Why Most Game Launches Fail Before the First Trailer Drops
Ready Check #1: The Launch Readiness Series
This is the first article in Ready Check, a weekly series of 12 articles on launch readiness for indie and AA games. This week, we’ll cover the REAL reason most launches fail, as well as a quick and easy way to diagnose YOUR game’s launch readiness!
New installments of Ready Check will drop each Monday at 7:00 a.m. Pacific Time. If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to Spawn Point Marketing so you don’t miss any:
Of the more than 20,000 games that hit Steam in 2025, almost half got fewer than ten reviews, while over 2,000 got zero.
Zero. Zilch… nada… nothing.
This is what folks in the industry call “the discoverability crisis.” Except… this is not actually a discovery problem, because it’s not a Steam (or console/mobile store) algorithm problem. Rather, this is a marketing readiness problem… and by the time those studios hit launch day, it’s already far too late to fix.
What most studios don’t realize, until it’s way behind them, is that your launch doesn’t fail on launch day; it fails 18 months earlier, in pre-production, when someone decides marketing is something you’ll just “figure out closer to release.”
The Default Model: Marketing as a Launch Cost
Many studios treat marketing like it’s a phase:
Pre-production is for scope and prototyping.
Production is for building.
Pre-launch is for marketing.
Launch is for celebrating!
Post-launch is for patches (and, if you’re lucky, DLC).
That sequencing feels intuitive, but it’s also what kills indie studios far more reliably than bad code, bad art, or bad game design. Here are three reasons why:
I. Trust compounds, and you can’t catch up on compounding. Audiences simply do not convert on first exposure. The reader who sees your game on Steam today and then buys it on launch day is nothing more than a fantasy. The real conversion path for your average player is something like: saw a devlog 14 months ago, wishlisted 10 months ago, lurked the Discord for 8, played the demo during Next Fest, and then finally bought it at launch. Every week of pre-launch marketing is a week of compound growth. If you start at launch -3 months, you’ll find you already missed most of it.
II. Positioning calcifies in production. By the time the game is feature-complete, you’ve made a thousand decisions that shape who your game is for: art style, tone, length, difficulty, monetization, platform strategy, and many many more. If those decisions weren’t made with a clear audience in mind, the launch window becomes an exercise in retrofitting a position onto a product that already has one, whether you wrote it down or not. And unfortunately for you, that retrofitting rarely works.
III. The high-leverage free channels require lead time. What do Steam Next Fest, press relationships, creator outreach, and community have in common? Every one of these has a minimum lead time that’s measured in months, not weeks. Show up three weeks before launch, and none of them are available to you.
Steelmanning the Other Side
In the interest of fairness, let me give the launch-day-marketing model its fair hearing.
The logic goes: don’t market until you have something worth marketing, don’t burn attention on a game that might get delayed or canceled, don’t spread yourself thin, and keep your powder dry.
And sure, that logic works… in film and TV, where you have a finished, fixed product and a known release date. But games are different. Games have extended development timelines, soft launches, early access, demos, Next Fests, and beta programs. Your “something worth marketing” already exists in pre-production, long before you commission the trailer. You only need a one-sentence pitch and a mood board to start a Discord, while a teaser trailer and capsule art are more than enough to stand up a Steam page. Meanwhile, a demo is enough to pitch creators.
So the argument isn’t whether to market early — you should absolutely, resolutely, 100% be marketing early! Rather, the question is what “marketing” means at each stage. And here, I’ll tell you right now:
In pre-production, it means defining your audience and seeding your community.
In production, it means optimizing your Steam page and building your wishlist.
In pre-launch, it means running ads and press/creator outreach campaigns.
Conflating those stages into a single launch-month sprint is the big mistake studios make.
What Do the Top 10% Actually Do Differently?
The studios that crack the top 10% of revenue aren’t smarter, or luckier, than the rest. So what do they do differently? To put it simply: they treat marketing as infrastructure that gets built alongside the game, not as a campaign that gets launched after it.
They hire or partner with a marketing lead in pre-production, pick a target audience before locking art direction, put up a Steam page when they have a vertical slice (not when the game is gold), and start a community as soon as they can describe the game in one sentence.
None of that is expensive, and in fact, most of it is free! But all of it requires deciding, very early on, that marketing is a function of the business instead of a thing the founder will panic-execute in launch month.
