Indie games are having an increasingly hard time with discoverability; there are more great indie games than ever, but for every one that breaks out and becomes a Balatro-level success, there's likely 50 more that get passed over completely. At the GDC 2025, game marketing researcher Chris Zukowski posited that there is one thing that is absolutely necessary for developers to do to prevent this: demos.
"Here's the universal truth with interactive media [...] you need to give away something, because to play it is to understand it, and you really don't know how a game plays and whether you like it until you try it," Zukowski said. He added, "Demos have the biggest impact for fixing low visibility. That's what it comes down to. Folks, Valve knows it, and you need to know it."
