A team behind city builder Laysara: Summit Kingdom made a post on Reddit at the end of last year. It has gone viral since then helping generate 11,000 wishlists on Steam. So what really worked for the devs?

The post, which now has over 73k upvotes, was published on Reddit 12 days ago. Game marketing consultant Chris Zukowski analyzed what made it viral and appealing to gamers.

Of course, it has a catchy headline, starting with, “I spent a whole year and all my personal savings making this game (with a friend).”

Laysara: Summit Kingdom is also a city builder, which is one of the most favorite genres on Steam. “Steam fans love, love, love complex, deep, strategy games [with] hours of content,” Zukowski explained, adding, “The designers behind the game focused on this when designing the game.”

The other thing that worked is that the team posted in the right subreddit. Not only does “r/gaming” have tons of members (31.4 million), it also largely focuses on PC titles.

Zukowski also noted that the developers made a trailer using the recommendations of game trailer editor Derek Lieu. “No title cards! No logo cards! No slow establishing shots!” he wrote. “Gameplay from the first second. It goes right in and shows genre, then hook, then antagonist, then variations of the theme to show breadth of gameplay.”

As a result, Laysara: Summit Kingdom generated over 11,000 wishlists. Steam also started to show the game more, which brought more traffic and eventually resulted in more than 2500 wishlists per day.

“Anyway we should all be doing more Reddit work,” Zukowski concluded. “I know it is scary and weird but it really does work.”


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