So here you are reading my blog every week and time after time I write about these games that are doing amazingly well! They earn 100 or even 300 PER DAY! They launch with 100,000 wishlists.
Then, maybe you look at your own Steamworks stats and see a paltry 1 to 2 wishlists earned per day. In fact, sometimes you have more wishlist deletes in a day than you do adds.
What is going on? How are people getting wishlists?
In today’s blog I am going to help you identify why your game is not getting wishlists. There is no guarantee here. I will just help you look at the most common problems I see from games.
How Steam works
The reason most games are stuck earning only 1-2 wishlists a day is they have never proven to the Steam algorithm that they are a “Real game” by generating thousands of page impressions that convert to thousands of wishlists.
My theory is that by default Steam assumes that all games are asset flips and that you should be hidden to make room for games that people are excited for. The way you prove to Valve that you are not a low effort asset flip is by getting a huge influx of traffic which converts into wishlists.
Here is a recent example from The Ouroboros King
The developer for the Ouroboros King wrote this great blog post
Here is the follower chart for Peglin
Here is the follower chart for Dome Keeper
Notice how all these games went through long periods where nothing happened and then BOOM all of a sudden a ton of wishlists landed in their lap and then every day the algorithm naturally shared their game which led to more streamer coverage which led to more wishlists.
That is our goal. You need to get a big influx of traffic so that the algorithm thinks you are a real game worthy of the algorithm’s time. But how?
Problem solving
There are many causes of no visibility so I am going to present today’s blog in the form of a Fishbone diagram also known as a Ishikawa diagram. This diagram was invented at the Kawasaki shipyards and helps solve defects in manufacturing.
But today we are going to find defects in visibility.
FUNDAMENTAL Problem: You haven’t done anything yet.
Before I dive in, there is one big central aspect to most low performing games: there hasn’t been a big moment to really pull people towards your game. Just putting your game on Steam and sending a tweet every once in a while is not going to blow your game up into the visibility stratosphere. It takes a MAJOR influx of traffic to kickstart the algorithm.
I did a study of the Discovery Queue (which is one of the main widgets that Steam uses to bless a game with traffic) and saw trends that indicate the thresholds you need to reach before the algorithm will pay attention to you:
This table presents how many Visits and Wishlists a game earned during the 7-day period before a major Peak in DQ Traffic aka (B) in the chart above.
| Visits | Wishlists | |
| Average | 34553 | 13840 |
| Median | 11202 | 3583 |
| Lowest number that still triggered the DQ | 4347 | 524 |
Read more about my research on the Discovery Queue here:
So look at your traffic. Have you ever had a spike of traffic greater than 1000 wishlists in a week?
If no, then you probably haven’t done anything that will make the algorithm like you and give you serious traffic.
Notice that The Ouroboros King had a spike way back here? It wasn’t strong enough to turn the algorithm onto it (that mini-bump was caused by coverage by Clemmy’s Best Indie Games).
How do you get those big sparks of traffic? It depends on the type of game you have:
- Know it when they see it game (a social-media friendly game)
- Know it when they play it game (a demo-friendly game)
You could have both, but most games fall into one of those categories.
Problem: You haven’t done anything yet (Know it when they see it game)
Some games are just beautiful. You just tweet one amazing image of the game and it isn’t even final art and it goes viral. An example is Tiny Glade.
Even when the game was a simple black and white prototype with default ground, it went viral:
I wrote about it here.
Or horror games go viral with just a tweet:
I wrote about Choo Choo Charles here:
Or your game is so beautiful it can go to the front page of Reddit and the mods are so impressed by your game they don’t pull your post and you earn 11,000 wishlists.
I wrote about how Laysara Hidden Kingdom Did that here
So the fundamental question you have to answer is, “Do I have a social-media friendly game?”
Here is how to find out if you do:
- Take the next month and go HARD on social media. Tweet every day with gifs of your game.
- Pick the most beautiful part of your game. The coolest effect, the coolest boss, the best shader, whatever it is and just tweet a gif of it.
- Also try to do the “Trend Jacking” trick: I described here
- Cut the best part of your trailer and make a 15 second TikTok and talk about what your game is.
- Post a 30 second edit of your trailer to r/games or r/pcmasterrace and use the old “I quit my job to make my dream game” title (but please don’t quit your job for your game).
- Repeat these actions every day for 30 days. Just push your game as hard as you possibly can.
At the end of this mega month, did any single one of your posts on TikTok, Twitter, or Reddit generate at least 1000 wishlists? No? You didn’t go viral? I am sorry, you do not have a social-media friendly game.
BUT THAT IS OK!
95% of successful Steam games are not social media friendly. I had you do all that social media work to figure out if your game is a social media friendly game. Now that you know you don’t have one of those games, cut back on the social media posting. Look at the stats from your social media hell month and pick the platform that you liked the best and/or got the best response. Post there like once a week. But don’t expect much. Social media is largely overrated unless you are one of the lucky “social-media-friendly” games.
Problem: You haven’t announced your game
Sometimes people just publish a Steam page without a trailer, send one tweet that says “I have a game: <link>”
That is not announcing your game.
Here is how you announce a game
- Create a 30 second trailer and title it “<Game Name> Announcement Trailer” but don’t publish it. If you need the simplest one check out this blog post.
- Reach out to a bunch of sites and say “Do you like my trailer? Would you like the exclusive?” If they say yes, let them announce it. If no one responds go on to the next step
- Apply to upcoming festivals and in the application there is usually a question “do you have anything to announce?” In that box, you link to your unpublished trailer and say “You will be the first place to announce my new game” if that doesn’t work go to the next step.
- On social media, on your newsletter, in your discord start teasing something start posting “In 7 days we will have a big announcement” then the next day “6 days to the big announcement” and include a mysterious gif of gameplay.
- Make your “Announce Trailer Live” contact the press, social media, newsletter. Make a big TADA with it.
It might work, it might not. But you have to at least make a big EVENT out of your announcement.
And if you launched your Steam page and never did this, you can still do it. Remember the old saying “If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there did it make a sound?” Considering you don’t have many wishlists, nobody was there to hear your announcement, so it didn’t make a sound. So you can just announce again but the right way.
Problem: Lack of Promotion Social
When you are testing to see if you are a social-friendly game, I am asking you to pushing your game hard. Sometimes devs say “I tried social media and it didn’t work” and I check their twitter handle and they did some lazy meme work where they just inserted their game’s name into some trending meme.
This doesn’t work. Nobody is going to go to your steam page because you co-opted some dumb meme.
I also often see developers say they tried social media but in reality they just retweeted some of their friends’ posts and posts from big-named-developers. That is not doing social media.
I also often see developers say they tried social media and really they just complained about how hard it is to be a game developer or they did “a day in the life of a developer” post.
Those won’t generate significant traffic to trigger the algorithm because they are not about your game.
To get the type of traffic we are looking for, you have to put your game out there front and center. Every day during social-media-test-month show a clip of the coolest part of your game and just explain what it is. Nothing too cute, it isn’t about you, it is about your game.
Just put your game out there.
Do this every day and track it. Did you ACTUALLY do it every day?
If after this month of truly putting your game out there and you get no response, move on.
Problem: You haven’t done anything yet (know it when they play it game)
As I said, most games don’t go viral on social media. It is a very rare and special game that has that beautiful graphics or interesting hook. It really is rare.
The more likely path to success is with a demo and getting Streamers to play it.
That is what happened to Peglin (Here is how Peglin made over $1 million because of a demo), this is what happened to Dome Keeper (I wrote about it how it earned $1 million because of a demo), this is what happened to The Ouroboros King (the developer wrote about it here).
Some streamers can generate the type of mega traffic that triggers the algorithm and YouTube has a long tail where views dribble in for months. But Streamers can only cover your game if you have a demo.
Similarly, online festivals that have Steam front page featuring can bring in thousands of wishlists.
Remedy
- You need to get a quality demo out there ASAP because you need to attract attention with your game.
- Once your demo is live, reach out to Streamers and apply to festivals
Marketing a fun to play game through streamers and festivals is the most reliable and best way to get that necessary traffic to get “Blessed” by the algorithm.
Let’s look at that wishlist chart for The Ouroboros King again.
The reason the algorithm got “turned on” was because the developer released a demo, then got covered by the streamer Retromation (Here is his video). Then several more streamers also played the demo.
But what if the developer had released the demo earlier? Here is an alternative reality version that I totally just mocked up in photoshop.
I know I know, it is easy for me to just say “Make your game faster and put it out earlier.” But my point here is that a demo is a major kickstart for most game marketing. The sooner you get a demo out the more time you have to get covered by streamers, the more time you have to spend in Steam’s “blessed” status earning hundreds of wishlists passively.
So my recommendation is (within reason) try to schedule your game’s development goals around getting a demo out. You still need to release a demo with solid game feel and presentable graphics, but as soon as you can, release a quality taste of what you are making, the sooner you can get streamer coverage and festival featuring.
And YES you can go back and fix your demo later if it has issues. Just try your best and if things go south, patch the demo.
