How to Get Your First 1,000 Players: White Knuckle Edition
And a very useful trick to level up your Discord onboarding
I talk to a lot of early-stage game developers as part of my day job.
One of the biggest problems they all face early on is “how to build a community” as a new studio. This conversation usually starts around hiring: Who should we hire to run community for us? But if you dig into the question, what a lot of people really want to know is something like: How do I get anybody to care about my game? And the desperate hope is that maybe that’s a problem they can delegate to somebody.
Everybody wants a million players. But how do you get that initial traction?
So back in January I wrote this post where I asked four different successful indie game developers exactly that: where and how did they get their first 1,000 players? Each of the four games earned at least a couple thousand “overwhelmingly positive” reviews on Steam and likely grossed over $1 million—putting them among the top 1-2% of titles on Steam.
That post is probably the most useful thing I’ve written about games marketing on Push to Talk because the responses from the devs revealed something interesting about indie games that pop off: Although their go-to-market strategies differed at first, they all sort of converged into a similar story.
To summarize:
Loddlenaut found pre-launch traction with TikTok posts and Steam festivals.
Lil Gator Game hit it big with YouTube creators.
SKALD: Against the Black Priory nailed its positioning and reached a niche RPG audience with help from advocates like Larian CEO Swen Vincke.
Chants of Sennaar released a demo that became a hit among French journalists.
These are pretty remarkably different approaches! But it’s what happened next that stood out. The stories all began to blend together. All four games earned enough pre-launch wishlists to guarantee that they would hit the “New & Trending” chart on Steam upon launch. From there, big content creators seemed to find the games on their own (probably from seeing it on New & Trending). And then some combination of word-of-mouth growth and the Steam algorithm conspired to bring in tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of paying players from who-knows-where.
It’s almost as if the specifics of the marketing don’t really matter. You just need to get enough gas in the tank to be able to crank the word-of-mouth machine and the algo engine. Assuming your game is really good, at least, that’s the playbook.
Catching Players Red-Handed
Today I want to revisit this “first 1,000 players” idea by looking at another recent hit indie game, the first-person “horror climbing” game White Knuckle. It launched in Early Access on Steam last month and already has 2,284 “overwhelmingly positive” reviews.
But the game’s lead programmer and designer, Holly Jencka, says that before October of last year, the game didn’t even have 1,000 wishlists.
White Knuckle is the first release from Jencka’s studio, Dark Machine Games, but her background as a 3D environment artist shines through in the game’s visuals. The screenshots are interesting but it looks incredible in motion. Trailer below:
The game nails a lot of weird things at once: super slick first-person movement, a gritty-but-appealing low res aesthetic, and real horror elements in a game nominally about climbing a building. Holly Jencka clearly knows what she’s doing with this game.
So I reached out to ask a few questions about her go-to-market strategy and how the game reached its success so far:
PUSH TO TALK: White Knuckle is sick, and players obviously love it, but it doesn't seem to have had any particular social media advantages going into launch (beyond maybe the demo?). How did you reach your first 1,000 players?
HOLLY JENCKA: We got very, very fortunate after releasing our demo back in October. In September of 2024 we entered our game into the Indie Horror Showcase, with a plan to launch the demo on the day of the show. On the day of our demo's launch alongside the showcase, over 1,000 people had downloaded it and we had nearly 1,000 wishlists! This was phenomenal considering we had done essentially no marketing at all for the game. Things snowballed from there pretty much entirely through word of mouth! For the Early Access release we already had a lot of players who were super excited to try the game out. We had been picked up by DreadXP to help market the game and fund its development, and as a result of those and many other factors we were easily able to hit our first 1,000 players for the Early Access within the first day! I still can't believe it.
I think a lot about the past seven months since we launched the demo, what went right, what went wrong. I think it all goes back to the day of the showcase, and the good fortune we were lucky to stumble into: I really can't stress enough how much getting White Knuckle into the Indie Horror Showcase helped our demo's visibility. Not even just because the IHS is a particularly widely followed showcase, more so that getting into it meant that yes, people watching would find the game, but more importantly it slotted White Knuckle's demo directly into the Steam “Event Page” for the show, which gave us a huge natural visibility boost that lasted over a week. Next Fest is good, but there are so many games now that my recommendation for indies is to also aim for the smaller boutique events, which are more likely to put you front and center on their pages.
Sidebar: A Discord Onboarding Trick Worth Stealing
When you join the Discord server for White Knuckle, one of the first things you’re encouraged to do by the automated onboarding flow is to go to the #introductions channel and “Introduce yourself and tell us how you found the game!”
The result is a timestamped flood of players cataloging exactly how word-of-mouth growth occurred for White Knuckle. You can scroll back for months of the channel’s history and see how it evolved. There’s a fascinating mix of people crediting Steam’s algorithm itself, personal recommendations from friends, and (as Jencka discusses below) many, many references to the YouTuber Markiplier.
PTT: What about players after that initial batch? How would you break down the different waves of players you reached?
JENCKA: The second wave of players for both our Early Access and initial demo releases had the same source: Big YouTubers. For the demo, Alpha Beta Gamer did a video on the game only a day or two after the showcase, and nearly tripled our daily wishlist count. For Early Access, Markiplier did a video, and then another, and another, and... well, he likes the game! In both of these cases the vast majority of our players came from these YouTubers’ communities, but also from the communities of other content creators who found the game through ABG or Mark, and then decided to create content on it themselves.
Once you have that kind of traffic, you earn enough attention that the third wave of players begins, the folks who have the game pushed to them directly through Steam, and everything just rolls faster and faster from there. Eventually, the flow peters out and slows down to a natural background level, and the waves that will eventually come are either due to a big update, a sale, or some other content creator introducing a new audience to your game! At least, that's been our experience, this has been a first for me!
PTT: Anything else you'd be willing to share about your approach to releasing the game and reaching your audience? What went well, what could have gone better, etc.
JENCKA: We've been incredibly fortunate. Our community has been amazing and truly has done our work for us to spread the game around. On that front, I think our own openness and willingness to interact directly with the community has the natural side effect of really making people feel invested in the game, which leads to them telling everyone they can! Other than the Indie Horror Showcase, in the early days we did basically zero marketing (Aside from like, three videos for TikTok I threw together), but nowadays we have DreadXP's help which is wonderful. I still do think that most of the players who still find the game are finding it naturally, through word of mouth and content creators.
In terms of things that could have gone better, honestly I could have marketed it more early on! The game was doing supremely well, but I'm sure that if I got to work yelling at everyone from the rooftops to play the game it could have gone even better, though I'm certainly happy enough with where things are now that I don't regret the choices I made. It's a hard balance, and I'm new to… well all of this! So much of what I've been doing has been by the seat of my pants, maybe in another year I can sit down and actually identify what worked and what didn't.
That’s it for this week! Thanks sincerely to Holly Jencka for sharing her insights. Readers, let me know if you’d like more posts in this “First 1,000 Players” series.
For everybody else:
This is really solid advice - getting something impactful out there then funnelling players to Discord in this way is practical for almost any dev to do and stops the agonising over "how do I do community stuff"