Marketing before your page exists creates your own competitors

If you start marketing before you are ready for it, the attention you collect does not come back to you, it comes back at you as a competitor. Most of you think the risk of showing early is having the idea stolen. The real risk is having nowhere to send people on the day you show it, because that attention has to go somewhere, and if you do not give it a place to go someone else does, and you have advertised them for free.

An exact example of this happened recently. A developer called NasNakarus posted a clip of a simple needle in a haystack game, 5M pieces of hay and a single needle. His own video alone got over 53 million views, and on top of that it was reposted everywhere one by one. But the game had no Steam page at the time. That attention went somewhere too, the place it went just was not his page.

The person who sees the video has no link, so they type the name into Steam. Search that name today and five pages come up, four of them from other studios. The bad part is not the name collision either. None of them just sat on the name, all four made the game, and on top of that they separated from each other. One put in co-op, one put in tool upgrades, one built a bale selling economy. A genre formed before the man’s own game even shipped.

If a game goes viral, copies coming is expected anyway. The part that normally puts people off is the wishlists that virality writes onto the original, because whoever is thinking of copying sees an audience already gathered in front of them and moves on, thinking the original has taken what it was going to take. Here there was nowhere to gather, so that wall never went up. What the copier got was not a deterrent, it was an invitation.

The most painful part is that the original is the last of these five to come out. One of the copies shows Q3 while the man’s own game arrives in Q4. He could not get the clean name either, so he added Simulator to the title to separate himself, and he spends the first sentence of his store description, the most important spot after the capsule, defending himself instead of describing the game, writing “the viral one the one and only”. So from here on you have to spend extra effort proving you are the original and advertising the idea you already validated a second time, and there is no guarantee the idea will not slip out of your hands either.

Last week I wrote that you should not cry about your game being copied, and this landed right on top of it. What I said there still holds, the part that can be copied is usually one piece of the moment to moment gameplay and that piece does not carry a game on its own. Here the hook and the gameplay are the same thing and there is nothing to separate them. So the whole part that does the work was visible in the clip, and that clip showed 53 million people not what the game was, but how valuable an idea this simple to make is.

Honestly the game is nothing special either, it is something you could comfortably build in a day or two. That is what sets the speed of the copying. If nobody can rebuild your game over a weekend, the cost of showing early stays low, but if the idea is fully visible in the clip and takes two days to make, the race starts the moment you show it.

If you think you have an idea that can go viral, opening the Steam page up front is essential. When attention turns up from somewhere without you knowing, you have a place for it to go. It can be wishlisted, the link can be shared, and the person writing about it knows what to point at.

Opening early has no cost either, because if you do not market it that page does not land in front of anyone anyway. Do not read that as a weakness, it is exactly what makes opening early an advantage. When and how you open the page does not matter either. You do not need to wait for a perfect capsule, a finished trailer or settled store text. At that stage the page has one job, to show that you have a link ready to share if something from your game goes viral.

Do not take this as turn every idea into a page immediately. There are plenty of games with a page and nothing to show, and their problem is a completely different one. The point here is this, the gap between the moment you show something and the moment there is somewhere to go is your risk, and you are the only one who can close it.

The only concrete output of this virality so far has been at least four new direct competitors.