323. 400,000 Wishlists in a Month: Dead as Disco's Steam(ing) Playbook

Dead as Disco went from 50,000 Steam wishlists to over 400,000 in less than a month, with over a million unique demo players and a 98% Overwhelmingly Positive rating. They are currently at 750k+ Wishlists today. Host Jen Donahoe sits down with Eden Chen, founder of Pragma and the FirstLook player relationship platform, and Adam Gershowitz, COO of Brain Jar Games, to break down exactly how they did it.Adam walks through Brain Jar's journey from a 300-person closed playtest to pulling the NDA and watching TikTok explode their community overnight, racking up over 200 million views on the Dead as Disco hashtag. Eden explains how First Look helps studios build a "golden cohort" of core fans, use in-game surveys and sentiment analysis to track player feedback at scale, and create organic referral loops that drive 10-25% community growth.The conversation also covers Discord bots as a community engagement and advertising channel, why TikTok beat Twitch for a music-based game, and how Eden is building paid inventory for core gamers in 2026 through creators, Discord servers, and player utility sites.Packed with specific tactics and real data for anyone rethinking their publishing platform and capabilities.Firstlook.gg and Dead as Disco https://store.steampowered.com/app/3404260/Dead_as_Disco/Adam Gershowitz - https://www.linkedin.com/in/agershowitz/Eden Chen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/edechen/Jen Donahoe - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferdonahoe/