Nobody shares a store page
People do not send each other Steam links. They send a thing that made them react, and the link comes along for the ride.
So the shareable unit is a clip, not a trailer: a few seconds of gameplay legible without sound or explanation, made for someone who was not thinking about your game and can watch it muted and still want to show someone.
What each platform actually rewards
| Platform | What travels | How the reach works | The rule that catches studios out |
|---|---|---|---|
| A clip or GIF posted natively, game named in the title | Voting inside one subreddit | 25 of the 27 largest game and game development subreddits we read restrict or ban developer self-promotion. Rules are set per subreddit and enforced by human moderators | |
| Discord | Something your members want to forward onward | Person to person, in servers you do not control | Discord sets no platform-wide rule against posting your link. Each server writes its own, so what you risk is a moderator deleting the post or confining promotion to one designated channel, not a Discord ban |
| TikTok | A clip that holds attention in the first second | Algorithmic, shown to strangers regardless of following | Unless the account is business-verified, the store link lives in your bio rather than the post, so the path to a wishlist is long and mostly unmeasurable |
On all three, a bare link is the version that fails: Reddit removes it, a Discord server's moderators delete it, TikTok buries it.
Reddit: earn the right to post before you post
The Reddit failure is hard to notice: a rule-breaking post is removed quietly rather than refused, so the studio concludes Reddit does not work. Two things first:
- Read that specific subreddit's rules, not Reddit's. Read September 2026, and they change without announcement, so check before you post. r/gaming, r/Games and r/NintendoSwitch cap promotion at 10% of your submissions. r/IndieDev allows capsule comparison posts on Wednesdays only, and r/playmygame allows paid-game trailers only on Tuesdays. r/indiegames requires gameplay footage in the post and bans links to store pages outright.
- Post the clip natively, not as a link out. A native video or GIF is what the feed is built to show.
Discord: your server is the asset, other people's are not
Your own server is the asset: you do not reach other servers, your members do. Give them a clip, not a request to share your page.
Other people's servers are not a channel. Dropping a store link into a server you joined for that purpose breaks a rule the server itself wrote, and a moderator removes it.
Discord's own Community Guidelines say nothing about self-promotion, so there is no platform-level standard and no consistency between servers: many game and dev communities confine promotion to a named channel rather than forbidding it, so read that server's rules channel before you post.
TikTok: the clip is the whole product
You do not need an audience to get reach here. What you pay for it is the path to your store page: a viewer has to leave the video, open your profile, tap the bio link, then wishlist. Every step loses people, and none are visible to you.
A business-verified account can attach a destination link to the video itself as well as to the profile, and TikTok accepts business verification from accounts of any size rather than gating it on follower count, so check what your account type supports before assuming the bio is the only option.
You will not be able to attribute most of this
A clip gets forwarded into a private Discord, and someone searches your game by name a week later. That arrives in your Steam Traffic Report as an untagged direct or search visit.
Steam's UTM Analytics credits conversions within 72 hours of a tagged click and sees only links you tagged; neither condition holds here.
So do not judge organic on attributed wishlists, which undercount it worst where word of mouth does the work. Watch the shape instead: a bump in store-page visits and name searches in the days after a clip goes out. Marketing attribution for Steam games covers that gap.
Capture the traffic, because the share is one-time
Organic distribution does not repeat: a clip reaches people once, and if all you offered was a wishlist, you cannot reach them again except through Steam's own notifications, which are narrower than most developers assume.
Valve sends a wishlist email or push only on its own triggers: release, again if the game leaves Early Access for full release, on a discount of 20% or more, and once when a demo goes live.
Valve caps those messages at one message per game every two weeks, longer during busy periods such as seasonal sales, and only customers with a verified email address who have not switched those messages off receive them.
You do not write the copy and you do not choose the moment, apart from the demo notification.
So give arriving traffic somewhere to become contactable alongside the wishlist: an email list, a Discord invite, or both. Owning your game audience makes the case; Conversion Funnel is how we do it.
What this page does not cover
Working with creators is covered in game influencer marketing; choosing your primary channel sits in how to market an indie game.
Sources: the posted rules of the 27 largest game, indie-game and game-development subreddits that publish rules (29 checked, 2 publish none), read September 2026; Discord's and TikTok's own published community guidelines and creator documentation, checked September 2026. Platform and community rules change without notice, so treat every specific here as a prompt to check rather than a standing fact.
