How games get real visibility
One of the negative side effects about my writing about amazing success is that developers who are just starting out can see games getting 100s of wishlists a day (that is not hyperbole) while they are stuck getting 1-3 per day. To a new developer working as hard as they can this can be demoralizing. You are working as hard as possible, telling as many people as you can about the game, how many more hours a day are there?
Every indie developer needs to learn one very important factor about marketing a game on Steam: your job is not to reach out to every potential fan and individually ask them to wishlist your game, your job is to convince a very small but potent audience to get excited and they wishlist it and then Steam notices that excitement and show your game to a wider audience.
A game that earns 150 wishlists a day, is not contacting 150 people more than a team that earns 1 wishlist a day. They might not even be working harder. The reason they get so many more wishlists is that at some point, that superstar game sent hundreds of people to their steam page and Steam said “Whoa this kind of traffic correlates with games that sell a lot, so we should start treating this game as one that has potential.” Then Steam starts showing the game in a lot more places like the Tags page, or “More Like This” or the Discovery Queue (which is the topic of this blog).
If you are new to Steam marketing, you need to change your thinking from “how do I contact one million gamers?” to “how do I prove to the Steam algorithm that my game is worth it so that it shows me to one million gamers.”
In today’s blog I will show you a specific example of a game and a marketing campaign that did this.
Whisker Squadron Survivor
Developer Aaron San Filippo is the creative director at Flippfly. The team is creating Whisker Squadron: Survivor as a spin off from their main game Whisker Squadron. I am telling you his story because he was able to wake up the Steam algorithm using a really cool trailer. Here is the trailer Flippfly published;
What you will learn
- A definition of the Discovery Queue and why it is so great
- How to conjure up an event that can wake up Steam
- What to look for to see if you have been covered by the discovery queue.
What is the Discovery Queue (DQ)?
Everyone asks me how to get on the front page of Steam. But the secret coolest widget on Steam is actually this little boring one called “Discovery Queue” (DQ from here on out)
Here is a screenshot. You should try it out. Really, go do it. It is on the front page, scroll down a bit and then click this button:
Now a lot of developers will say “What? I never use that. I get all my gaming news from Twitter. Who cares about that dumb widget?”
Well guess what? People aren’t always like you. There are a bunch of people that do stuff that is different from you and I am telling you DQ is used by a lot of people who are very important because they buy a lot of games. The super buyers on Steam use DQ and that is who you want to market it to.
I have seen the numbers for some top selling games and Discovery Queue is usually the number two or number three source of traffic to their Steam page. It is huge and not enough people care about it.
Also many of the successful games I have written about have depended heavily on success from the Discovery Queue. Seriously, check out these other posts and search for the word “Discovery Queue”
How does DQ work?
When you “explore your queue” by clicking that button, Steam dumps you on a Steam page for a game it thinks you will like. You can “Add it to your Wishlist,” “Buy it” (if it has released), or ignore it, or just click “Next in Queue”
This widget is amazing because the people who click through it are saying “I want to see a cool new game so that I can buy it.” Therefore, Valve must show them games that are relevant to them. Valve uses a secret brew of reasons to show a game and they KIND of tell you why with their explanation written above the “Add to your wishlist” button. See how it says “because it is popular.” That is usually the main reason. BUT, they also show games that match the games that I like to play.
Steam is able to provide good recommendations because it knows every game I play and they use a tag weighting system. For every gamer on Steam they know the median play time for every tag. Then if I am an outlier and play more than the median playtime, the Steam algorithm figures I must really like that type of game. For example, if most Steam players play 1 hour per week of games tagged “Platformer” and I play 12 hours per week of games tagged “Platformer” it is a safe bet that I like platformers. So in my DQ I am more likely to see Platformers. (This by the way, is why it is very important to tag your games accurately).
Most of the time the games are games that are available for purchase. That is because the DQ is VERY valuable real estate that makes money for Valve every time a game is shown in it. If Valve shows a game that is only “coming soon,” they are essentially giving away a space that could have earned them some money.
