The one you see attached is actually one of the better ones. Some of the other shorts performed absolutely terribly.
But what really surprised me was just how few views you get unless your video somehow takes off on YouTube.
For the promotion of Burn With Me, we produced a whole series of shorts and posted them on YouTube Shorts and, more recently, Instagram Reels. And after all this, I can say that either there's something about our game that doesn't work for shortform content, or there's simply so much competition out there that making a good short isn't enough anymore.
You either need a really solid existing audience, which is incredibly difficult to build (aside from making the game itself), or your content needs to be completely different. I feel like a simulation game or a funny co-op game has a much higher chance of success than an average indie deckbuilder, or what have you. And I suspect our game, and perhaps card games in general, just aren't particularly well suited for these platforms.
So if you're thinking about investing seriously in shortform content for a similar game, I'd urge you to think twice and consider putting that effort somewhere else.
Our game is cool, it's already out, and judging by the reviews, people genuinely enjoy it. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good fit for this particular format. That's probably our biggest takeaway.
You can check out the shorts on our YouTube channel (Nozomu Games) to see how long we've been doing this and how our approach evolved. We made around 48 videos and gained only roughly 80 subscribers with an average shortform video staying in that 1-2k views range.
We didn't really know what we were doing at first, and we learned a lot along the way. By the time we got to release, I genuinely think some of our latest shorts were pretty good. But none of them brought in any notable number of wishlists.
And sometimes it just felt like the algorithm wasn't interested. We had videos with really good viewed-versus-swiped-away ratios, but even those weren't enough to get any meaningful boost from YouTube.
We've recently started reposting the same videos to Instagram Reels, and so far we're seeing pretty much the same results.
And it's not like we were just pumping out lazy AI-edited videos, either. We put a lot of thought and effort into every single one. I even started recording the voiceovers myself. Each short had its own little story we wanted to tell, whether it was about the development process, an interesting detail about the game, or one of its core design ideas. We genuinely tried to make something worth watching, rather than just advertising the game.
And still, none of it really worked.
Of course, that's just our experience with one particular game, and I wouldn't claim that shortform content doesn't work for indie games in general. But after 40 videos, a lot of experimentation, and very little to show for it in terms of wishlists, I think we've given it a fair shot before drawing this conclusion.
