Indie game developers spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out their launch day. I think part of the reason is because you can’t control whether a streamer covers you or how many wishlists you can get on a day BUT if you enter a date into Steamworks, your game will launch on that day! Therefore people think a lot about it. 

In general I think indies over analyze this and spend too much time worrying about their release date. It doesn’t matter that much and most of your success was baked in when you pick the art style and genre of your game. 

But here we are, you need to set a date so I am here to help you. Just don’t stress out too much about it 

Definitely don’t launch during Steam Storwide events

Periodically, the typical Steam Storefront will completely change to promote a single all consuming event. These events remove all the typical “launch” widgets that help you get visibility. For instance Popular Upcoming and New and Trending are completely gone. All the other recommendation widgets like “popular with friends” are gone. Those really help your game get the extra visibility that is so important during your launch window.

This is actual text from Valve’s blog about the risks of launching during a seasonal sale:

Remember, during these sale events the entire front page of the Steam store shifts to a different layout, focusing on highlighted promotional deals. As always, it’s possible to launch your game during these seasonal sales, but visibility for new releases is significantly reduced while the sales are running.

Valve team regarding Steam Sale News

There are 2 types of Steam events that completely take over the page:

Steam Next Fest

The first is Steam Next Fest. It takes place 3 times a year, for 1 week each. Usually the festivals start in the first or second week of the following months. 

  • February 
  • June
  • October

The dates can change a little bit year to year and they usually post the final date range a couple of months ahead of time. Usually I just google search “Steam Next Fest <month> <year>” to find out when it is.

You should also check the Steamworks Developer blog (link) and look for any announcements. 

Steam Seasonal Sales

The huge seasonal sales take place the following times and usually last 2 weeks.

  • Steam Winter Sale (Typically Last Thursday before Christmas and lasts 2 weeks)
  • Steam Spring Sale (Typically Second Thursday of March and lasts 1 week)
  • Steam Summer Sale (Typically Last Thursday of June and lasts 2 weeks )
  • Steam Autumn Sale (Typically Last Thursday of November and lasts 1 week)

There used to be a Lunar New Year Sale but Valve announced that it was too close to the Winter sale so were merging it into a Spring sale.

Now I warned you not to launch DURING a Storewide Sale but there is this trick where if you launch your game exactly 1 week before one of the Store sales you can open a support ticket and ask Valve if you can just extend your launch discount and continue it into the following week to be part of the seasonal sale. 

The team behind ZERO Sievert were able to use this trick, which I wrote about here and it earned them quite a bit more money than if they hadn’t extended the discount.

Now, I think they only honor this request for top tier games that have tens of thousands of wishlists. So don’t get too mad if they say no. But, it is worth a shot and you might consider launching 1 week before one of the seasonal sales to use this trick. 

Probably don’t launch with a bunch of other games

One of the most reliable ways to get a ton of wishlists right before you launch is to get into popular upcoming. This is that widget. 

The widget has 10 slots and it ranks all the upcoming games that have enough wishlist velocity, by date.

Typically you need a total of 6000-7000 wishlists to have enough to appear on the list. To see if your game might appear on the list do this:

  1. Search your game on SteamDB
  2. Look at the Charts tab, then scroll down to Store data section
  3. If you see a number next to “in wishlists” (see Game B in image below), your game is eligible to appear on the list.If you only see follower count (Like Game A), you are not yet eligible to get on the list.

To become eligible, you just need more wishlists before launch.

The next part is the widget ranks all the games that are eligible by day. 

Consider this scenario: 

  • 2 eligible games releasing Monday
  • 10 eligible games releasing Tuesday
  • 2 eligible games releasing Wednesday, 

On Sunday, popular upcoming will have the 2 Monday games then 8 Tuesday games

Then on Monday after those 2 games release, you will see all 10 Tuesday games

Then when Wednesday rolls around you would see Wednesday games at the top and then whatever is next. 

Consider this alternative scenario

  • 1 eligible game Monday
  • 1 eligible game Tuesday
  • 1 eligible game Wednesday
  • 1 eligible game Thursday

In this case all 4 of those games would appear on popular upcoming. That Thursday game would have a long time there soaking up thousands of wishlists. 

Therefore the optimal strategy here is to launch your game when there aren’t that many other games being released. Which leads me to the next thing.. 

Launch when there aren’t many games being released

So you can get a lot more visibility on Popular Upcoming if you can launch when there aren’t that many other games also releasing. When do most games release?

Here is a chart looking back at the last 3 years to see when games launched  

Basically the beginning of the year is the least busy, then it gets more and more crowded with a slight decrease in the summer months of June and July.

Side note: Data from this chart came from VGInsights by filtering for each month each year

If you want to see specifically what games are launching in the general period when you launch your game, check out SteamDB’s upcoming list, you can scroll down to your target date and see what is currently scheduled. SteamDB Upcoming List

What day of the week should I launch?

