Every day, roughly 55 new games land on Steam. On phones the fight is even harder: mobile already accounts for more than half of all game revenue on the planet. And Brazil is no minor player: three out of four Brazilians play games, 95 million players, the third largest gaming population in the world.
So the audience is there, in enormous numbers. The shortage was never players. Games do not sell themselves, and most studios launch blind. The good news? Doing the marketing basics well already puts you ahead of most of the competition.
This guide covers those basics, done right, for Steam and for mobile, with no jargon. Grab a coffee.
Steam and mobile: two completely different games#
Before any tactic, understand this: PC and mobile are not the same market on different screens. They are two economies with their own currencies.
- On Steam, the currency is the wishlist: how many people hit "notify me" before launch. That is the number the algorithm watches.
- On mobile, the currency is a pair, cheap installs plus players who come back: you buy downloads with ads and then work to keep the player around.
That is why the guide has two parts. Feel free to jump to yours, but both are worth reading: there are good ideas to steal in each direction.
Part 1: launching on Steam#
The wishlist is the line outside your launch#
Think of the wishlist as the line at the door before the store opens. Steam looks at the size of that line to decide whether to show your game to more people. And the line comes with known numbers:
- 7,000 wishlists: your game gets on the radar for "Popular Upcoming", Steam's launch showcase. That is when the store starts working for you for free.
- 15 sales for every 100 people in line: that is the typical first week conversion. Not 50, not 2: fifteen.
- 30,000 to 50,000 wishlists: the range that launches clearing $250,000 usually land in.
And a detail almost nobody mentions: only 9% of games sell more copies in the first month than they had wishlists. In practice, the line is the ceiling on your launch. All of pre launch marketing exists to raise that ceiling.
Your Steam page is the storefront (and it opens early)#
Games that launch well put the page up 6 to 12 months ahead. It is not perfectionism: no page means no wishlists, no festival, no ads. Every month without a page is a month the line does not move.
And put real care into what people see first. The capsule, that small image in the store grid, has to shout the genre, and the first screenshot has to show actual gameplay. Nobody joins the line for a game they could not understand in 3 seconds of scrolling.
Demo and Next Fest: your opening night#
Next Fest is Steam's demo festival, and a good one adds 2,000 to 7,000 wishlists in a week. The catch: each game takes part exactly once, ever. It is opening night at the movies, and there is no second premiere. Only enter with a stable demo and a finished page.
And the demo earns its keep outside the festival too. Among the hits of 2025, the games that kept the demo live ended up with an average review score of 94.7%, against 84.6% for the ones that pulled it. If your first hour is good, let people taste it.
Paid ads for a PC game: the $1 benchmark#
Paid traffic works for PC games, as long as you measure the right thing. The industry benchmark is simple: about $1 per wishlist. There is a documented public case: one developer spent $4,365 on ads and brought in roughly 4,000 wishlists. If your cost sits far above that, the problem is almost never the ad. It is the page or the positioning.
The first week decides it (and reviews rule)#
A typical game earns 25% to 40% of its lifetime revenue in the first month. And the first reviews carry enormous weight: games that surprise people hold scores around 90%, while the ones that disappoint fall to the 60s. A bad review score kills the conversion of the traffic you paid to bring in. Translation: do not ship broken.
Part 2: launching on mobile#
The mobile equation: buy players cheap and make them come back#
On phones, almost nobody types your game's name into the store on their own. Discovery is something you buy. The price of each download coming from an ad is the CPI (cost per install), and it swings wildly from market to market:
- Latin America: around $0.32 per install. One of the cheapest audiences in the world to acquire.
- United States: $5 or more. Yes, fifteen times more expensive.
- By genre: a hyper casual title runs about $0.40 on Android, while a heavy RPG passes $6 on iOS.
But installs are only half the equation. The other half: does the player come back? The industry measures that with retention: D1 (came back the next day), D7 and D30. The market median is a D1 around 22%, and the top 10% of games hold about 40%. Rule of thumb: with D1 under 30%, spending on ads is filling a leaky bucket.
Soft launch: the dress rehearsal in a small country#
Before going global, studios run a rehearsal: they launch the game for real, but only in cheap markets like the Philippines, Malaysia or Indonesia. The goal is to measure retention and cost while spending little, fix the funnel and only then hit the global button. The bar for moving on is usually that same D1 around 30%.
