The "No Steam" Strategy for Steam Wishlists

Everyone and their grandma told us the same thing: get your Steam page up now and start collecting wishlists.

So we did the opposite.

When we started building Dig In, we were an unknown Icelandic studio making its first game in one of the most competitive markets in entertainment. We kept meeting developers who had followed the conventional wisdom: launch a Steam page, collect wishlists for years, and hope that eventually the number becomes impressive enough for players, publishers or investors to take notice.

We decided to try something different.

Instead of building a Steam audience, we first tried to build a community.

Through homemade short-form videos, social media, Discord, mailing lists and eventually a public demo on itch.io, we spent more than a year growing an audience almost entirely outside the Steam ecosystem. In fact, one of the most common questions on our socials became:

“Why no Steam?"

By September 2025, Dig In had around 5,000 Discord members and millions of organic social-media views.

It still had zero Steam wishlists.

Then, in spring 2026, circumstances finally forced our hand. We had to open the Steam page.

In this talk, Vitar Games founder Baldvin Albertsson breaks down why the studio deliberately postponed Steam, how smaller platforms and community building helped create demand before there was anywhere to convert it, what happened when that accumulated audience was finally pointed toward Steam, and how Dig In went from 0 to 100,000 wishlists in less than two weeks.

This is not a talk about avoiding Steam.

It is a talk about understanding how your game and Steam can work together.