"Valve knows it, I know it, and you need to know it": Steam expert tells indie devs to "give away" demos, because actually playing a game beats all other marketing

Indie games are having an increasingly hard time with discoverability; there are more great indie games than ever, but for every one that breaks out and becomes a Balatro-level success, there's likely 50 more that get passed over completely. At the GDC 2025, game marketing researcher Chris Zukowski posited that there is one thing that is absolutely necessary for developers to do to prevent this: demos."Here's the universal truth with interactive media [...] you need to give away something, becau