How Indie Devs Can Market on a Tiny Budget: A Case Study of ​*Chumini: Tiny Army*​

Hi everyone, this is KO (kkll7952) from FilterGame = w =/
Today I want to share a low-budget indie game marketing case study,
based on a Reddit post.
It explains how Chumini: Tiny Army managed to build up wishlists
despite having almost no marketing budget—definitely worth learning from.

Chumini: Tiny Army launched on Steam on January 31, 2026,
and it’s a survivor-style survival game where
you lead a tiny army through a forest to fight demons.

Game link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3310000/Chumini_Tiny_Army/

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1qtrkbw/my_experience_as_an_inexperienced_marketing_guy/

The game was developed by the French studio Guilloteam,
a four-person team that finished the project in roughly eight months (not full-time for everyone).

As a brand-new small studio,
they initially had almost no PR or marketing experience,
so Clement shared how they learned and executed promotion step by step along the way.

—

About the publisher:
The team worked with the publisher Abiding Bridge.

This publisher is quite unique—they encourage developers to do marketing themselves,
and they also help build a local French dev community.

So most of the promotional work was still handled by Guilloteam,
and below is a breakdown of how they marketed their Steam game on a low budget.

Launch Performance
Steam wishlists: 6,500
Featured on Popular Upcoming for about 30 hours

Post-launch results (as of Feb 2):

Around 30 reviews

96% positive

About 800 copies sold

—

Marketing Strategy Breakdown
1. Opened the Steam page early (opened in 2024/12)
Used Steam Playtest as an exposure tool

Successfully got covered by YouTubers

One creator who focuses on survivor-style games achieved:

120K views

2,000+ wishlists

which kicked off their first major wave of community traffic.

2. Demo + Steam Next Fest
   They ran their first wave of “mass outreach”:

Sent 1,000+ emails

No ad spend

Proactively contacted streamers and YouTubers

Results:

Average Next Fest performance

+600 wishlists

Total reached ~2,900

Below expectations, but that’s also how Next Fest tends to be now— outside the top games, it’s hard to see huge growth.

3. Mid-cycle marketing — staying visible They experimented with multi-platform exposure:

Posting on Bluesky

Testing Reddit

Testing TikTok

Building a Discord community

Attending events

This period added another +300 wishlists.

4. Final push before launch They reserved a full month focused purely on marketing.

Tactics:

Posted every day for the final 3 weeks

Sent 6,000+ emails

Including:

Press kit

Demo keys

Giveaway keys

Community links

And they used YAMM to manage sending campaigns.

Why: Free email providers (like Gmail) can flag mass sending as spam and block you.

Key turning point:

They re-contacted YouTubers they had worked with before and got strong support again.

Results:

Reached 6,000 wishlists

After hitting Popular Upcoming, gained another +500

Final total reached 6,500

—

The author’s core conclusions:

Marketing is necessary—if you don’t do it, you won’t be seen

Consistent visibility + pushes at key milestones (Demo / Next Fest / Launch)

Modern marketing heavily relies on content creators

Actively building relationships is extremely important

Their rough feeling of the ratio:

80% luck + 20% effort

—

FilterGame’s observations and takeaways:

Many thanks to Clement for sharing this.
Key points you can clearly see:

Email outreach + YouTube exposure has become a common playbook for many teams

Making the most of Steam’s official event milestones is becoming more and more important

On top of that, I’d also recommend:

Actively joining third-party Steam events

Joining sales events

Attending game expos

Doing cross-promotions / collaborations with other games

For example, AirBoost is currently doing a collaboration with ​Lami: Programming & Coffee​.

Also, building a developer community is just as critical—
when teams can support each other and retweet/share, exposure can multiply rapidly.

In an era where the number of Steam releases grows rapidly every year,
earning players’ attention has become one of the key conditions for development success.

That's it! Chumini: Tiny Army just released on Steam, and launches with a 10% discount!

store.steampowered.com/app/3310000/…

We hope that you'll have a sweet time playing our cute & colorful survivors-like, and we're eager to read what you think of it!

#indiedev #indiegame #gamedev #steam

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— Guilloteam | CHUMINI & MIDNIGHT BLOOD RUSH (@guilloteam.bsky.social) 2026年1月31日 凌晨1:01