It sucks but my impression is that people familiar with releasing games on Steam all seem to immediately see why this could happen and gave feedback. Also it doesn't seem like a beloved early access game in general by those that bought into early access. It had its hype period a long time ago and limped out of early access. Now Valve is trying to help them market

Steam for the most part is the primary marketing platform for indie games. Not just for PC, also PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo because of how lackluster those shops are for discoverability of games that aren't front page advertised with large thumbnail/poster placements. Success on Steam is viral marketing for other platforms

Still recommendations are always to try to build a following both on and off Steam. Twitter for a while were the major social media accounts indies should spend time building up a following. Now it's Tiktok. YouTube and Twitch influencers are also a good choice for getting viewers converted to customers but you can't just pick a popular person, got to be mindful for if their viewers watch for game recommendations or for the personality only. So in that way, it's not as simple as pay a popular streamer to play your game and their fans will play the game

Regardless Steam is the best for marketing. Steam curators are way smaller than YouTubers, streamers, Tiktok but it's highly directed at spending customers. Some Steam reviewers have followers. You can follow game developer/publisher pages. That's how I learn of some games. I get emails and check out publisher Steam pages of games I like.

Until any competitor actually tried to compete with Steam as a service, I'm not going to knock Valve heavily over Steam. They keep improving. Itch is not anything close to marketplace that can compete with Steam. It's even more barebones of a service than Desura over a decade ago. At the basic level to compete with Steam, it needs a desktop client and social media functionality for developers to build followers. Maybe it needs to open source and join under the Linux foundation or KDE or something to help guide it to the next level

At least they haven't removed game because some payment processor don't like it.

And to reward you, we’re giving you 24-hour visibility

(which is nothing special; there are 6 slots available for this visibility every day of the year for various Steam invitations).

He has no clue what he's talking about Steam in 2021 had 69 MILLION daily active users. WTF do you think is a bigger number 130.000 wishlists or getting even 1% of 69 million people to look at something in the reel?

People don't understand the size of steam or the value of that space (that one of six slots) sometimes. It's wild.

And also, THEY noticed, THEY informed him, THEY apologized, and THEY offered some form of compensation, which they legally don't have to.

I am soooooooooooooooo tired of indie devs blaming everything from the constellation of the stars to the quality of the donuts on a different continent for their game not doing well, except that maybe the game isn't that good, and also those 100.000 already sold units is the actual size of the market for that game.

Thing about wishlist is, I treat it more as a "Games I found vaguely interesting at first glance" rather than a "Games I want to play" list. I assume I'm not alone in this matter. Of 214 games on my wishlist, there's like 3 I'd play right now if they were gifted to me. 2 that I'd buy. So, assuming 1% of people who wishlisted a game will buy it on launch, that would have been 1368 sales (rounding up). Assuming the game cost 20$ at launch (it currently costs ~14$), that would be 27360$ from launch day sales. Nice payday, but not if you have to work 10 years to get it (also taxes and steam's cut, so that number would actually be much lower)

Thing is, just because you worked hard on something doesn't guarantee that it will be good and/or popular.

Said this on /c/gaming as well but

I have no doubt that this bug played a part in their sales... However... The game was in early access for a decade before it actually released in 1.0. This was the 1.0 change log:

Changelog 1.0.0 - 12 december 2024

Adds:

• Guidance system: uses the completion tree to display objectives and help the player to progress. The guidance system can be disabled in Game options.
• Option to change the direction only when moving with the keyboard (player is not facing automatically the mouse)

Changes:

• Quests and dialogs with the crystal have been removed and replaced by the guidance system
• Worm transformation is always visible

Various bugs fixed

So to be honest, I'm not entirely sure that that launch was much of a launch to begin with... While the bug definitely had a part to play, I'm not sure this would have sold anything in the first place. It's a terraria clone that was dragged through early access for a decade before launching in a way that doesn't actually feel like a launch.

I check my email for info on wish list games approximately never.

I know that is a terrible blow and it sucks. However in this corrupted age you have to admire that valve acknowledged its error where any of the main players would have just kept it quite.

Do that many people rely on emails for that?

Why was there no mention from Steam that they have belatedly sent out the emails? Were the people who wishlisted the game still not notified? This is no way to fix a issue.

This is going to sound weird but I never actually get Steam emails, outside of receipts. Maybe I disabled them years ago. And I wishlist/follow hundreds of games.

Uncertain if I'm a unique edge case who hates email clutter or not.