Can I post my game on r/IndieDev?

Yes, in the matching weekly thread. r/IndieDev runs a rotation — Feedback Friday, Screenshot Saturday, Soundtrack Sunday, Marketing Monday — and each one is a sanctioned place to share your own game. Self-promotion posted to the main feed outside those threads is removed even when the content is good, so the day you post is the thing to get right.

What is Screenshot Saturday and does it still work?

It is the weekly thread where developers post visuals from whatever they are building, and it still works because it is one of the few places on Reddit where the audience arrives specifically to look at unfinished games. Post a single strong image or a short clip rather than a gallery, say what changed since last week, and reply to other people in the thread — participation is most of what determines whether anyone sees yours.

Where can I post my indie game without getting banned?

r/playmygame and r/IndieGaming are the two with high promo tolerance: the first exists so people will try your game and requires a playable link, the second wants gameplay footage with a direct ask. r/IndieDev accepts promotion inside its themed threads. r/gamedev and r/gamedesign have low tolerance and want craft or design discussion in the feed, with promotion confined to weekly threads.

How do I get wishlists from Reddit?

Indirectly. Asking for wishlists in a post is the format both developer and player subs skim past. What converts is a clip of one mechanic good enough that someone asks where they can follow it, or a numbers post honest enough that people go looking for the game behind it. r/IndieGaming tolerates a direct wishlist ask alongside footage; r/gamedev does not tolerate it at all.

Should I post my trailer on Reddit?

Rarely, and almost never as the main post. A trailer is an advertisement in shape as well as intent, and both audiences read it that way — developers cannot judge feel from cuts and players have seen thousands. A raw capture of one mechanic does the job the trailer was meant to do. Keep the trailer for the store page and for r/IndieGaming, where footage-led posts are normal.

How to promote an indie game on Reddit without getting banned

Game development is the one niche on Reddit where the calendar decides whether your post survives. The same clip, from the same account, with the same title, is a welcome contribution on Saturday in the Screenshot Saturday thread and a removal on Tuesday in the main feed. Most first-time removals here are that mistake and nothing else.

The reason is that these communities have been saturated with trailers for a decade. r/IndieDev handled it by building a themed thread for every kind of promotion — feedback, screenshots, audio, marketing — and clearing the feed of everything else. r/gamedev handled it by deciding that the feed is for the craft of making games and that anything which is only an announcement belongs in a weekly thread. Neither is hostile to your game. Both are hostile to your game appearing where it was not scheduled.

The other half of the problem is that gameplay footage is the currency here and most devs post the wrong footage. A trailer is edited to sell; this audience wants twelve unedited seconds of something moving well, because that is what they can judge.

Where indie games can actually be promoted

Each of these is a real community with its own rule. The rule is the part that matters — a good post in the wrong thread is still a removed post.

r/playmygamePromo tolerated
The sub exists so people will try your game. There is no framing to work out and no thread to wait for — posting your own game is the entire purpose of the place.
The rule here: Include a playable link and one specific ask, like feedback on the tutorial or whether the second boss reads as unfair. A post with no playable link is the one thing that gets removed here.
r/IndieGamingPromo tolerated
Players rather than developers, and far more permissive than the big gaming subs. This is where a wishlist ask can actually reach someone who is not also shipping a game.
The rule here: Lead with gameplay footage or screenshots and make the ask directly. Low-effort reposts with no footage are what gets pulled, so the clip has to carry the post.
r/IndieDevConditional
300k developers with a sanctioned self-promo thread almost every day of the week. Generous, as long as you use the right one.
The rule here: Match your content to its thread — Feedback Friday, Screenshot Saturday, Soundtrack Sunday, Marketing Monday. Self-promotion posted to the main feed outside those threads is removed regardless of quality.
r/unity3dConditional
Engine-specific, so a technical breakdown here reaches people who understand what the thing you solved actually cost you.
The rule here: Make it a Unity post, not a game post: the shader, the profiler trace, the pooling change, the version you are on. Pure commercial marketing with no technical content is removed.
r/godotConditional
Same technical-showcase norm as the Unity community, with an engine crowd that is unusually willing to help debug what you post.
The rule here: Keep it Godot-specific — node structure, the signal you had to work around, the 4.x quirk you hit. Generic marketing unrelated to Godot specifics gets removed even when the game looks good.
r/gamedevStrict
The largest and most strictly moderated of the developer communities. Worth earning, and the fastest place to collect a removal if you treat it as a showcase.
The rule here: Posts must be about the craft — postmortems, technical breakdowns, process. Promotion belongs in the weekly threads, and a marketing post with no development content in the feed is removed.

