Hi, I'm hakairyuousinn (my X account).
When I started using my X account on October 25, I had one follower. The next day, eight.
My first work-in-progress post got 367 impressions in 13 hours. The video was played 113 times.
I didn't know whether that was a lot or a little. So I looked into how many followers developers with hit indie games had at different points after starting.
I couldn't find anyone's follower count after 30 days
I looked at developers behind 26 games. Not one had a complete record of their account start date and follower counts after 7, 14, 30 and 90 days. I couldn't find anyone who'd kept that much detail.
So I can't give a target number for the first month.
One week of countdown posts matched four months of growth
The developer of Times of Progress had about 200 followers at the end of July 2023. Four months later, about 400. Then a week-long countdown before the announcement added roughly 400 more, bringing the total to about 800.
The announcement post got 46,000 impressions. But the following month brought only about 60 more followers.
Daily posts still took a year and a half to reach 20,000
Rusted Moss opened its game account in December 2021. By its April 2023 release, it had about 20,000 followers and over 50,000 Steam wishlists.
The developers posted a short gameplay clip every day, reportedly taking about five minutes to make each one. They kept doing it daily for a year and a half.
Balatro's numbers weren't followers
Balatro's developer timeline lists 183 on June 10, 2023, and 2,440 at the end of June. I initially read those as follower counts. They were Steam wishlists.
The developer wrote that a few posts on Reddit and X didn't get much response. Growth came from playthroughs and word of mouth from mid-June onward.
One developer spent about ¥200,000 on ads
Kurouri Peso published the results of spending ¥205,825 on X ads in one week.
| Metric | Before ads | After ads |
|---|---|---|
| X followers | 16 | 57 |
| Browser players | 13 | 92 |
| Downloads | 9 | 22 |
The ads got 1.31 million impressions and 16,000 clicks. Those numbers are on a completely different scale from the follower and player counts.
My own numbers
I had 38 followers on the evening of November 1, when I released Rokuro (ロクロ), and 86 on the evening of November 3. In those two days, I released the pottery game Rokuro and the soft serve stacking game. Rokuro's announcement got over 130,000 impressions. Even with that many impressions, the follower count rose by 48 in two days.
Times of Progress also got 46,000 impressions on its announcement but only about 60 more followers in the next month. Follower counts don't seem to grow nearly as fast as impressions.
I decided to release a small browser game every day for two weeks starting November 3, and measure how many followers I gain.