Last week I wrote about the marketing campaign of ZERO Sievert. Here is the wishlist chart showing off all the key marketing beats:
I was fortunate enough to consult for the Modern Wolf team as their launch strategist. What does that job even that mean?
99% of that impressive wishlist graph is due to how great of a game ZERO Sievert is and how great the marketing team at Modern Wolf is.
So what do I do? How could I possibly help out with all that they had already done? In today’s blog I want to deconstruct exactly how I helped the team and explain how the Steam algorithm works.
Why you give Steam 30% of your revenue
Here is the deal with Steam, that 30% cut of your revenue that they take is in exchange for a potential firehose of visibility. The dirty secret is you only get that firehose of visibility if you can prove to Valve that your game is worth promoting. That is the unfortunate truth. I went back and looked at the entire lifetime traffic numbers for ZERO Sievert and the majority of traffic came from Steam itself. In this graph, Internal Traffic is all the visibility that comes from the Steam platform. External Traffic is the traffic that the ZERO Sievert marketing team generated like from Tweets, or streamer coverage, or from their Discord.
I would say that ZERO Sievert really made the most out of that 30% they gave to Steam.
So where generated all that traffic? These are the top sources:
Top Traffic:
#1 Direct Nav (external) = 28%
#2 Discovery Queue (internal) = 21%
#3 Search Suggestion (external) = 8.7%
#4 Other Internal Steam (internal) = 7%
#5 New Release Notification Email (internal) = 6.2%
Let’s focus on that #2 Discovery queue. It is a huge source of traffic and doesn’t get enough respect from most indies. To activate the discovery queue to show your game, you have to do one of these:
- Get external traffic
- Generate a lot of money for Valve.
Here is a graph of the traffic ZERO Sievert got from the Discovery Queue
If you read my previous ZERO Sievert post, you might remember that Splattercat and all those streamers played the game in November and December of 2021. Valve rewarded that external traffic with a bump in the Discovery Queue (that is that little peak in January 2022)
Then, remember in August when Modern Wolf launched a trailer announcing they would be publishing ZERO Sievert and they got a lot of streamer coverage? That generated another Discovery Queue spike.
Then, when the game launched in November and it sold well, Valve gave it all the Discovery Queue Traffic in the world because Valve is in the business of making money and they get that by showing games that have proven to convert to hungry gamers.
Basically, the discovery queue is just one example of how you work hard to promote your game so that Valve will amplify that traffic.
Lighting a fuse: what I actually do
Here is a metaphor to explain what is happening here:
The visibility we as indies can generate via tweeting, or streamers, or festivals, or paid ads is actually relatively tiny. It is like lighting a teeny tiny match that makes a teeny tiny bit of light. Basically no gamer will notice that tiny point of light. We can’t do it ourselves.
Compare that tiny match to the visibility Steam can provide your game. Steam is like a huge bomb that when it goes off, it shakes the ground and every shopper on Steam turns to look at you to see where that shockwave came from.
Now every bomb is detonated by lighting a fuse. So our goal as indies is to strike our tiny match and then use it to light the fuse that ignites the Steam visibility bomb.
When indies complain that Steam gave them zero visibility and their game didn’t sell, it is usually because of 3 reasons the indie developer (for one reason or another) never lit the bomb’s fuse.
- Sometimes indies don’t light the fuse because they just never bothered to strike the match (aka they did no marketing or didn’t tell anyone about their game)
- Or they had bad, wet matches that never ignited (their game wasn’t that exciting, or in a genre that nobody plays anymore)
- They couldn’t find the bomb’s fuse in the first place and therefore couldn’t light it (they didn’t understand the Steam algorithm).
Steam is complicated and there are actually lots of these bombs that you can ignite at the right time to maximize the explosion and get everyone to pay attention.
That is where I come in. Companies hire me to help them figure out when to strike their matches and where to find the fuse. I can’t make better matches or dry them off, that is up to the game developer to make sure they made a good game. But I can help you when you have good matches.
So let’s look at the fuses that I helped the Modern Wolf team light.
Fuse #1: Steam Next Fest
Steam Next Fest is a 3-times-a-year festival that is a pretty good way to get wishlists. Based on my research, on average you get about 1000-3000 wishlists. That’s good, but not spectacular.
