We released our first game on Steam back in 2014 and it was a release disaster on so many levels. The market and platform were both pretty different at that time and we made lots of mistakes. Being on the front page was the most important thing and the main carousel was curated. I assume there was a decision making process for the curators somewhat similar to the algorithm used in today's Steam but it was still quite different.
In order not to experience the same failures again, in our upcoming Early Access game we develop together with Way Down Deep, I have been studying about games marketing in general and on Steam specifically. This article is an attempt to wrapping up all the things I learned during the last 3-4 months about the topic. I'm not an expert on this area and you should learn from more experienced marketing people and seek professional help if necessary for further info about the topic. But I believe this article is a cool beginner's guide to build your first marketing plan.
I have to thank Ali Emek from Logic Artists, Ibrahim Yildirim from Pera Games, Raymond Doerr developer of Rise to Ruins, Tomer Barkan from Suncrash and all the other helpful developers from the Game Marketeers Discord server for sharing their data and leading me through this post. Also all the people I'm sharing their articles and videos on this post, you are the real MVP :)
STEAM METRICS FOR UPCOMING GAMES
Once you set up your store page on Steam and make it public, Steam starts giving you impressions on various parts of the platform and some of these impressions turn into visits, some of those visits turn into wishlists and some of those wishlists will turn into sales later on.
You can find "Store & Steam Platform Traffic Platform Tab" under Marketing & Visibility part of your app admin page. You can see how many impressions and visits you get to your store page each day. Furthermore, you can also link a Google Analytics account to your store page to check some further data.
You can also check the amount of wishlists your game has on your financial info section of your Steamworks account.
You can't check other games wishlist amount but there is a quick estimation method by checking their followers on their community groups. (It is at the right hand side of any games store page). The amount of wishlist for an upcoming game is usually between 4 to 6 times higher than their followers count.
As of today the numbers for Circadian City are:
- 4500 wishlists
- 882 followers on Steam
- 220 Discord members
- 350 alpha testers
We will mainly focus on how to increase your impressions, your CTR (visits/impression) and wishlist/visit ratio.
To understand how important the wishlists are you can read this extremely helpful article about wishlist conversion on launch
I had the urge to confirm this wishlist conversion rate from the developers I know and I saw even further rates than mentioned in this article. It seems reasonable to expect a first week sales of 40-60% of your total wishlists by then. Therefore increasing the wishlists are extremely important.
TIPS ABOUT STEAM ALGORITHM
We the mortal developers can only understand the results of the powerful dark magic used in here. But there are a few things worthy of remembering.
"If you can source some external traffic to your store page, this increases your impressions internally on Steam as well."
There are a few alternate logical explanations why the algorithm might be working this way but it's not important. What is important is the result. Steam is obviously leveraging your PR or paid ads efforts you do to bring traffic to their platform. I confirmed this from other developer friends.
I am not talking about direct search used on Steam here. You might at first think that it is normal when a player sees an ad on Facebook and go to their Steam profile on their own and type the name of the game. I am talking about recommendation feed appearances, or discovery queues.
"Your day-7 sales coming from wishlists will be around 1/5 of your total day-7 sales."
I need to confirm this further but according to the wishlist conversion article, this is very common. This greatly increases the value of each wishlist during your upcoming state. This means that Steam is giving you more visibility in the store the more you make sales which sounds normal for any reasonable business.
"Your day-7 sales defines your MMR that affects your visibility on Steam for a very long time"
The term MMR is a made up term in this video. He goes on further to suggest that you should invest your whole earning in the first week back in the marketing of your game. This is based on the assumption that Steam gives you a visibility score looking at how good your sales are. Which makes sense again for any reasonable business. But they do it on the first week only. This might need further confirmation.
According to this article your day-7 sales are 1/5 of your year-1 sales. Which sounds common and further justifying the previous paragraph.
"If you can make 50.000 wishlist prior to launch Steam might feature you during your launch week."
Obviously this isn't about the algorithm and it's similar to the way how the old Steam worked. We need further confirmation about this rumor but I had reliable sources saying a Steam rep mentioned this to them.
If this is true, it gives another reason to keep piling up wishlists whatever the cost.
All of the above show us that marketing is extremely important for a Steam game and if you still think Steam user score is the only thing defining a player's purchase decision I suggest you to watch this video: Know your market: Making Indie Games That Sell and quoting the speaker:
Have you heard this before? "If your game didn't sell well you just need to make better game next time."
Quality certainly does matter, but if you think game quality is the only factor or even the dominant factor in the game success, it is the fallacy of believing that the world is fair and just.
Let us try to understand how we can achieve enough wishlists by going down the funnel.
MARKETING ESSENTIALS
I will try to categorize the actions needed in our marketing plan according to the awareness levels of potential players. There is a marketing model called AIDA that would help us doing so. From the Wikipedia page:
Attention – The consumer becomes aware of a category, product or brand (usually through advertising)
Interest – The consumer becomes interested by learning about brand benefits & how the brand fits with lifestyle
Desire – The consumer develops a favorable disposition towards the brand
Action – The consumer forms a purchase intention, shops around, engages in trial or makes a purchase
According to this model, we are trying to push players to the bottom. We need different marketing channels, tools, assets and a communication plan for each level.
There is a great GDC talk about e-mail marketing, building the strategy on top of this model. The talk favors e-mail marketing compared to other methods and it seems viable. I've never tried this before but it convinced me to open a Mailchimp account and start some mailing lists.
PHASE 1: ATTENTION
Attention phase in AIDA model is the discovery phase as the more broadly used term in games marketing. Since the indie apocalypse, there are too many games out there and discovery is harder than ever.
Fortunately we have tons of channels to help us in discovery. Social media, influencers, Steam itself and word of mouth. Opening your Steam page as early as possible definitely helps a lot in early discovery.
Internal Actions (Inside Steam) for the Attention Phase:
We opened our Steam page way earlier than we had some kind of an alpha footage from the game. We just had a character walking around in town and some mockups for the UI. Still with a page like that, we managed to have around 1000 visitors daily to our Steam page and around 80 of them are converting to wishlists.
Tagging your game properly:
Steam itself gives an explanation about this on this page. Before I tagged Circadian City, for the first few weeks the page was open we had around 400 visitors per day. It quickly jumped to 1000 right after tagging.
Try to find good selling games similar to yours and tag your game with the same tags if possible. I'm not telling to mislead the players here. Just play along, I used "retro" and "cute" tags just to have some similar tags to best selling games of the genre. Our game has a retro and cute feeling but normally I wouldn't tag the game like that. On the other hand I didn't use agriculture or fishing just to attract attention.
Screenshots and Description:
On the Steam platform, the header image of your game is usually the first image a player sees about your game. First contact is quite important. I heard of games (not the big AAA titles, commercial indie studios) spending 25.000 USD for a key art of the game.
Although Steam reduced the frequency of upcoming games being shown on the platform, there are still a lot of places you can appear. Discovery queues, at the bottom of other product pages, similar to games you've played at the bottom of front page (I haven't seen any upcoming game on this part but somehow we receive traffic from this section according to traffic breakdown, I don't know how it happens)
Some marketing people suggest making an A/B test to your visuals to test the CTR (click through rates)
Add some keywords:
Steam users can use the search function to find games. This is usually the case when you have some external communication. They see the an influencer talk about your game somewhere and the next day they type the name of the game to Steam search. It is quite common that they can't remember the name exactly. Help them find it by adding as much related and mispelled keywords as you can. It is done in the partner site under edit store page > basic info.
Community group and developer homepage
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