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Case study · Steam Next Fest October 2026

How Ryan used his Deep Audit before Steam Next Fest

Clone. Optimize. Sacrifice. is a casual idle city-builder by solo developer Ryan Saunders (One Man Media). You clone heroes, send them through automated dungeons, recycle the rest for science and climb auto-battle leagues. Ahead of Steam Next Fest in October 2026, Ryan got a WishlistLab Deep Audit of his Coming Soon page.

Clone. Optimize. Sacrifice. Steam capsule

The starting point

The Deep Audit scored the page 65/100. The verdict: a strong niche (idle progression, RPG character growth and PvP auto-battling) held back by presentation. The biggest opportunity was making the store page communicate the game's unique loops at a glance.

What the Deep Audit flagged

  1. Capsule legibility. At Steam's smallest capsule size the logo was only partly readable against a busy background. Fixes suggested: a simpler background behind the logo, a heavier title or an outline, and a small visual hint of the cloning or city-building theme.
  2. Placeholder text in screenshots. Some screenshots still showed developer placeholder UI text. The audit also suggested reordering the first four screenshots so they show the core loops in order: city-building, hero cloning and progression, auto-battle combat, then the PvP leagues.
  3. Trailer opening. A five-shot plan for the first five seconds, leading with the city and cloned heroes in combat before the logo.
  4. Tags. The page had three broad tags (Casual, RPG, Strategy). The audit proposed a full 20-tag list led by specific ones such as Idle, City Builder, Automation and Auto Battler, so Steam can place the game next to the right players.
  5. Short description. Informative but dense, so the audit offered three plainer rewrites under 300 characters.
  6. Social proof plan. As an unreleased game it had no reviews yet, so the audit recommended using the Next Fest demo, curators and creators in the idle and RPG space to build early proof.

It finished with a comparison against Melvor Idle, IdleOn, Vampire Survivors and Against the Storm, and a 30-day action plan timed around the fest.

What Ryan thought

“This is great man thank you, some solid feedback I can use.”
Ryan Saunders, developer of Clone. Optimize. Sacrifice.

He also caught something the audit got wrong. It flagged the video blocks in his About section as plain video tags and suggested swapping them for GIFs. They were actually Steam's newer looping webm embeds, which play just like GIFs on the store page but look better and load faster. We fixed the audit so it now treats looping webm clips the same as GIFs, and every report since benefits from his correction.

Next Fest

Clone. Optimize. Sacrifice. has a demo for Steam Next Fest (19 to 26 October 2026), and it's our Featured pick on the WishlistLab homepage for fest week. Wishlist it on Steam ↗

Want the same for your page? Start with the free Steam page audit (score out of 100 and your top 3 fixes), or get a Deep Audit for the full teardown.