Imagine that instead of a games company, Valve owned and operated 12 parking spaces on a busy city street and had a parking meter in front of each. They would get money for every hour of every car that is parked there. If they let a car park there for free, they are losing money that can literally never be earned back. See opportunity cost.
When you run through your DQ, most of the games will be for sale. But sometimes, just sometimes, Valve believes in a game so much that they figure that it is worth the short term revenue hit of showing a free game because in the future that game will sell better because it was wishlisted. But, that “coming soon” game has to be worth it. Steam obviously wouldn’t give that spot to a crappy asset flip game with comic sans serif capsule right?
So how do you prove that your game is “worth” it enough that Steam will show your game even though it isn’t for sale yet? Let me explain…
How do you prove to Valve that your game is good and get into the DQ?
Money is an obvious signal that a game is worth it. It is a revealed preference as they say in economics. But if a game isn’t for sale, what do you use? The next best thing: Wishlists!
Valve considers your game “worthy” if it sees a lot of wishlists come in for your game in a short period of time. Usually this comes from doing a big event that is capable of stimulating enough people to go to your Steam page and Wishlist the game.
Examples of these big events are like The Game Awards where your trailer is shown to millions of gamers. You can also have a viral reddit post or a viral TikTok. It has to be a big deluge all at once. It can’t be 1 or 2 wishlists here or there spread out over weeks. I think this is because Valve has seen how the games industry works: popular games typically have big marketing pushes that spike traffic.
Now your game might get a big spike from participating in something like Steam Next Fest but that doesn’t count as a reason to earn you a spot in the Discovery Queue. I don’t know for sure but I have a couple theories why internal events don’t typically trigger the DQ:
- Valve in Q&As sometimes uses the phrase “you should bring external traffic.” I think Valve has filters or masks on their traffic monitoring to exclude traffic generated by their own Steam site so as to avoid a hall-of-mirrors echoing cascade of traffic where they provide you traffic, which signals the algorithm to give you more traffic, which in turn triggers more traffic. By only rewarding games that earn a lot of “external” traffic they avoid this feedback loop.
- There are a lot of games in these Steam festivals. So you are essentially graded on a curve. There are only 12 spots in the DQ. So you have to be one of the top games in the festival that day to stand out among all the other games also in the festival.
- I think you have to bring traffic AND wishlists. In the latest Steam Q&A I attended, I asked about visits being a good thing and they said they don’t trust “visits” as a good stat for gauging interest because it can be gamed by bots. But by looking at wishlists they can guarantee that the interest only is coming from an actual, active Steam account. (Side note, we theorize that Steam also gives more weight to Steam accounts that have made a lot of game purchases. Think about it, It becomes very expensive to run a bot army if you have to buy a lot of games for each bot.)
So how many wishlists trigger the DQ? I don’t know, that is a secret.
But we can get a hint by looking at example cases and Whisker Squadron Survivor.
How Whisker Squadron Survivor got on the Discovery Queue
As Whisker Squadron was nearing release Aaron commissioned a new “Launch trailer” from a fellow indie company named D-CELL who is making the game Unbeatable (Aaron loved their trailer).
Part 1: Outreach
Next Aaron started shopping it around to 40 press outlets and about 300 influencers a week ahead of time with an embargo date set to the time of our announcement.
The largest outlet that ended up picking it up was Gamespot, who put it on their “Gamespot trailers” channel with 1.04m subscribers. Here is the trailer hosted by Gamespot
He also uploaded it to his own Youtube channel here.
Note that his own channel got more views than Gamespot.
Part 2: Activate owned media
Owned media are the channels where people follow you and want to hear what you say. So Aaron sent the trailer to his 13K newsletter subscribers.
He also Tweeted about it to his 7502 followers.
Part 3: Results triggering the DQ
As mentioned, Gamespot covered it. So did Rock Paper Shotgun.
