Vampire Survivors started as a $2.99 itch.io browser experiment in 2021, built by one developer, Luca Galante, with mostly borrowed art. Its Steam early access launch in December 2021 turned it into one of the year's breakout hits, its 2022 full release pushed it past several million copies, and by 2024 its developer counted a franchise with DLC and console ports. The path from free web demo to that outcome runs through three chokepoints — a storefront gate, a wishlist number and a festival — and understanding all three is what separates games that get found from games that launch into silence.
What do the two storefronts actually offer developers?
Itch.io and Steam solve different problems, and most successful indies use both in sequence.
- Itch.io is the open workshop. No approval gate, instant publishing, and an open revenue split — the developer chooses what percentage itch takes, with 10 percent the common default and zero available. It hosts prototypes, jams (its game-jam infrastructure, including Ludum Dare submissions, is the industry's largest incubator), and demos. What it lacks is discovery traffic at scale: itch's audience is enthusiast and developer-heavy.
- Steam is the marketplace. Publishing requires a $100 Steam Direct fee per app, recoupable once gross revenue passes $1,000, and Steam takes a 30 percent revenue cut, per Valve's published terms. In exchange: the store where PC players actually buy, plus the algorithmic machinery — wishlists, recommendations, seasonal festivals — that turns discovery into sales.
The standard pipeline is therefore: jam prototype on itch, free demo to build an audience, Steam page up early to collect wishlists, launch when the number is ready.
Why do wishlists carry so much weight?
A wishlist is a purchase intent signal Steam's own systems read directly. On launch day, the algorithm shows new releases to relevant users in proportion to their traction, and wishlists convert to first-week sales at meaningful rates — commonly cited across developer postmortems at roughly 10 to 20 percent within the first week. First-week velocity then determines whether the store keeps surfacing the game or buries it, which makes wishlist count the closest thing indie publishing has to a launch forecast. Developers share rough community benchmarks: around 7,000 to 10,000 wishlists supports a visible launch, six figures is a hit, and the gap between those numbers is almost entirely earned during the pre-launch months, not at release.
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How does Steam Next Fest fit in?
Steam Next Fest, Valve's recurring week-long demo festival, has become the pipeline's central event: a game may participate once, so timing it right — near launch, with a demo that converts players to wishlisters — is a genuine strategic decision. A strong Next Fest showing plus streamer coverage in the same window is the pattern behind most of the era's indie breakouts. Vampire Survivors' early access build spreading through streamers in late 2021 is the canonical case; Balatro's 2024 launch, where the poker-roguelike sold past one million copies in under a month per publisher Playstack's announcements and cleared five million by early 2025, is the most recent large-scale example of demo-plus-wishlist compounding.
The counterweight is volume: Steam's own release statistics show tens of thousands of games shipping per year now, and the majority sell marginal amounts. Discovery is not broken — it is simply concentrated, and the festival-wishlist-coverage loop is how games earn their way into the concentrated tier.
The post-launch picture deserves equal honesty, because the festival loop ends on release day. Steam's discovery systems then re-weight around revenue and review velocity: a game whose first reviews land Mostly Positive or better keeps recommendation placement, while a game that launches at Mixed loses visibility regardless of wishlists, which is why so many studios now launch in early access — smoothing the review curve over months rather than gambling it on one week. Pricing is part of the same mechanism: a $20 indie title needs a fraction of the units a $5 title does to hit the same revenue bands the algorithm rewards, and the postmortems that read as pricing confessions, again and again, describe teams who underpriced a game that players were happy to value higher.
What should an aspiring indie actually do?
- Ship a jam game to itch first. A finished small thing teaches more than a polished vertical slice, and the jam audience doubles as your first hundred true fans.
- Open the Steam page 9 to 12 months before launch. Wishlists accumulate slowly and every pre-launch marketing effort feeds the same number.
- Spend your one Next Fest slot near launch. With a demo tuned to end on a cliffhanger and a page that converts, it is the highest-leverage free week the platform offers.
- Plan for streamers structurally. Games with legible spectation — short runs, visible chaos, shareable moments — travel through content channels far faster than games that need explaining.
One more player-side observation rounds out the mechanics: the line between storefronts is blurring from the audience's side too. Itch bundles and charity pack fundraisers regularly move six and seven figures for causes while introducing hundreds of thousands of players to small teams, and Steam's own demo and free-weekend infrastructure increasingly mirrors what itch pioneered with browser builds. For a player, the honest strategy is taste-dependent: browse itch for the experimental end and jam culture, wishlist liberally on Steam, and accept that the cheapest way to support the next Vampire Survivors before it exists is simply clicking the plus button on a page a two-person team put up in hope.
Verdict: for players, the practical read is that itch.io is where you find games a year early, often free, and wishlisting on Steam is the single most useful thing you can do for a small team — it is literally the signal their launch runs on. For developers, the pipeline is proven from Vampire Survivors to Balatro: prototype in public, open the page early, win your one festival, and let the number decide when the game is ready.