However, if you manage to claw your way up to the front page of the Steam Next Fest, you usually get at least 40,000 wishlists. That is spectacular!
However, there are only 36 spots on the front page of Steam Next Fest. So, with a little extra work to be on the top, you can go from having a pretty good boost in visibility to an absolutely phenomenal boost to visibility.
How do you get on the front page? From my research and testing, I found there are two ways:
Option 1) Velocity: collect 3000 wishlists in the 2 weeks prior to Steam Next Fest
Option 2) Start the festival with at least 150,000 wishlists
ZERO Sievert was close to those magic numbers but there was a definite possibility they would miss the cutoff and not be on the front page. So I recommended that the team do a dedicated marketing effort starting 3 weeks before launch to get them to the front page:
This campaign involved the following:
- Doubling down on communications like twitter, discord, newsletter.
- Redirecting a portion of their launch-day advertising spend to run a bunch of paid ads in the weeks leading up to Steam Next Fest.
Result:
Wishlists in the month before Steam Next Fest ZERO Sievert earned 20,683. A significant boost over the previous months. That extra pressure paid off and they made it over the cusp and ended up in the top 10 most wishlisted and most popular games during Steam Next Fest.
By being on the front page of Steam Next Fest they earned 68,564 wishlists that week. That was the game’s single biggest pre-release wishlist increase.
Basically, I got the team to strike a match and light the Next Fest fuse and it exploded into an extra 68,000 wishlists. Now using the math I explained in the previous post, I calculated that those wishlists converted quite well earning the game an extra $177,619 because they participated in Steam Next Fest. A worthy bomb to detonate indeed.
Remember though, ZERO Sievert had already proven that it had the magic. I wouldn’t recommend every game spend their way to the top of Steam Next Fest. If your game isn’t close, if people aren’t excited about it, all the money in the world won’t make the bomb explode.
Fuse #2: Merchandising and Sales
Here is a tip: if you want to earn more money, just ask for more.
The way to ask for more on Steam is to add bundles when you launch. Basically a bundle is just going up to a shopper at checkout and asking “Hey you are about to buy this game, would you also like to have this one that is just like it for a few dollars more?” It is essentially what McDonalds employees do when they say “would you like fries with that?”
Not everyone says yes, but enough people do that it is worth trying.
One of the benefits of a publisher like Modern Wolf is that in their catalog they have lots of games that are similar to one another which makes it much easier to construct a bundle. The Modern Wolf team used their other games to create the “Rule of Three” bundle that included Ostranauts and Cantata for a 20% discount.
What was the effect? Let’s look at one of the games in the bundle: Cantata
During the 7 days before the ZERO Sievert launch, Cantata earned: $146 / week
On the week of ZERO Sievert Launch (when you could also buy the bundle) Cantata earned: $5,537
I also sampled a random post-bundle launch week and Cantata earns: $953 / week
Bundling with a game that is launching can dramatically increase sales. Setting up a bundle is trivial so it’s just one of those easy things that everyone should be doing during a launch. For more information on why bundling is so good see this blog post.
Fuse #3: Extra long discount
There is this rule where Steam only lets you enter those big Steam seasonal sales like Winter Fest and
Summer Fest after your game has been out for 28 days. See this rule from the Steamworks documentation
This “at least 28 days before the event” stinks because those events generate a LOT of money. But sometimes, if your game has enough clout (aka wishlists), and you ask very nicely, and your game launches 1 week before the festival, Steam will approve your sales window and include you in the seasonal sale. And that is what I recommended the team at Modern Wolf to do.
By participating in the Autumn Sale immediately after their launch, they earned an extra $542,000. Not bad for just one support email.
Summary
So, I am basically a sapper of Steam. I find opportunities that are actually quite easy to execute once you know they are there. I help teams focus on marketing efforts that actually matter and actually turn into real wishlists and real dollars.
Match Photo by Yaoqi on Unsplash
Explosion 1 Photo by Dane Deaner on Unsplash
Bomb fuse Photo by James Adams on Unsplash
Explosion 2 Photo by Jonas Frey on UnsplashFries Photo by Alia on Unsplash
Sapper Image courtesy of Wowpedia