ASO: SEO for the app stores#
65% of discovery on iOS comes from search inside the store itself (on Google Play it is 58%). Your store page is an acquisition machine, not a formality. What moves the needle most: an icon and screenshots that communicate the game in seconds (screenshot captions now index in search too), a vertical video and a rating of 4.0 or better.
Two habits that pay for themselves: 77% of players read reviews before downloading, so reply to your reviews, which even counts toward the stores giving you editorial features. And test the store page like an ad, because the icon and the first screenshot are your billboard.
Creative is the game inside the game#
On mobile, what sets your acquisition cost is the ad creative. The 2025 and 2026 reports agree: video dominates, taking more than half of impressions, and playable ads doubled their share in a year. The pace at the top is brutal: 10 to 15 creatives per ad group, refreshed 2 to 3 times a week.
The bottleneck on mobile today is not budget or targeting. It is creative production. Whoever tests more hook variations in the first 2 seconds pays less per player.
Where to advertise#
Meta remains the number one acquisition channel for games (Instagram and Facebook together take almost 70% of social impressions), with Google App campaigns right behind and TikTok as the channel worth testing. Inside other games, the ad networks (AppLovin, AdMob, Mintegral, Unity) split the monetization and acquisition pie.
What holds true in both worlds#
Positioning in one sentence. If you cannot explain your game in a single sentence that makes someone want to play it, no ad will fix that. It is the filter everything else runs through.
Community is free fuel. In this year's GDC survey, the channels developers use most are social media (65%) and streamers and creators (39%), ahead of paid ads (31%). Devlogs, behind the scenes clips and gameplay cuts keep interest alive between the announcement and the launch.
Metrics on the table from day 1. Steam: cost per wishlist. Mobile: CPI and retention. Without those numbers in front of you, you do not have a campaign. You have hope.
Knowing when NOT to advertise. Weak page, unstable demo, low D1? Advertising in that state only speeds up the waste. Fix the house first, then turn the machine on.
Quick checklist#
- Steam: page live 6 to 12 months ahead; a capsule that shouts the genre; a demo if your first hour is good; Next Fest planned (remember: once only); paid media held to the $1 per wishlist benchmark; a review push in the first week.
- Mobile: the funnel measured from the prototype on (tutorial completion is a critical event); soft launch in a cheap market until D1 reaches 30%; the store page treated like an ad; a creative factory running every week; scale spend only once CPI and retention are healthy.
Quick answers#
What does marketing a game cost? Games PR agencies charge roughly €2,000 to €6,000 a month, and a professional trailer starts around $500. On mobile, you can validate a soft launch in Latin America for a few thousand dollars, precisely because installs there are cheap. The size of the budget matters less than measuring cost per wishlist or per install from the first dollar.
Is Brazil a good place to launch? For mobile, excellent: 95 million players and one of the lowest CPIs in the world, which is exactly why studios from outside the country like to test there. On Steam, Brazil is one of the fastest growing markets on the platform and has its own regional pricing.
Can I do all of this myself? You can, and plenty of people do. What you cannot do is wing it. If you have more time than money: community, page and demo. If you have more money than time, that is where professional help comes in, and the performance layer (campaigns, page, numbers on the table) is exactly what we run.
Your game deserves better than a launch in the dark. If you want to turn these numbers into a plan for YOUR game, see how we work with games or start with the free diagnostic. We play, we know both stores, and we measure everything.
Sources#
- Steam and wishlists: annual analysis by Chris Zukowski via GamesRadar, wishlist to sale conversion from GameDiscoverCo via GameDev Reports, VG Insights and presskit.gg
- Demos and 2025 data: How To Market A Game (Chris Zukowski)
- CPI by region and genre: Game Growth Advisor 2026 and FoxData
- Mobile retention and UA channels: MAF benchmarks and creative report (Lancaric)
- ASO: Phiture, ASO Trends 2026
- Brazilian and global market: Pesquisa Game Brasil 2026, Telesíntese and Newzoo data on global revenue by platform
- Developer channels: GDC State of the Game Industry 2026
