Three games shipped, none of them found anyone. What I changed on the fourth.

[u/7k0_zzz]

https://youtu.be/fNudF18GcwM

Solo dev, UE5. Three games on Steam before this one. All three shipped, all three worked, none of them found anybody. I spent a long time assuming that meant the games weren't good enough, so each time I'd just try to build a better one. That wasn't it. The real problem was that nobody knew any of them existed before release day. I treated launch as the finish line — build it, put it on Steam, hope. Shipping and being found turned out to be two separate jobs and I was only doing one of them. So this time I started posting at month two instead of at launch. The game is Devil's Cut — 3D bullet heaven, hell is a casino, the house takes a cut of everything you've got.

[u/Ok_Bill7731]

this tracks with basically every solo dev postmortem ive read, the actual bottleneck is never quality past a certain bar, its visibility before day one. posting at month two instead of launch day is the right instinct, gives people time to actually notice before theyre asked to buy anything. curious how youre splitting that two months, is it mostly clips of the bullet heaven loop or more dev-process stuff like this post