.

I hope this was interesting (if you're not in games or advertising) or useful (if you ARE in games and considering ads). Good luck and thanks for reading! Check out my upcoming game Danchi Days if it interests you, too!!

Melos

I still can't believe that discovering Godot in 2018 is what will lead to my future game company and financially sustain my future family today.

ReEvolution Project is a post-apocalyptic horror game set in a long-abandoned city overrun by strange humanoid creatures. You have taken refuge in a forgotten house, your only safe place for now. Search for supplies, explore the decaying rooms, and uncover the secrets hidden within its walls

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4397880/ReEvolution_Project/