Houston, We Have a Marketing Leadership Problem
There’s another area where most indie studios get stuck:
Founders become accidental CMOs — the founder who wrote the design doc is now also running Discord, drafting press releases, editing capsule art, and negotiating with creators (all while growling “Become a game dev, they said… you’ll focus on making games and not selling them, they said…” through gritted teeth). Meanwhile, the art director who should be finishing UI is writing Twitter threads, while the narrative designer who has to lock bark by midnight is instead scripting trailers.
“Everyone does a little marketing” is a slogan that studios use to feel good about not having a marketing lead. But this often leads to disaster, because it means nobody owns outcomes. It means no real decisions get made about channels, audiences, or beats until something breaks (and something will break, sooner or later, for one reason or another). And it means every marketing task competes with a production task, and production always wins…1 until launch, that is, when production’s done and suddenly marketing has three weeks to deliver what should have been built up over two years.
The studios that successfully market their game ultimately share just one structural trait: somebody on the team owns marketing as their primary responsibility, whether this is a full-time hire, a fractional CMO, or publisher partner… the legal structure varies (and is honestly fairly irrelevant). But what doesn’t vary is that there’s one person on the team whose calendar and accountability are entirely organized around one simple question:
“How do we get people to know and care about this game before it ships?”
If no one on your team can answer that question without deferring to someone else, then congratulations, you have a marketing leadership problem! And marketing leadership problems are the root cause of roughly every other marketing problem I’ve ever been asked to fix.
What Does It Mean to Be “Launch Ready”?
Now, at this point, you might be asking yourself: “Well, what does launch readiness actually look like?” Which is where the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard comes in. I built this nifty little tool, because studios kept asking me the same question in slightly different words:
Are we doing enough? Are we doing it right? Are we going to land this?
The Scorecard is the diagnostic version of that question. It consists of 16 questions, across six categories, all weighted by impact:
Marketing Timing
Steam Page & Store Presence
Community
Wishlist Momentum
Content/PR
Marketing Leadership
It takes roughly four minutes to complete, and it gives you a score out of 100, a readiness tier (Fog of War, Flying Blind, Behind Schedule, On Track, Launch Ready), and the three highest-leverage moves you could make right now based on where you’re weakest.
It can even present specialized recommendations for games that have already launched but aren’t converting, as well as games that aren’t launching on Steam!
Now, I want to be very clear on something: this is NOT a replacement for strategy. A score is a data point, not a plan — which is a much longer conversation. But this is the fastest way I know to surface where a studio’s launch is actually fragile… and funny enough, the answer is almost never where the founder thinks it is!
Often, they discover their wishlist problem is merely a symptom of the real problem: timing. Or they think they have a community or store presence problem, only to learn that’s actually downstream of a leadership problem. But the common thread running through all those failure modes? Not knowing whether you’re actually “Launch Ready” or not, and to what degree; studios who think they’re “on track” often find out they’re Behind Schedule, with only a 90-day window to fix it (eek!).
What’s Coming Next in Ready Check
This is Part One of a 12-week series. Every Monday, I’m going to take the scorecard apart category by category: the research behind the weights, the common failure patterns I see across studios, and what it actually takes to move your score. We’ll dive into the infamous “411-day problem,” we’ll do the math on wishlist-to-revenue conversion, and we’ll walk through why Steam Next Fest is the single highest-leverage free event (that way too many studios still skip).
Next week, we’ll dive deep into the methodology: how I chose the six categories, why Marketing Timing is the heaviest lift at 25%, and why Marketing Leadership is deliberately weighted lower than you’d expect. There’s a reason for that, and it’s not what I reckon most of you would guess!
If you want to find out where your studio sits before the series goes deep, take the scorecard! Four minutes, absolutely free:
Take the Game Launch Readiness Scorecard →
And if you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to Spawn Point Marketing for free game marketing tips, case studies, and industry analysis, delivered straight to your inbox each Monday, for free:
GG,
~Jay
Next on Ready Check:
Spawn Point Marketing offers fractional marketing leadership services for indie and AA game studios. For more information, visit https://spawnpointmarketing.com
And naturally so! After all, if the game doesn’t get made, everything else is moot.
Jay, this is really cool! I appreciate you making it pragmatic and applicable. There's info on marketing out there, but how to concretely execute on it is what I'd love to understand better.
Looking forward to this series 👍
"you can’t catch up on compounding"
There you go! This is it. Time, not timing, is what makes compounding powerful. Those who act on marketing with a sense of urgency will surely benefit.
Looking forward to this series, Jay!