Rules change and moderators enforce their own reading of them. Check the sidebar before you post, every time, and see the full directory of 104 communities for the rest.

What this audience actually upvotes

One unedited clip of one mechanic. Twelve seconds of a grapple hook that feels right will outperform a ninety-second trailer every time, because developers watch to judge feel and players watch to judge whether it looks fun — and neither of those survives a cut every two seconds set to music.

The technical problem you lost a week to. Frame times, the pathfinding rewrite, why your save system corrupted, the animation blend you could not get to look right. These are the posts that get answered by someone who solved it in 2019, and the thread ends up more valuable to you than the exposure.

Wishlist and sales numbers, published plainly. This audience is starved of real Steam data because almost everyone who has it is embarrassed by it. "412 wishlists after eight months and a festival" is a post the whole sub reads, and it costs you nothing except the pretence that things are going better than they are.

The two ratios that decide whether you get removed

Enforcement on Reddit is account-level, not post-level. A moderator opens your profile after one post trips their attention and skims what fraction of the account is about its product. That is why a reasonable post attached to a promotional profile still goes.

9:1 — comments to posts. Reddit's self-promotion guidance implies about nine contributions that have nothing to do with your product for every one that does. It comes from Reddit's 2014 moderator clarification and its current small-business guide restates it as “be a user first”.

3:1 — value posts to promotional posts. Among your submissions, at most one in four should promote anything. Clearing 9:1 while every post you make is a plug still reads as a marketing account.

The mention-deletion test. Delete your product name from the post and reread it. If nothing of value is left, it was an advertisement with context attached and it will be removed. If it still teaches something, the mention is a footnote on a real contribution.

New accounts have a further problem: most large subreddits silently filter posts from accounts under a karma or age threshold, so the post looks live to you and is invisible to everyone else. Check yours with the karma and warmup calculator before you post at all.

What gets indie games removed

Posting a Screenshot Saturday image on a Wednesday
r/IndieDev runs a themed thread for each kind of promotion and removes self-promo from the main feed. The image is fine, the account is fine, the day is wrong — and because the removal is procedural you often get no explanation for it.
Instead: Keep a short queue of clips and screenshots and release them into the matching thread: feedback on Friday, visuals on Saturday, audio on Sunday, marketing on Monday. Waiting three days for the right thread costs less than a removal.
Posting the trailer instead of the game
A trailer is a compressed advertisement, and both the developer subs and the player subs read it as one. It is also the format that carries no information they can use — nobody can tell from a cut whether the movement feels good.
Instead: Post the raw capture. One mechanic, no music, no cuts, no logo card. If it is not interesting unedited, the trailer was hiding that from you as well as from them.
Treating r/gamedev as a place to show your game
It is a craft community with low promo tolerance, and the biggest one, so it is the most defended. A post whose subject is your game rather than how it was made is removed on sight, and it is usually the first removal a new indie dev collects.
Instead: Bring the making-of instead: the postmortem, the system you built, the thing that broke in production. Your game is the case study, never the headline. Put the announcement in the weekly thread where it belongs.
Only appearing when there is a milestone to announce
Demo out, Kickstarter live, launching Friday — an account that surfaces four times a year and always with an ask is the pattern moderators filter and other devs ignore. Game communities are unusually good at spotting it because the same names keep reappearing on launch weeks.
Instead: Post the process between milestones and answer other people's technical questions. The devs who get real traction on launch day are the ones the sub already recognised, and that recognition is built on Tuesdays, not launch Fridays.