Here is a chart of what days of the week most games launch. Here is when most games launch:

Couple caveats here:

  • Recently, Valve has been preventing games from setting a launch day on Saturday or Sunday because the Valve support staff will not be working so can’t help you if something goes wrong. So don’t pick those days.
  • Don’t launch on Tuesdays because that is typically Steam maintenance days and sometimes Steam just doesn’t work for a few hours. You do not want that to happen to your launch.
  • If you launch on Monday and you get on popular upcoming you could have all of Saturday, Sunday collecting wishlists. Is Monday secretly the best day to launch? (Spoiler alert, it is the best day as confirmed by the dev of We Are Who about to Die in this video)

OMG Call of Duty is launching the same day as us, should we change?

NO!

I don’t know who started it or where it came from, but there is this silly game that indies play where if a big AAA game is launching they try to avoid that date. Also if you hire a PR company, they often provide a service where they will help you pick a date and they always tell you to not do it when AAA games launch. My hunch is this is just legacy behavior left over from tent pole movie releases and nobody quite knows why to avoid AAA and so they just say not to without any hard evidence. 

My opinion? It doesn’t matter. Here are 3 reasons why you shouldn’t worry if a big AAA game is launching on the same day you are.

Reason #1 Steam is huge

Even the biggest game isn’t played that much when you look at the entirety of Steam. If you look at the top games list of 2022, Monster Hunter Rise was one of the best selling games. The all-time peak of concurrent players was 231,360 but, ironically, that happened 7 months after it launched. Nobody was warning you not to launch 7 months after it launched were they? No.

Now if we look just at the launch, there was 130,000 concurrent players. That sounds huge but Steam is so ungodly large that you cannot conceive of the scope. To put this in perspective, consider that on Monster Hunter’s launch day there were 8 MILLION people playing games on Steam. So Monster Hunter was played by 1.6% of the Steam Audience that day. 

You mean to tell me that you are scared of launching your game because 1.6% of the audience is playing a game? 

Steam is so massive you can’t even rationally understand the scale. Here is a pie chart, hopefully this makes you think more about this:.

This pie chart shows that 1.6% of active Steam users were playing Monster Hunter Rise while 98.4% were playing something else.

Reason #2 The press doesn’t matter

When you hire a PR firm and they say you shouldn’t launch during a AAA launch because the press will be so preoccupied covering that game that your indie game will not get any press. Well guess what? The press doesn’t cover indie games anyway. They usually only write about them only after they become huge. And by the way even if you do get covered, the press doesn’t sell that many units or give you that many wishlists. The best press beat I ever saw earned a game about 5,000 wishlists. You are going to move your release date because you are worried about maybe losing 5,000 wishlists?

Also the press doesn’t write about indie games anyway. Here are the articles PCGamer was writing during the release of Monster Hunter:

Valheim, Castlevania, Fortnite, Minecraft, Flashback! PC Gamer is the best site for getting traffic and it mostly writes about games that are old. PC Gamer will write about it but only after it is big and a few years old. 

Valheim is an indie game, but it only gets articles written about it long after it has already proven to be successful. Press coverage is a lagging indicator. You get press after your game is already successful. 

Reason #3 Other indie developers are too scared to launch during AAA release

Remember back there where I said to get on popular upcoming just lists every eligible game releasing that day. So the fewer games releasing your week, the better your chances for spending a long time on the Popular Upcoming widget. 

Also, we have established that indie developers are irrationally scared of big AAA releases so they are probably going to shift their date to avoid that big release. 

THEREFORE, it makes sense that you should actually pick a date when a big game is launching because the popular upcoming widget will be just you and that AAA game. 

Now, with that said, I do think October, November, December is bad because there are a TON of AAA games launching. There are 30% more games releasing those months than there are in January. That means more games will be competing for that coveted “Popular Upcoming” slot.

Get a second opinion

Simon Carless did a big writeup of when to release a game based on how well the game converted wishlists to sales. Here is a link to his full post.

Also from his analysis you can see January through April are good! 

June is very good.

October, November, December are less good, but not by that much. 

Image credit Simon Carless

In another blog post, Simon Carless found that big AAA releases do not affect sales. Read: Can Another Big Game Release Crush Your Sales.

So what did we learn

  1. January – April has less competition
  2. Release on a Monday or a Wednesday
  3. Don’t freak out if a AAA game is launching the same day / week as you
  4. Don’t launch during Steam Next Fest (some week in February, June, October)
  5. Don’t launch during Steam Seasonal Sales (December, March, June, November). 
  6. BUT if you can swing it launch the week before a Steam Seasonal Sales

Calendar Photo by Behnam Norouzi on Unsplash