Brave New Wonders is a factory automation game, one of the more demanding genres to market on Steam. The audience is narrow, highly informed, and quick to dismiss anything generic. The goal was to convert a Steam Next Fest appearance into a high volume of qualified wishlists, and to leave the store page stronger heading toward launch.
We built a seven-beat campaign timed around Next Fest, with every beat written for the factory automation audience across four coordinated channels. Genre-native creative did the heavy lifting: nothing generic, everything speaking directly to the players who love automation.
Paid social. Reddit and Facebook campaigns with segmented creative tested across multiple game pillars, audiences, and ad formats.
Influencer activations. A coordinated creator wave across YouTube and Twitch during the live Fest window, placing the game in front of engaged automation-genre audiences.
Store page refresh. A new trailer and key art deployed ahead of the Fest to sharpen first impressions and lift conversion.
Organic and messaging. A values-led content beat that resonated with the community, supported by organic social driving additional qualified traffic at no media cost.
Daily wishlist velocity climbed from roughly 125 per day before the campaign to about 577 per day during Next Fest, a 4.6× lift, peaking near 860 in a single day. Sixty percent of all wishlists in the window were captured during the Fest itself, the channels compounded on one another as the Fest built, and the store page refresh was the clearest turning point in the data.
Against published indie Steam benchmarks, the campaign performed at the top of the range. Page conversion landed at the high end of the 8 to 12 percent indie median, the Next Fest haul sat inside the typical 2,000 to 10,000 band, creative CTR ran above the Reddit norm, and cost per wishlist came in efficient for a niche genre.
