How do I get visibility on my game?
I surveyed over 100 games to see where their wishlists came from and this was the result
In order of effectiveness it is
- Festivals
- TikTok (if you have the right type of game for it)
- Streamers
- The Press
For more information on Tiktok, check out these links
Does Instagram work?
Nope. I don’t know why but I have never seen significant visibility come from Instagram
Does youtube work for posting my devlog?
Yes, you can get significant traffic from YouTube, BUT you must dedicate all of your time to posting videos. It must become your life. You must learn the YouTube algorithm. You must think about your next YouTube thumbnail constantly. You must make special viral content. You must decide whether you are going to post once a week, every other week, or once a month, AND STICK TO IT! YouTube is not just a place to occasionally post a video here and there when you are feeling fancy. It must become your life!
Seriously, it is a full time job posting to YouTube and you have to fully commit.
Jonas Tyroller did well with it for his game, but he dedicated his life to it.
Should I create separate social media accounts (and Discords) for each of my games and for my studio?
No! Make one studio account and never do a social account for only one game. The way businesses survive is when customers buy more than one of your products. You want someone who buys your first game to also buy your second and your third and so on until you are retired.
If you make one account per game you are essentially quarantining your potential customers into separate buckets so they never hear about your next one. The way you truly survive in this industry is to slowly grow your following with each game you release like you are rolling a snowball. Creating an account per game is like destroying that snowball and starting again from nothing. The same rules here apply for your Discord Server. One per studio.
When is it time to create a Steam coming soon page?
Here are my 3 rules for when you should create your page:
- You have decided and understand your game’s genre and core gameplay loop.
- You general art style is decided. It doesn’t have to be final art but you should know whether your game is grimdark or wholesome or realistic or cel shaded or colorful or desaturated.
- You have 3 distinct environments that you can show off. They don’t have to be fully implemented, but you want to be able to show the eventual depth of your game.
You want your Steam page up at least 6 months before you sell your game. Valve published this data that shows how much better games do that had a page up 6+ months.
I don’t have a trailer, should I before I launch my page?
You should have a trailer before you launch your Coming Soon page because it makes you look like you have your act together and are a serious developer. You can launch with a simple one but it should showcase gameplay (not cinematic cutscenes).
For more information on making a quick trailer see this blog post by Derek Lieu:
Does itch.io work?
Selling a game on itch.io will earn a tiny amount of the revenue that you will earn on Steam. Itch.io has not cultivated a community of people who spend money on games. So you won’t make much money on itch.io.
HOWEVER
The culture of itch.io is that of free games. Streamers, players, everyone goes to itch.io to find weird free games. So upload your prototypes, your game jam games, upload your demos, upload anything free as a test. If you get visibility on itch.io it means you might have a concept that works well on Steam (where you can charge real money). So treat itch.io as the testing grounds for a more expansive launch.
For more examples of games that did well testing concepts on itch.io see these games:
My trailer isn’t ready in time for Steam Next Fest, do I really need it?
Delay your entry into Steam Next Fest. You should be doing the last Steam Next Fest before you launch because the games that do the best in the festival are the ones that have the most wishlists and momentum. You need time to build that momentum which is why you participate in Steam Next Fest at the last possible moment before launch.
Will publishers hate me if I already have a steam page?
Nope! Here is a quote a producer at Raw Fury told me
“Put your Steam Page up yesterday. Don’t hesitate to get an itch.io up. Don’t hesitate to make a demo. Do all of those things. The more energy and emotion you get going around those things, the better for everyone. What you want is to make a game that people are excited about. What we want is to help you find the best way to make that game and make it successful with the biggest audience you can have. The game that you are showing today is not the game you will be selling in 2 years. So go ahead and get it out there to get people’s feedback.
Garnett Lee Raw Fury
If you are collecting hundreds of wishlists a day they don’t care what you do, they want you.
How many wishlists do I need before I launch?
At least 7000. This is because the Steam algorithms start to consider games at this level of visibility viable and they will promote you. With about 7000 your game probably will appear in the Popular Upcoming widget the week before your launch. That visibility will then lead to a possibility that you will convert enough to appear in the New and Trending widget (provided you are not EA), which starts the rest of the dominoes to have a game that is “favored” by the steam algorithm.
Note that 7000 is approximate because it depends on the other games also launching at the same time. Basically, look your game up on Steam DB, and if you have a rank number for wishlists you are eligible for Popular Upcoming. See the rank next to “in wishlists”
For more information on popular upcoming see my blog on how many wishlists you need before launch
I don’t have 7000 wishlists. Should I delay my launch?