A post that would survive

Written for r/gamedev. Adapt the specifics; keep the shape.

Our Steam demo converted at 4.1% to wishlists. Here is what we changed after watching 60 playtests.

We put a demo up in February and I watched recordings of 60 sessions before touching anything. The conversion from demo download to wishlist was 4.1% at the start. It is 11.3% now. Almost all of the gain came from three changes, none of which were features. What the recordings showed: Median time before the first quit was 4 minutes 20 seconds. I had assumed people were bouncing at the difficulty spike in the second area. Nobody reached the second area. They quit in the tutorial. Three changes, in the order they mattered: 1. Cut the tutorial from 9 minutes to 2. The old one explained six systems before the player touched anything. The new one explains movement, then stops. Everything else is now taught by the first three rooms. This single change moved median session length from 4:20 to 16:40. 2. Moved the interesting mechanic 40 seconds in. The thing our game is actually about was gated behind the tutorial and the first area — roughly eleven minutes. Nobody buys a game on the strength of a mechanic they never saw. It is now the second thing you do. 3. Put the wishlist prompt at the end of the demo instead of the main menu. Obvious in hindsight. On the menu it is a request from a stranger; at the end of a demo somebody enjoyed, it is a reasonable ask. Roughly a third of the total lift came from this alone. What did not work: a "Wishlist Now" button in the pause menu (17 clicks in six weeks, and it made the pause menu worse), and a discount countdown on the store page while the demo was live, which I think actively hurt. The uncomfortable lesson is that our first eleven minutes were an obstacle course between the player and the reason the game exists. We spent two years on systems and had never watched anyone meet them cold. If you have a demo up and have not watched recordings of strangers playing it, do that before you build anything else. I can go into how we set the playtests up if it is useful — we did it for about $200 total.

Why it survives: No game name, no store link, and it is still one of the more useful posts that sub will see that week — the mention-deletion test cleared outright. It is craft content, which is what r/gamedev requires in the feed, and the numbers are unrounded and unflattering enough to be believed. It ends with an offer of more detail rather than a link, which is what turns a post into a comment thread where somebody asks what the game is.

Frequently asked questions

Can I post my game on r/IndieDev?: Yes, in the matching weekly thread. r/IndieDev runs a rotation — Feedback Friday, Screenshot Saturday, Soundtrack Sunday, Marketing Monday — and each one is a sanctioned place to share your own game. Self-promotion posted to the main feed outside those threads is removed even when the content is good, so the day you post is the thing to get right.
What is Screenshot Saturday and does it still work?: It is the weekly thread where developers post visuals from whatever they are building, and it still works because it is one of the few places on Reddit where the audience arrives specifically to look at unfinished games. Post a single strong image or a short clip rather than a gallery, say what changed since last week, and reply to other people in the thread — participation is most of what determines whether anyone sees yours.
Where can I post my indie game without getting banned?: r/playmygame and r/IndieGaming are the two with high promo tolerance: the first exists so people will try your game and requires a playable link, the second wants gameplay footage with a direct ask. r/IndieDev accepts promotion inside its themed threads. r/gamedev and r/gamedesign have low tolerance and want craft or design discussion in the feed, with promotion confined to weekly threads.
How do I get wishlists from Reddit?: Indirectly. Asking for wishlists in a post is the format both developer and player subs skim past. What converts is a clip of one mechanic good enough that someone asks where they can follow it, or a numbers post honest enough that people go looking for the game behind it. r/IndieGaming tolerates a direct wishlist ask alongside footage; r/gamedev does not tolerate it at all.
Should I post my trailer on Reddit?: Rarely, and almost never as the main post. A trailer is an advertisement in shape as well as intent, and both audiences read it that way — developers cannot judge feel from cuts and players have seen thousands. A raw capture of one mechanic does the job the trailer was meant to do. Keep the trailer for the store page and for r/IndieGaming, where footage-led posts are normal.

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Last reviewed: July 2026