Marketing & discovery for indie devs

Most games don't fail.
They just never get found.

You can build something great and still watch it vanish because nobody knew it was there. SeeIndie is about the other half of the job: being findable. No agency budget, no growth hacks. Just practical things that actually move discovery, tested in the open.

Start with the basics → Follow the experiment

Last updated:

A Steam page is the floor, not the ceiling.

Discovery isn't one thing. Your Steam page, your social presence, and your own website each pull players in a different way. Most advice stops at the first two, the ones that need constant feeding. The website, the one you own and that keeps working while you sleep, is the piece most indies skip. SeeIndie covers all three, and goes deepest on the one everyone forgets.

Where games get found

Start with wherever you're weakest.

liveWebsiteYour own site, built so search engines, AI models and players can actually find it. The multiplier nobody uses. liveSteamThe store page is the only page most players will ever see. Tags, capsule, description, wishlists — and what the algorithm actually counts.
in progress · AugustSocial mediaWhich platform is worth your evenings, which are not, and the one community move that still pays: a Discord people stay in.
on the roadmapPress & creatorsHow coverage really happens in 2026 — the pitch, the timing, the keys, and why a streamer often beats a magazine.
on the roadmapLaunchThe last 90 days. Wishlist targets, release dates, discounts — and what happens the week after nobody talks about.
on the roadmapBrandYour name and your game as things people search for on purpose. Naming, identity, the SERP that shows up when a publisher googles you.
On guides: longer, step-by-step guides are coming later as a paid thing. Everything you see here stays free.

Latest posts

New guides and case-study updates, newest first.

4 aug 2026Your Steam store page: the page that makes your wishlistsYour Steam store page doesn't rank — it converts. What every section is for, in Valve's own order, and the two fields that actually feed Steam discovery. 31 jul 2026How to rank in ChatGPT (and why the answer keeps changing)ChatGPT cites different sources depending on how hard it thinks: Semrush found only 25.6% overlap between reasoning modes on identical prompts, and Reddit's share of citations halves. Here's what that means for getting your game described correctly — and what's actually worth doing. 29 jul 2026The Crit Pick SEO case study: the first month of real dataTwo weeks to get crawled, then 18 clicks and ~1,650 impressions. The first real Search Console data from Crit Pick, plus the dos and don'ts behind the build. 27 jul 2026What is llms.txt? (And why Google says you don't need one)llms.txt is a Markdown file at your site's root that's supposed to hand your pages to AI models. Ahrefs checked 137,210 domains: 97% of these files are never requested, and most bots that do fetch one aren't AI tools. Here's what it is, who reads it, and what Google says. 24 jul 2026The Guild Wars 3 page, by the numbersWhy the GW3 tracker is shaped the way it is, read as search strategy, not code: what term it chases, how the keyword set was cleaned, and why "no leaks" is the part that actually wins. 22 jul 2026How I built the Guild Wars 2 event timerA live clock for every fixed-schedule event in Tyria, and the calls I made building it, including which SEO advice I took and which I left on the floor.
Who's writing this

A dev who does SEO for a living

SEO pays my bills, mostly in finance, which is about as cut-throat as search gets. I've also got a game dev degree and studio experience on console projects. The console, unfortunately, never released. SeeIndie is me pointing one skill at the other, out loud, so you can copy what works and skip what doesn't. :)

Common questions

What is SeeIndie?
A site about marketing and discovery for indie game developers: how people actually find games, and what a solo dev or small team can do about it without an agency budget. Written by a game dev who does SEO for a living.
Do I need a marketing budget to use any of this?
No. Nearly everything covered here is free to start: a page people can find, a Steam page built for wishlists, and Google Search Console to see who arrives. Paid tools save time once you're serious, they don't unlock the results. The toolbox is sorted free-first for exactly that reason.
Is SEO even worth it for a game, or is it all Steam?
Steam is where most wishlists come from, and nothing here argues otherwise. But Steam's traffic starts once people are already on Steam. Search is how people find you before that — and it's the one channel you own outright, rather than rent from an algorithm.
How do I know any of this actually works?
Because it's being tested in public. Crit Pick is a gaming site being built and ranked from zero, with the real numbers published as they come in — including the months where nothing happens.
How often do new posts go out?
The newsletter goes out every other week — the short version, no filler. Posts land as they're finished rather than on a schedule, because a padded post to hit a date helps nobody.