If you are nearing launch and you have a pretty good wishlist velocity now and can project that you should hit 7000 in a month or two, yes, I do think it is worth delaying so that you can at least appear on Popular Upcoming.
On the other hand, if you have tried every marketing trick I write about, if you have entered every festival, and yet, you still are nowhere near 7000, and it would take you approximately 2 years to grind your way up to that benchmark, don’t delay. Just launch your game. It is better to dedicate all that marketing time and effort on your next game.
My clickthrough rate is X%, is that good?
Clickthrough rate doesn’t matter because of the way Steam gives visibility. Ironically, games that are doing very well often have a lower clickthrough rate than underperforming games.
The more important metric to track is the number of weekly wishlists you earn. Basically if you are earning 0-40 wishlists a week that is underperforming. If you are earning 200 or more wishlists a week that is awesome.
In the following chart each bar is the clickthrough percentage for 100s of games I surveyed. The games on the left of the chart have a ton of wishlists. The ones on the right don’t have much. As you can see the clickthrough is higher the fewer wishlists you have.
Read more about what a normal click-through rate is and why you shouldn’t worry about it
A streamer emailed me saying they want to cover my game and need 5 keys, should I send them?
No. Just ignore them. They are key resellers. When you launch your game your email address gets added to some list somewhere and a bunch of these resellers just bulk email every name there with the same story about needing keys.
It always is something like “I am a small streamer just starting out and need 5 keys for me and my team to try out your game and then we promise to play it on our up and coming stream.”
They won’t play it on a stream and even if they did, it won’t impact your sales. Even if these solicitors say they are Pewdiepie they just spoofed his email. They aren’t Pewdiepie.
Any streamer that is big enough to impact your sales will just buy your game instead of asking for free keys.
However, you should be sending free keys out to streamers because it’s more likely that they will play your game if they can just load up the key.
Free keys is a one way street though: you should send free keys to streamers but don’t engage with streamers who ask you for free keys.
Ignore these unsolicited key requests. You don’t have to yell at them or report them. Just delete their emails. They are the barnacles of the internet. You just deal with them.
Do Steam curators matter?
Nope. Don’t worry about sending them keys either. Similar to the Streamer key question above, do not respond if they say they will feature your game in their curator community if you send keys.
You don’t even need to use the Curator tool in Steam. It does nothing. I have never seen a game get significant visibility from Steam Curators.
I just published my demo on Steam and got 2000 downloads but only 5 wishlists, what is going on?
They’re bots. There are scrapers who download every file that gets uploaded to Steam. I don’t know why they want those files. All those downloads are the bots and they don’t care about you unfortunately.
However, if you uploaded your demo and got 2000 downloads and 2000 wishlists, that is something!
For the most part you can just ignore the download count and focus on how many wishlists you brought in.
I just realized that a AAA game is launching on the same day as my game, should I move my release day?
No. It doesn’t matter what other games are launching next to yours. Steam is too big.
Simon carless did an analysis and found the biggest launches had no effect on other games
Read my post here for more information on when to pick a time to launch your game
Should I pull my demo after a festival is over?
I don’t think you should. Keeping your demo up is like keeping your finishing line in the lake: the longer you have it in there, the more likely a fish (or streamer) will bite and play your game. If you are constantly putting the demo up then taking it down, streamers have a hard time featuring your game on their Stream.
My Steam Coming Soon page is live, should my call to action be to wishlist it or to join my mailing list or to join my discord?
Before you have a Coming Soon page live, your CTA should be to join your mailing list
After the page is live, the CTA should be to wishlist but on your Steam page you should have a banner that says “click here to sign up for the beta” and that should be to your mailing list.
As you near your launch you can also add a CTA banner to your Steam page to join your Discord. I don’t like to have the CTA to the discord too early because you just signed yourself up for a whole bunch of community management and if nobody is chatting and it is a dead server, people are going to just leave or at least mute it. But if you do have a full time community manager, you might as well give them something to do like manage your Discord server.
TLDR: Wishlists are for most people, Discord is for super fans, Mailing list is for super duper fans. You want to provide progressively deeper ways for people to engage with you. So have a CTA wishlists then see how deep into the rabbit hole they travel with you.
Will this be recorded?
Ok this is not a question about marketing, it is a frequently asked question I get.
Yes, the Q&A, The Conference, The Talk, everything I ever do will be recorded.