How to Market an Indie Game on a Small Budget

Short answer: with a small budget, spend in this order. First your Steam page, because every other channel ends there. Then short-form video, your own clips first and creators second, timed around a demo or a festival. Judge every dollar by one number: cost per wishlist. On recent Trapster campaigns that number landed between $0.10 and $0.20 for games with a clear hook.

Most indie teams spend two or three years on the game and two weeks on marketing. The store page goes live, the trailer gets 400 views, and nobody can say what went wrong. Usually nothing went wrong with the game. The money and the time simply went out in the wrong order.

This guide is about that order.

Step 0: decide what you are buying

Before launch you are buying wishlists. Steam emails everyone who wishlisted your game when it launches and when it goes on a discount of 20% or more (Steamworks docs). A strong first week also pushes the game into more of Steam's own recommendation surfaces. So a wishlist is the closest thing you have to a pre-sale.

That gives you a simple filter for every idea on your list. Will it bring wishlists, and roughly how much will each one cost? A tweet with 50,000 impressions and no Steam link fails the filter. A 20 second clip that makes people search for your game passes it.

Step 1: fix the page you are sending people to (free)

Paid traffic to a weak page is the most expensive mistake a small team can make. Check three things before you spend anything:

• Capsule image. It is shown tiny in search and on the front page. The genre should be readable at that size.
• First four screenshots and the first 10 seconds of the trailer. Gameplay only. No logos, menus or studio intros.
• Short description. What the player does, in one or two sentences. Save the lore for the long description.

Show the page to someone who has never seen the game for five seconds and ask what it is. If they hesitate, fix the page first. We go deeper on store page fixes in how to get more Steam wishlists before launch.

Step 2: post your own short clips (almost free)

TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels are where players find games now. Cut five to ten clips of 15 to 30 seconds from real gameplay and post them on your own accounts for two weeks.

Your accounts start with no audience, so don't judge them by views. Judge them by watch time. The two or three clips people watch to the end are your best hooks, and you will hand them to creators in step 3.

Step 3: pay creators for views, not for promises

This is where a small budget goes furthest. Instead of emailing streamers one by one and hoping for a reply, you run one campaign where many creators post about the game in the same few days, and you pay for the views their videos actually get.

Three examples from campaigns on Trapster, all with public case studies:

Game	Wishlists added	Cost per wishlist	What happened
Very Safe Dino Park	+15,701	$0.10	33 creators, 67 videos, one TikTok passed 731,000 views
Professional Ship Simulator	+10,874	$0.15	31 creators, budget spent inside one day
Clay Clinic	+16,750	$0.16	16 creators, a page that started from zero

Not every game lands there. Galactic Vault added 1,307 wishlists at $1.22 each, because no single clip broke out. That is still a useful result: it tells you which hook to change before the next round.

How CPM pricing works and what changes the final cost is covered in how much game influencer marketing costs.

Step 4: stack it on a moment

A campaign works harder when it lands the same week as something players can act on: a demo going live, Steam Next Fest, a discount, or the launch itself. Each one gives viewers a reason to click today instead of "later", which usually means never.

What to skip while money is tight

• Paid ads before the page converts. You pay for clicks that bounce.
• Expensive booths if nobody on the team can follow up with the people you meet.
• Generic press releases to big gaming sites with no news hook. Editors get hundreds a day.
• Free key blasts to 200 channels. Cheap in money, expensive in time, and you can't control who posts or when. If keys are your plan anyway, compare the options in our Keymailer alternatives breakdown.

None of these are bad forever. They just aren't the first place for a small budget.

An 8 week plan

1. Weeks 1 and 2. Fix the Steam page. Cut 5 to 10 gameplay clips.
2. Weeks 3 and 4. Post the clips yourself. Note which ones get watched to the end.
3. Weeks 5 and 6. Run a creator campaign built on your best hook, timed with a demo or a festival.
4. Weeks 7 and 8. Read wishlists per day against your normal baseline. Repeat what worked, drop what didn't.

FAQ

How much should a small indie studio spend on marketing?
Start from a wishlist goal, not a budget. Pick a target, divide by a realistic cost per wishlist ($0.10 to $1.22 on our recent campaigns, depending on the hook) and you get a budget range you can defend.

Is short-form video better than a trailer?
They do different jobs. The trailer converts people who already landed on your page. Short-form video is what gets them there.

When should I start marketing my indie game?
As soon as the Steam page is live. Wishlists compound, and a page that collects them for a year launches very differently from one that collects them for a month.

What is the minimum budget for a creator campaign on Trapster?
$3,000. On more than half of our campaigns the first video goes live within 3 hours of launch.

Get a forecast for your game

Send us your Steam page and we will estimate views, creators, wishlists and cost per wishlist before you spend anything. See how Trapster works for studios or book a call.

Sources: Steamworks documentation on wishlists and store assets. Campaign figures come from Trapster case studies. Cost per wishlist is the creator budget divided by wishlists added, platform fee excluded.