Problem: You released a demo but your game isn’t fun
So you released a demo, and a couple streamers played it but you just didn’t get that huge traffic boost that Peglin, Dome Keeper, and The Ouroboros King got. What now?
It probably means your game isn’t fun.
I know, you will say “But players loved us! Every playtester says they had fun! When we went to an in-person floor-show there was this 6-year-old kid who spent his whole day at our booth.”
I have heard these claims many times and these are great stories but they are not data. Unfortunately, people are nice. Most people don’t want to hurt your feelings and say your game is janky. Or maybe they thought it was entertaining for the minute they were playing it, but they aren’t excited enough to try it again. Their kindness is good for your ego, but not great for your product.
Instead, look at your MEDIAN play time. I find when games have a median playtime lower than 24 minutes indicates some fundamental problem with the game. Here is my research on the median playtime.
Now you might say “Yes our median is 8 minutes, BUUUT our AVERAGE is really high! That must means something!?!”
Sorry, that doesn’t mean anything. If you don’t have many players and your average playtime is high that might just mean some random guy in Toledo accidentally left your game running in the background before he went to bed and that greatly increased the average. I know it is hard to face the facts but Median is the more important number to look at.
A low median can have several causes
- The game is too hard
- The game is too janky
- The game is too confusing
- The game is too easy or boring
- The game isn’t deep enough and there isn’t a meta game so when you play it is like an old school arcade game. You play it and then done. That won’t work on Steam.
- The UI is hard to use
- The sound / visuals are hard on people and it gives them a headache if they play for very long.
Remedy:
Because the root cause can be any of these factor you need to try and diagnose it on your own using these:
- Hook up analytics to your game at key checkpoints. Do players get through the tutorial? Do they get to the final boss? Do they restart the game after they die? Do they come back to the game days later?
- Are they stuck at some puzzle? For instance are there certain gates in the game like they have to collect 7 keys of Vamtoozler before proceeding to the next area? Well how many keys of Vamtoozler did they collect? Hook up analytics to each key of Vamtoozler. Maybe 90% of people never collect the 3rd key of Vamtoozler because the level design is too confusing. Fix that.
- Give your game to other game developers who are a little bit more experienced than you. Now, you cannot send your game to a legend like Jenova Chen, instead reach out to your local game group from developers who have published multiple games. Tell them that people bounce off your game and you need feedback why that might be the case. Hopefully they can help.
Problem #: You haven’t reached out to streamers enough
So you have a demo! Great! You actually need to reach out to Streamers. You don’t have to pay for their time at this point. The first step is just to reach out to them.
Look for games that are similar to yours then search them on youtube. Find all the streamers that have played those games and add their email / twitter handles to a spreadsheet.
Then, set a goal of contacting a few of those streamers every day with a pitch letter.
I have a couple example pitch letters in these blog posts
- The letter the team at Zero Sievert used to get coverage (see image below)
- How to get covered by IGN
- How to talk to Streamers
Here is one such example:
Problem: Your game is presented in a boring way
So you reached out to streamers a lot but nobody has covered you or even responded. You are thinking “my emails probably got stuck in spam.”
Unfortunately, the letters are not going to spam and streamers read just about every pitch that comes into their inbox. The truth is, they probably weren’t interested in your game. Look at this tweet from Wanderbots where he said “I know it seems like a no-brainer, but I’ve bounced off of great games because their steam page did them no favors.”
In fact, you should just read Wanderbots’s whole twitter thread.
Or your capsule is not good enough. Look at this comment by Streamer Splattercat. In youtuber-speak a “thumb” is the thumbnail.
Read more on how Capsules affect coverage:
Here is how to fix this:
- Make sure your Steam page is top notch! I have a whole free course on how to fix your steam page
- Make your email pitch tight! Look at the links I provided in previous section
- Make sure your capsule is PROFESSIONALLY DONE! Please! Read this. Streamers need a good looking capsule to make their Youtube Thumbnail look good. Unprofessional capsule = no coverage.
- In the presskit include screenshots with and without UI,
- In the presskit include your capsule with each layer separated in a .PSD format so they can rearrange your art to make a thumbnail.
- In the presskit include a video of your game in high quality video.
- You don’t have to make a fancy presskit website just upload all those files to a dropbox or google drive
- DONT zip the files up in a .zip or .rar. That looks shady as hell and they will be scared off.
- You must provide everything to them to make it easy. Just make it easy for them.
Problem: It’s not clear what makes your game unique
Alright, no Streamer is going to cover you or no festival is going to feature you if your game looks and plays like every other game.
