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Episode Summary

Every indie dev is trying to build the same thing: an audience that shows up when you launch, trusts what you make, and sticks around for the next game. Most of them are building it on rented land. A follower count on a platform that can change the rules, get sold, or quietly throttle your reach overnight.

Chris Zukowski has spent his career teaching indie devs how to build that audience the right way. He is the founder of How To Market A Game (HTMAG), one of the most trusted resources in the indie space, built on a weekly blog, a massive newsletter, and a refusal to ever guess. He started it as a side project while working a full corporate UX job at IBM, kept at it nights and weekends for years, and only went full time in 2019 once he had paying clients lined up.

So I flipped the premise. Chris teaches devs how to build an audience, so I asked him how he built his. We get into the origin story, the moment he realized “everybody’s doing this wrong,” the user research that proved social media barely moves the needle, and the wheel metaphor at the center of his whole philosophy: the newsletter you own is the hub, and every platform on the outer rim is one bad quarter away from breaking. We also talk Steam’s current golden age for small games, and his contrarian take that visibility was never your real problem.

If you are building something you want to last, this is the conversation that reframes what you should actually be building first.

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Meet Our Guest: Chris Zukowski, How To Market A Game

Chris spent years in corporate America as a UX and UI designer, working his way up to a director level role running user studies for tech companies, including a stint at IBM. The whole time, he made games on the side. Xbox indie titles, small Steam releases, the kind of nights-and-weekends work he still tells people not to quit their day job for. Around 2015 he started a blog about how Steam and game development actually work, publishing roughly once a month, then weekly as it grew.

The thing that set the blog apart was his method. Chris treated marketing claims the way a researcher treats a hypothesis. When the whole community repeated something as gospel, he would go pull the data, build a spreadsheet, and push the graph button to see if it held up. He ran the same basic user studies on Steam shoppers that he used to run in corporate America, just watching regular gamers browse and buy, and published findings nobody else had bothered to gather. That work became the foundation of HTMAG.

Today How To Market A Game runs on an owned newsletter and website, a Discord that became one of the biggest in game dev almost by accident, and the annual Inside Conference where Chris interviews developers who hit real numbers with small games. He is deliberately independent: not a publisher, not selling a tool, just a trusted middleman who safeguards developer data and documents what actually works.

Website: How To Market A Game

Inside Conference: Insider Conference

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Key Takeaways

“If they all fail, the core is the newsletter. It’s the best thing on the internet, kids. Start a newsletter, start a blog, start your own website.”

