Funding Your Indie Game: Pricing, Kickstarter, and Wishlists
Marketing and money are the same topic wearing different hats. Your price is a marketing decision. Your Kickstarter is a marketing campaign with a tip jar. Your wishlist count is the number the entire industry uses to judge your game's commercial viability. Treat the money side with the same rigor as the trailer.
Pricing: the math before the gut
Price by math, then adjust by gut — never the reverse. Start with your costs and Steam's 30% cut, then model regional pricing (a huge share of indie revenue comes from regions where $19.99 doesn't mean what you think it means). Consider your game's length and genre norms: players have strong price anchors per genre, and fighting them is expensive. The classic indie pricing bands exist for a reason — $9.99, $14.99, $19.99, $24.99 — because crossing a band boundary changes who considers your game. Pick the band deliberately.
Discounts as strategy, not panic
Every discount teaches players what your game is "really" worth. A planned ladder (launch 10%, first seasonal 20–30%, deeper later) preserves perceived value; improvised fire sales destroy it. Never discount in the first 30 days unless it was the plan all along. And know your floor: the price below which you'd rather bundle or go subscription-adjacent than devalue the title.
Kickstarter in 2026: viable, but different
Crowdfunding still works for games with a visible hook and an existing audience — it does not work as a discovery channel. Backers fund games they've already seen somewhere else. The campaign page needs: a 2-minute video that shows gameplay (not talking heads), a clear "what is this game" above the fold, and reward tiers where the math actually works. Tier math is where campaigns die: after platform fees (~10% all-in), payment processing, taxes, and shipping physical rewards, a $25 tier can net you less than you think. Model every tier's true margin before you publish.
The publisher pitch
If you're going the publisher route, your deck has a job: make a busy person understand the commercial case in ten slides. Market comps (games like yours that sold), the hook in one sentence, team credibility, budget and timeline, and exactly what you're asking for. Publishers see hundreds of decks; the ones that get meetings are specific about numbers and honest about risks. A deck that hides the risks makes the publisher invent worse ones.
Wishlists: the industry's currency
Wishlists are the metric everyone — Steam's algorithm, publishers, press — uses as a proxy for demand. The commonly cited rule of thumb: you need tens of thousands for a healthy launch, and the velocity matters as much as the total. But wishlists are a means, not the goal: they're a mailing list Steam lets you email for free at launch. Optimize for the conversion (page → wishlist), not the vanity number, and remember that 10,000 wishlists from your actual audience beats 50,000 from a viral clip of people who'll never buy.
The name is a business decision
Your game's name affects searchability, trademark risk, and first impressions. Check trademark databases before you fall in love with a title — renaming after launch is a special kind of pain. Prefer names that are spellable after hearing once, searchable without competing against a common word, and available as a domain and social handle.