I see too many games where their short description lists a bunch of very common verbs that are standard for your genre like this:
Tales of Vesporia is a unique adventure game where you explore, craft, and build in this unique compelling open world adventure. Will you find the 7 unique keys of Vamtoozler?
A weak short description that I just made up but have seen lots of times
One of the things I always do when critiquing a Steam page short description is see if I just swap out the game’s name with the most popular game in this genre will it still apply.
For example
MINECRAFT is a unique adventure game where you explore, craft, and build in this unique compelling open world adventure.
A test of the original short description where I swap in Minecraft. It works which means this is a bad short description.
Instead, say just enough to establish the genre and then hit them hard with what is unique about your game. Here is an example of what I mean:
Tales of Vesporia is an open world crafting game but everything you craft comes from your own flesh. You must consume, you must mutilate the world and rebuild it from your own carapace. Only upon the blood sacrifice of your tissue will the 7 keys of Vamtoozler emerge from your sinew.
My improved short description
See much better and I didn’t have to use the word “unique.” Not many games can be mistaken from that short description. Notice I did say “Open world crafting” which establishes the genre and could describes a bunch of other games, but I quickly pivot and spend a lot of time describing the most unique thing about my theoretical game.
Also, please stop using these words in your short description
- Unique
- Creative
- Colorful
- Fun
- Interesting
- Original
- Hilarious
Only your audience gets to decide if your game has those qualities. You do not.
The other way to differentiate yourself in your short description is to say what your game does NOT have. Basically you take what you hate about the biggest game in your genre and you say “our game doesn’t have that”. This is called the law of the opposites. Read this blog post I wrote about how to pull it off:
Problem: Your game is too unique or the genre is too vague
On the other side of the spectrum are games that are just too random and I cannot figure out what genre they are going for. Usually the screenshots are a mess of beautiful vistas and monsters but there is no context behind them so I can’t figure out the genre. Am I fighting those monsters? Am I taming that monster and making it my pet? Am I that monster?
Usually UI and camera angle can define genre but if it is just in-editor beauty shots of your game it is really hard to figure out what is going on.
Sometimes developers say “My game is totally unique and has no genre! Nothing in your education or experience can have prepared you for my game, it is completely outside the entire tradition of video games. It is outside the tradition of criticism and review.”
That sounds cool at first but it will not sell on Steam.
The Steam Algorithm works via the transitive property. Valve knows every game and every genre every player plays and then Valve recommend more games based on that behavior. So “Because you liked A and B you will like C.”
Look at this widget. Because I played game A, they think I will like all these games which are Bs. Notice how they all have the “First Person” and “Walking Simulator” tag
Or this widget
But if your game is totally outside the tradition of human thought, that isn’t good. If you are like “NO my game cannot be compared as an A or a B, it’s really more of a non-Euclidian glyph that I represent with the symbol “➰” and pronounce it with a glottal throat stop, and really it cannot be classified on this mortal plane.”
That’s cool but then Steam won’t know what to do with you and so they will just hide your game.
But usually when someone tells me “My game is unlike anything” it usually is just a roguelike with puzzle platforming elements or something. It probably has an influence from a game 15 years ago. Lean into that. Say “We are this game but new.”
Problem: It’s the game
Finally, after fixing the message, trying every sort of promotion, fixing the steam page and messaging, it comes down to the game idea and the genre. For some reason some ideas just don’t resonate with an audience. Similarly, sometimes the graphics just are not what people like. Art really sells a game and it is very hard to promote if you are not or don’t have a professional artist on your team.
A few years ago I wrote this post about how some games are feathers that are super easy to promote and some games are bowling balls and just don’t move.
What happens if none of this works?
Well, that’s the entertainment business kid.
I am sorry, but just because you make something doesn’t mean people will like it. Entertaining people is fickle. This isn’t the software industry where if you solve a problem that people need help with you can sell it. Humans are weird. Sometimes they don’t like something because one seemingly insignificant factor. Sometimes it seems like it should be a sure thing but it isn’t.
Playway has this interesting business model where they just assume that they cannot judge what is good or bad so they create a bunch of game ideas and see which gets the most wishlists. If you look at the Playway upcoming list you will see tons of games. Some of them have a lot of wishlists, some don’t.
For instance this game called Postapo Mechanic Simulator looks kinda cool but the Steam page has been live for a year and only has about 2000 wishlists. By Playway standards, that is not too hot and they probably won’t spend any more time or money developing it. You need to adopt a similar attitude. Put out a bunch of ideas (don’t necessarily make a Steam page for them because Valve doesn’t like a bunch of dummy pages), then see what people think, and then pick the ones that resonate the most.
Then ship it and start making the next one.