How to Market an Indie Game With No Audience

Short answer: if you have no followers, don't wait months to build your own. Borrow an audience. Creators already have people who trust them, and a campaign can put your game in front of hundreds of thousands of players in a day or two. Get the Steam page ready first, consider a slightly higher CPM so stronger creators join, and measure in wishlists, not followers. Three games that started with almost nothing on Trapster ended at $0.16 to $0.21 per wishlist.

Every indie game starts at zero. No followers, no mailing list, a Steam page with a handful of wishlists from friends and family. The usual advice is to "build an audience", which is good advice that takes a year. Most studios don't have a year.

What did zero-start campaigns actually do?

Three games that began with almost no audience:

Game	Starting point	After the campaign	Cost per wishlist
Clay Clinic	Brand new page, zero wishlists	16,750 wishlists, budget spent in one day	$0.16
Anomaly Control Simulator	New page, a few dozen followers	21,500 wishlists over two waves	$0.18
Cat Mail Co.	Wishlists in the low hundreds	+7,600 in 3 days	$0.21

None of these studios had an audience to amplify. The creators brought it.

Why your own accounts start slow

Posting your own clips is still worth it, because it teaches you which moments people watch to the end. But a new account starts with no reach, and the algorithm needs time to learn who to show it to. That's weeks of posting before anything moves, and it's easy to give up in the middle.

A creator campaign skips that wait. The creator's audience is already there, already trusts them, and already watches gaming content. Your game gets their reach on day one.

Step 1: make the page ready first

When you have no audience, every visitor counts more. Before you send anyone to the page, check the capsule at small size, put gameplay in the first screenshots and the first seconds of the trailer, and say what the player does in the short description. The full checklist is in how to get more Steam wishlists before launch.

Step 2: give creators a reason to pick you

Creators choose which campaigns to join, and an unknown game competes with games they've heard of. Two things help:

• A clear, visual hook. Anomaly Control Simulator is a slow, decision driven sim, which sounds hard to sell. Its hook was simple: examine dangerous artifacts, and one wrong call ends the world. Creators from horror, simulation and SCP adjacent niches picked it up.
• A slightly higher rate. Cat Mail Co. set its CPM at $7 instead of the usual $5 to attract stronger creators, and still ended at $0.21 per wishlist.

Step 3: go in waves

You don't need to spend everything at once. Anomaly Control Simulator ran two campaign waves back to back: the first proved the hook works, the second scaled it. 37 creators posted 123 videos in total, and the page went from a standing start to 21,500 wishlists.

Views are not followers

A campaign can bring a lot of views to a tiny page without making it famous overnight. Taillights started with a Steam page of 44 followers. 48 creators brought 628,052 views in about a day, and the page's followers nearly doubled.

That's the honest picture: views spread the game, but the number that tells you whether it worked is wishlists. Measure them against your normal daily rate, as described in how to measure wishlists from a creator campaign.

FAQ

Can a creator campaign work if my Steam page has zero wishlists?
Yes. Clay Clinic started from zero and reached 16,750 wishlists.

Should I build my own social accounts first?
Do both. Your own clips teach you which hooks work, and creators give you reach while your accounts grow. Our small budget guide has an 8 week plan for both.

Do I need to pay more as an unknown game?
Not necessarily, but a slightly higher CPM can attract stronger creators. On Trapster you can also set tiered CPM by audience region.

What's the minimum budget?
$3,000 per campaign. On more than half of our campaigns the first video is live within 3 hours of launch.

Borrow your first audience

Send us your Steam page, even if it's brand new. We'll send back a free forecast: expected views, creators, wishlists and cost per wishlist. See Trapster for studios or book a call.

Sources: campaign figures come from Trapster case studies. Cost per wishlist is the creator budget divided by wishlists added, platform fee excluded.