Intro
Hey there, fellow indie game dev. Let’s cut to the chase: you’ve got a game that you've either just started working on, or maybe it’s already late in production and you need to start building its home on Steam, or maybe your page already exists but it could use some improvement. Whatever the case, you want your Steam page to be as efficient as possible, bringing in good traffic and converting it into wishlists and ultimately sales. I’m going to try and use what experience I’ve gained so far to help you do that. You can either read the disclaimer or jump straight into the thick of it below.
Disclaimer
First off, this is a long, loooong post*. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Everything I’m going to share falls into either a) common knowledge that is readily available but a hassle to put together from different sources, b) my personal confirmed experiences and experiences other devs have shared with me, or c) some personal speculations. Please keep this in mind, and don’t treat this post as a foolproof guide to surefire success on Steam. I have not released anything on Valve’s platform yet; my game has had a successful Kickstarter three years ago, I’m gearing up for a release soon, I’m currently at ~20500 wishlists, and I’ve learned a lot by both stumbling into good ideas and fucking up majorly. If I am wrong about anything, please correct me in a comment.
Throughout this article, I will use my own game as an example, mainly because it was my vehicle to experiment and try to better understand Steam. The intention is to bring everything I’ve learned together in one convenient place*, and make optimizing your Steam page easier for you than it was for me.
Quick terminology index
Wishlist (addition) - A number that goes up when some poor unsuspecting soul likes your game and throws it onto his “I want to play this later but probably never will” pile of shame;
Visit - An unfortunate Steam user has actually landed on your page;
Impression - Someone has seen a capsule (a visual asset) of your game on Steam. What you want is to convert these rare, Yeti-like sightings into visits (and, ideally, wishlists & sales);CTR (Click-through rate) - The percentage of impressions that actually end up in visits to your page. It’s important, but wishlist additions are way more important.
Existential dread - What your life turns into from the moment you become hooked on checking Steam traffic and wishlist stats daily.
1. When do I launch my Steam page?
Short answer: As early as fucking possible.
Long answer: Still as early as fucking possible, but with a caveat that I’ll touch on below. You probably already know this, but - prior to actually releasing your game and becoming an internationally adored indie superstar - your main goal in life on Steam will be to accumulate wishlist additions (simply called wishlists from here on out for convenience). That’s what you should care about most, and focus all your efforts on. It therefore stands to reason that the longer before launch your page is up, the more wishlists it can accumulate. One year is not too long. I’ve had mine online since August 2018 and we were late as hell because of bureaucratic issues.
Now for the caveat I was mentioning: don’t launch your page unless you are sure that you have the best video & visual assets and text descriptions you and your team can come up with. Your first day on Steam is bound to net you a lot of exposure and wishlists - significantly more than most days afterwards. Steam’s elusive algorithm will also start judging your game based on how it performs in this first critical day, so please take it very seriously.
Please do not launch your Steam page without a trailer! This will make your game look bad, or as a low-effort move on your part at the very least. We’ll dive deeper into trailers below.
We did have a trailer, screenshots, and decent copy. Major fuck-up: no tags (more on their importance below). It could have gone a lot better.
Also, already having a community that you can bring in and positively influence the numbers day one will help. A lot. If you do, make sure you let them know in advance when your page launches, and remind them that very day via social media. Just like on Kickstarter, it’s best to have that moment zero critical mass for a snowball-type effect.
Always use “wishlist now” as a call to action basically every time you show your game in public:
Tl;dr: Bring your Steam page live ASAP but only once you have the best trailer, screenshots and text possible, and ideally with a community boost to boot.
A quick aside about your game title: in case you haven’t yet named it, keep in mind that certain words fare better than others in Steam searches. I’m not saying name your game “Souls Battle Royale Roguelike Simulator 2021”, but it’s something to keep in mind.
My game is called Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure. I have indeed intentionally chosen a title that the average mortal would have a 0.008% chance of spelling correctly on their first try, BUT it also has both “adventure” and “Cthulhu” in there, which (at least for the time) count towards nice “search suggestions” impressions on Steam. This means that once you start typing either “adventure” or “Cthulhu” in the search bar, my game pops up:
Yes, “Gibbous” is hard to spell and remember and nobody knows what the hell it even means, but on the other hand, good luck finding a specific game with “heroes” in its title by wading through Steam search results. It’s a trade-off, choose carefully.
Disclaimer: your game needs to have a certain level of popularity before it starts popping up as a search suggestion. No idea what that threshold is; if anyone does, let me know in the comments.
Alright, let’s start actually breaking down the Steam page.
2. The Trailer
As I’ve said above, don’t launch your page without one. There are great articles out there about how to approach trailers; I will not go super deep into it, you’re better off reading posts like this one by people who actually know their stuff. I’ll just touch on some do-s and dont-s, and some generalities.
DOS
Show off your best gameplay footage up front (it can also be a cutscene, if it’s relevant or it helps set the scene). If you plug Google Analytics into your Steam page (more on that below), you’ll notice a lot of users spend no more than half a minute on your page before moving on, and they’re probably checking out your trailer.
Try and hook the viewer within the first moments of the trailer, don't faff about
Unless you sink your hook into them within those precious seconds, they’re off to the next 50th game released on Steam that day.
If your game has both a story and voice acting, make sure that the lines you use in your trailer help set up the premise without spoiling too much. Choose wisely, and choose hard-hitting stuff that summarizes the plot or drives atmosphere.
Look up free trailer SFX packs on the internet if “epic” is what you’re after. I like this one, but there are probably a bunch out there. There’s also freesound.org that only requires free registration, but keep in mind you will have to credit attributions in the description. I would not advise using royalty-free music in your trailer, unless you don’t have original music in your game.
Whatever is unique or representative about your game - put that stuff up front and highlight it hard. They’re called hooks for a reason; please read Ryan Clark’s excellent post about what constitutes a hook and why they should be on your mind constantly when designing your game. And your trailer.
If you can think of anything visually or audio-wise that can set your trailer apart and add a bit of wow factor, it would be great. In our case, I used parallax-scrolling 2D layers on my characters to give them a neat 3D effects (reddit post about it here
