Game Publishing, Marketing & Monetization Cheat Sheet

Publishing a game is everything that happens between "the build works" and "strangers are paying to play it" — picking a storefront, setting a price and revenue model, building a store page that converts browsers into wishlists, running a marketing campaign that starts long before launch, clearing whatever certification the platform demands, and then keeping players around afterward. It matters because most games fail commercially not from bad code but from nobody hearing about them: in 2024 alone, 18,234 games launched on Steam and only about 2.4% reached 1,000 reviews, the rough threshold where a platform's own algorithm starts working in a developer's favor. The counterintuitive part is timing — marketing and development run in parallel from the start, not "when it's done," because wishlists collected 18 months before launch convert at roughly the same rate as ones collected the week before; the studios that break through are the ones that treated publishing as a discipline with its own multi-month timeline, not an afterthought bolted onto the end of a dev cycle.