There are many great articles on how to market your game to launch, but there isn't much on what to do afterwards. Here’s an attempt to bridge that gap.
The below is a close look at Cultist Simulator‘s storepage traffic breakdown from Steamworks. I’ve taken snapshots of the game’s performance over the past two years and thought about what this tells me about post-launch marketing. I’ve restricted myself to speaking only about Steam to avoid data overload.
For those of you who haven’t heard of Cultist, here’s a cheat sheet:
Niche, text-based, Lovecraftian card simulator by Alexis Kennedy, of Fallen London and Sunless Sea fame
Critically divisive – you either love it or hate it
Two-person dev team (plus freelancers)
Launched on 31st May 2018
Sold 50k copies in mth 1
Released three DLCs, two new languages, several free content updates and a bundle edition in the following 1.5yrs
I’m not a data analyst, so you may draw different conclusions from the following numbers. Please leave me a comment at the bottom if you do!
1. THE TIMELINE
Alexis and I talk a lot about keeping the balloon up: how selling your game post-launch is like continually batting a balloon up from a gradual downwards trend. The higher you bat it, the longer it takes to come back down. If you don’t keep batting it up, it will eventually end up on the floor. The floor, in case you missed it, is zero sales, and gravity in this metaphor is the decreasing relevancy and commercial viability of your game over the course of linear time.
Cultist‘s lifetime graph looks as you’d expect, with a few peaks rising out of an otherwise stable, low rate of daily units sold. The major peaks are all launch and seasonal sales, with a few secondary peaks from releasing new content (DLC, soundtrack and major languages). Nothing ground-breaking here, other than a few minor good blips from Steam events and high-profile streamer coverage.
2. FULL TRAFFIC BREAKDOWN
The key metrics here are impressions, visits and CTR. More on them below, but first a caveat! You’ll see on the annotated traffic images that there’s something helpfully called ‘(other pages)’ that’s always near the top of the list and/or CTR scale. By far the largest proportion of (other pages) is, apparently ‘(various features)’ with no further information available.
This is what I see in Steamworks.
I’ve not commented on ‘(other pages)’, because honestly, I don’t understand it. I’m not sure what’s accounting for these numbers or what they mean, so… if you know, please share!
Now, here’s the data in its full glory: click for screenshots of Cultist's most recent week, most recent month, last six months and lifetime traffic. I’ve annotated them with major takeaways, but here’s a closer look at our major three metrics.
3. IMPRESSIONS
I erroneously used to think of impressions as ‘eyeballs’. In reality, they’re the number of times your stuff was displayed, regardless of how many people actually looked at it. The key thing is that these numbers are really big – the top of the marketing funnel – and they get smaller and smaller until they turn into actual unit sales. I find it useful to think of impressions as opportunities: it’s the largest possible number of times Cultist could have made contact with an eyeball, and therefore the largest possible number I could realistically hope to convert. The closer my number of visits match my impressions, the more people are seeing and being interested in Cultist Simulator. The closer my number of sales match my visits, the better my store page is at converting considerers to customers.
This is, of course, a crude oversimplification of what’s actually going on, but it helps me visualise how these metrics interact. Anyway, here are our top three performing impression-givers across Cultist‘s life:
Impressions | Most recent week | Most recent month | Last six months | Lifetime |
|---|---|---|---|---|
#1 | Steam home page (219k) | Steam home page (13mil) | Steam home page (25mil) | Steam home page (99mil) |
#2 | 'Friend is in-game' notification (90k) | 'Friend is in-game' notification (478k) | 'Friend is in-game' notification (2mil) | Tag page (14mil) |
#3 | Recommendation feed (63k) | Recommendation feed (415k) | Tag page (2mil) | 'Specials - Full List' (11mil) |
It’s a no-brainer that the Steam home page is the most significant impressions feed across the board. Steamworks proudly claims 94 million MAU and 1 trillion daily impressions, so… there’re a lot of impressions to go around.
‘Tag pages’ are tag-specific subpages which function much like the genre subpages and are in effect particularly focused mini-home pages, with featuring for recommendations, new and trending titles, etc. Cultist‘s data shows a pretty sharp divide between the Top Sellers and the New and Trending tag lists: these top two feature spots are by far the most significant areas of the page, and there’s a drop-off from 4mil impressions down to 189k with the remaining . This implies that these two lists are the main ones people look at, and that games featured in these lists make up a lot of that juicy feature carousel right at the top of the page.
A tag page for ‘Lovecraftian’
‘Specials – Full List’ refers to the ‘the full page of search results’ when you click the ‘Browse more’ button at the top of the ‘Specials’ section on the home page. They get special front-page featuring, so it’s not surprising they give lots of impressions. But it probably also means that lots of people click through to browse current bargains, and is further proof how important sales are.
The current specials list on Steam’s front page
‘Friend is in-game’ notifications are a different story. Jason Rohrer talked brilliantly about the power of ‘infinite unique situation generators’