That media push resulted in 1777 wishlists on one day and then 1017 wishlists the next day.
Those 2794 wishlists were enough to wake up the DQ. in this graph you can see that little blue line perk up right there at the end. That DQ gave them 7668 visits over that week.
Mysteries of the DQ
Although it is an amazing, very potent boost, it is very hard to knowingly trigger the DQ. It comes in at mysterious times. For instance, if you look at the traffic graph, the February 1 spike wasn’t enough to trigger it.
I have also seen other games earn more than 3000 wishlists from getting covered by a Streamer and get 0 increase in DQ traffic.
I have also see games get two big DQ spikes throughout their marketing campaign and then never again. It is almost as if the DQ has a memory and says “nah, you only get 2 turns in this we don’t want to wear out our audience.”
My theory is that there are only so many DQ slots Steam gives out every day and maybe there was another game that got even more wishlsits than you did for the same combination of tags.
I also don’t know why some games have the DQ for just a day, and other games can get the DQ to wake up for a full week. I suspect the DQ watches to see how well your game engages DQ browsers and if it does well, it keeps getting shown more.
The DQ is mysterious and it is almost like a divine wind that shows up when you least expect it.
Why you must think in terms of the DQ
When you market your game on Steam you should be constantly looking for times when you can have a big, concerted push all at the same time. The most successful marketing campaigns are not about tweeting every day, instead they are about finding special moments to get a whole bunch of people excited at the same time. I often liken it to throwing a birthday party. You are trying to look for a reason to have a bunch of people come to your house at the same time and party. It is much easier to get a party together if you have a reason such as the weekend, Birthdays, Christmas, New Years, Graduation etc. It is much harder to just say “Come over on a Tuesday”
Here are some big events that you can leverage to try and get a bunch of people excited
- Going viral on social media – As I have written in other posts, if you manage to have 1 viral tweet or tiktok it usually isn’t enough to trigger the DQ, but you can spin that coverage into additional coverage at sites like IGN and Gamespot because they always want to cover things that are “hot”
- Make the announcement of your game, and Steam page a big event. Create a trailer like Aaron did. Other good events are the Announcement of your release date, the Launch of your game.
- Do a big event around the launch of a Beta.
- Get into a big show like Game Awards. Although those events cost tens of thousands of dollars.
- A writeup in a big publication with a dedicated PC audience (Gamespot, IGN, PCGamer). In my experience, Rock Paper Shotgun doesn’t generate enough clicks to trigger the algorithm.
- A big streamer playing your demo (This is the easiest way to induce the DQ).
Basically anytime something big happens to your game, or you reach a new milestone, treat it like the Moon Landing. Tell everyone about it and tell them to wishlist your game.
Even better is if you can stack some of those events together. Can you announce your new game, announce a kickstarter, and announce a new trailer, and announce the date for a beta all at the same day? That is newsworthy.
That in turn MIGHT influence the Steam algorithm and get them to show your game in the DQ.
How to turn around sagging wishlist rates
Oftentimes struggling to improve their daily wishlist rate focus too much on making tiny adjustments to their steam page to improve their clickthrough rate. While it is good to make those improvements to your Steam Page, the margins there pale in comparison to the need to wake up the Steam algorithm using one of the big events I list above.
Steam’s default assumption is that your game is a junk asset flip game (because statistically speaking most games on Steam are). You need to use a big boost of external traffic to prove that your game is noteworthy so they start showing you places.
So until you do something BIG that generates a BIG wave of traffic, Steam will ignore you and hide you.
The Discovery Queue is one sign that you have woken up the Steam algorithm and the earlier you do that the more time you will spend earning real visibility on Steam.
In the meantime, check out Whisker Squadron: Survivor.
How many wishlists does it take to trigger the Discovery Queue?
I surveyed the audience and have the results:
Parking lot Photo by Raban Haaijk on Unsplash