— Chris Zukowski, How To Market A Game

• Own your audience, don’t rent it. This is the center of everything Chris believes. Picture a wheel. The hub is your newsletter, your blog, your own domain, the things you control completely. The outer rim is YouTube, Discord, X, every social platform. Any spoke can snap. Discord could get sold and ruined, X could change hands, YouTube could throttle your reach. It does not matter, because the hub is still yours. The test is simple: look at your URL bar. If it says howtomarketagame.com and not howtomarketagame.twitter.com, you own the audience. That subtle difference is the whole game.
• The platform behind your list doesn’t matter, owning the relationship does. Chris uses Kit, but he is blunt that it is not an endorsement and probably not even right for most game devs. The point is that the company running your mailing list is interchangeable. When his old provider raised prices and slipped on service, he migrated and not a single subscriber noticed. One day the buttons looked slightly different, that was it. Compare that to moving from X to Bluesky, where every follower has to find you, sign up, and re-follow. With a list, the work is invisible to your audience. That is the power.
• Social media has basically never worked for indie games. Chris always felt it in his gut, then did the research to back it up. He would trace a viral moment back to the developer and ask how many wishlists it actually produced. The answer was usually around twenty. In his 2019 GDC talk he told everyone Twitter was a trash fire that would only get worse, and he was right. The lesson is not that you should never post, it is that building your audience on short-form feeds is building on a sandy beach that washes away at the next high tide.
• Get out of the indie game bubble. One of Chris’s biggest edges is that he studies other industries. Indie book publishing, indie film, indie music, blogging. Game devs tend to only watch and listen to other game devs, which means everyone recycles the same vibes-based advice. Looking sideways at how creators in other fields build sustainable careers is where a lot of his most useful frameworks came from.
• Run user research, because most marketing advice is just vibes. Chris’s breakthrough was applying boring corporate UX methodology to Steam. He recruited regular gamers, not YouTubers or devs, and watched them browse Steam and decide what to wishlist. He found that people fast-forward through trailers hunting for actual gameplay, and that hiding your UI to show “the vibes” backfires because shoppers use the UI to instantly understand what kind of game it is. None of it was complicated research. It just was not being done.
• Devs don’t need a newsletter as much as consultants do, but it still helps. Chris is honest here. For a developer shipping games on Steam, a newsletter is useful but not as critical as it is for someone building a consulting business, chasing a studio job, or going the business side. The deeper reason to have one is insurance. You never know which platform breaks next, and the list is the rock you rebuild from. Every time you launch a game you can point the list at it: wishlist this now, join the playtest. It ratchets your success forward, launch after launch.
• Email once a month, even when you have nothing big to say. The instinct to stay quiet until launch and then blast everyone is the worst thing you can do. Going silent and then sending one giant email perfectly mimics how spammers behave, and the algorithms treat you accordingly. A healthy signal is a small, regular note. Once a month, the shortest possible update: I’m still alive, I’m still working on my game, here’s the lighthouse I built. Bonus points if you invite replies, because engagement tells the spam filters you are a real person.
• Build trust by having no agenda and “working the maze backwards.” Chris starts from a fact: it is possible to make and sell an indie game for real money, because he knows people who do it. Then he works the maze backwards. He finds someone who reached the finish line, asks exactly which turns they took, and documents it. He does not care what the answer is. If the data showed the best move was paying to promote a puzzle platformer on X, he would write that blog. No tool to sell, no one true way, just accurate reporting and fiercely protected developer data. That is why people trust him.
• Visibility is not your real problem. This is his gut take with a lot of data behind it. Indie devs are not starving for visibility. Content creators, festival organizers, and hardcore genre fans do look at the games, they just pass. The actual gaps are skill and genre. Chris estimates ninety-five percent of games on physical show floors are in genres that simply do not sell on Steam. The fix is not more eyeballs. It is leveling up your craft and making the right kind of game, which leads directly to his favorite cause.
• Make small games. Steam is in a golden age for them. Chris compares it to indie filmmaker Mark Duplass’s “thousand dollar movie” idea: don’t start with your dream film, make a tiny one, then ladder up. Same for games. Stop pouring five years into a dream project and burning out. The devs he invited to Inside Conference made games in under nine months that earned 150,000 dollars or more, some hitting nearly 200,000 wishlists. Small, finished, and shipped beats big, perfect, and never done.

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Show Notes & Mentioned Resources

About Chris & How To Market A Game

• How To Market A Game: Chris’s blog and newsletter, the hub of everything he does.
• HTMAG Free Resources: Free guides and starting points for marketing your game.
• Inside Conference: Chris’s annual virtual conference interviewing devs who succeeded with small games, priced cheaper than a AAA game.

Mentioned in This Episode

• Mark Duplass: “The $1,000 Movie” talk: The South by Southwest talk Chris references on building a career by laddering up from tiny projects.

Key Frameworks from This Episode

The wheel: Your owned newsletter, blog, and domain are the hub. Social platforms are the outer rim. Build on the hub so a broken spoke never takes you down.

Working the maze backwards: Find someone who already succeeded, ask exactly which turns they took, and document the path. No agenda, just accurate reporting.

The once-a-month email: Send a tiny “I’m still alive” update monthly so the algorithms read you as a real person, not a spammer who only blasts at launch.

The thousand dollar game: Don’t build your dream game first. Make a small one in under nine months, ship it, and ladder up from there.

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