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, because to play it is to understand it, and you really don't know how a game plays and whether you like it until you try it," Zukowski said. He added, "Demos have the biggest impact for fixing low visibility. That's what it comes down to, folks. Valve knows it, I know it, and you need to know it."
"You need to get your demo playable as soon as possible," he continued. "The longer you wait on getting your demo up, the longer that flat line where you don't get any visibility, despite posting on any social media platform – that doesn't really work. It's not until you get your demo that you get your visibility."
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