I have seen a number of marketing strategies lately where developers release their game free with the hope that they will get more visibility. In today’s blog I will explain to you some of the strategies and then warn you of the dangers of free and to persuade you against releasing your game for free..
Why in general free doesn’t work
It seems like putting your game out there for free should work. Free! There is no barrier to entry. Nobody has an excuse to not play your game. In fact the Free page on Steam is the page with the second highest traffic outside of the front page.
Revenue generated = visibility
To understand why “free” doesn’t work, you have to look at it from Valve’s point of view. There is limited real estate on the front page of Steam. Every slot earns them some amount of money. If they decide to put a free game in one of those front-page-slots, there is an opportunity cost where they could be making more money from a full-price game.
From that point of view, it seems obvious that Valve has no incentive to promote you further because you are literally costing them money to show your game because your spot could have been filled by a paid game.
Longer more detailed answer
At launch, Steam gives games that have enough wishlists and momentum a bunch of visibility. The Popular Upcoming, and Discovery Queue are all there to show the game off. If enough shoppers browsing those widgets buy or play your game, it says that you passed the test and you will show up in New & Trending and other recommendation widgets on the front page of steam.
Most of that “phase 2” visibility is based on dollars earned. If a game is making money for Valve, they are going to want to show it more. They are incentivised to give it more visibility. I said “MOST” of phase 2 visibility comes from revenue. A free game can appear on New & Trending based on high number of concurrent users (CCU)
In this blog post did some research into the Post-launch Discovery Queue. I looked at how two of Jonas Tyroller’s games fared in the Discovery Queue. Thronefall made more money, so got more visibility.
When your game is free, it obviously isn’t making money so there is less incentive for Valve to promote it.
But what about free with DLC
When Valve is determining whether to feature a game in the various widgets it does consider the main (free) game and all associated DLC as a single unit. So if the game has DLC and a good monetization model, it could theoretically do well. HOWEVER, Steam players are allergic to aggressive free-to-play mechanics with timers and loot boxes. Also the sheer number of free players you need to make the DLC comparable to paid players is so massive that only AAA companies manage to pull of Free + DLC. It is very very hard to do this.
The Steam player base is a hard audience who love spending money on their favorite hobby. Free To Play works on mobile because it is primarily a casual audience who doesn’t spend money on games. Free To Play is a strategy for casuals.
Price is not the reason people aren’t playing your game
In this blog post I wrote about how Steam players buy games but don’t play them. Same goes for FREE demos. Even when you have a demo for free, most people just wishlist it. Here is a survey of the median Steam game during next fest. 907 people will wishlist (but not play) a free game.
Even if a Steam shopper is interested in your game, a large percentage of those people will buy but not play it.
That means that if your game is paid, that shopper will spend money on you but not play will still increase your chances in the algorithm. If your game is Free, they will not be increasing your CCU, and they won’t be buying DLC so it will not increase your total revenue.
Common “Free” strategies and why they fail
So now you know how the Steam algorithm promotes games and how the Steam shoppers play, here is why most free strategies don’t work.
I am just making a hobby game for fun so I will make it free
Please, just charge money for your hobby game. I know you are not interested in money. You don’t care if you make money or not. But here are some reasons why you should still charge money
- Free doesn’t mean your game will get seen by more people.
- Asking for money sets market expectations. Indies underprice their games already and we collectively should be pushing the price of our games up so that developers can make a sustainable living. We want people to value our labor. Steam is one of the few places where you can get directly compensated for your creative work, we should keep it that way and setting your price to free devalues that.
- I know you might be insecure about your project (every artist is). I know you are afraid that people are going to say “This game isn’t worth $x, it is trash.” But you need to push through. Part of being a creative is standing up bravely to the critics who will try to take you down even though they can’t do what you have done.
- Even if this is a student project, you should sell it for money. You probably have student loans. You gotta pay them off in some way.
- If you really really want to put it up for free, put it on itch.io. Then launch paid on Steam.
- One of the best visibility tools post launch is discounts. You put your game on sale and people who wishlisted it but didn’t buy it get an email. If you make your game 100% free there is no way to trigger that email to wishlisters.
Please, even though it is a hobby game, charge money for it. You are worth it. Your game is worth it.
I am doing free with DLC
DLC attach rate is very very low. Usually 10% at most. The visibility from free is not 10x higher therefore the increase in traffic does not overcome that low attach rate. That means that your initial traffic might be higher, but that is short lived because Valve will see that you aren’t making much money, so won’t promote you further.
I am going to day 1 free, then switch to paid
This is a weird tactic that took off a few years ago and never worked well. Don’t do this.
Basically you launch for free, ride the rocket of free Steam visibility as long as you can to juice your CCUs and then when you reach some theoretical high, you flip it to paid and hopefully you have so much “hype” and “visibility” that people will just buy your game because it is on the front page or at the top of some recommendation widgets.
Here is why it doesn’t work: when you switch to paid, every review that you got when it was free is zapped by Valve. Those reviews no longer count to your total as if you gave away free steam keys. You will basically start over with 0 reviews.
And what makes matters worse, because you are post launch, there are no more widgets to boost you like Popular Upcoming, New & Trending, the Discovery Queue. So now you have a harder time convincing people to download your game AND you don’t have any visibility widgets to boost you.
This doesn’t work. Don’t do it.
We are going to do a bundle with 1 paid key 3 free keys
Valve used to offer this option where you could bundle free keys in with game purchase. The idea was mainly for co-op games where someone could buy it, and then she could give the free keys to her friends to play with her. Here is a 10-year-old forum thread about games that used to do this.
In theory it sounds awesome, but Valve realized most often those free keys were resold through gray-market key selling sites. So they stopped this option for developers
Unfortunately, I have talked to developers who all the way up to launch still thought this was a still a thing that Valve offered. It was a shocking turn of events when they realized at the last minute their whole marketing and monetization strategy was impossible.
Please, understand the store you are selling into. You cannot do this anymore.
I used to work in mobile games, I am doing F2P
Steam players HATE Free to play and you risk the subsequent bad reviews. Basically the only games that can get away with this are very very big companies with huge budgets that can weather this storm. They also have an on-staff economist and data analyst who can expertly tailor the reward systems to maximize spend.
There are very very few F2P games that work on Steam. It is just a mismatch of the audience.
Price is not the reason why your game isn’t being played
As I wrote before, the reason game developers are willing to give Valve 30% of their revenue (even if they complain about it) is because Valve has built a storefront that attracts the most fanatical customers who will throw money around like it is nothing. They spend money on games they will never play.
If players don’t mind throwing around money, price is not the biggest obstacle to people buying your game. The biggest obstacle is that the game isn’t interesting enough. There are so many choices out there that if the game doesn’t sound intriguing, or there aren’t hundreds of content creators and the player’s friends aren’t raving about how awesome your game is, people won’t buy it.
When shoppers say “eh, maybe next time it is on sale I will buy it” that sounds like they are complaining about the price, but what they are actually saying is that they aren’t interested. They are basically saying “I will get to it tomorrow.” It is an interest problem, not a price problem.
Therefore, making your game free won’t make your game more popular in the long run.
In fact, raising the price could increase visibility because you are more likely to get that favored status by Valve, show up in more Steam widgets, and reach “real steam” faster.
So please, folks, don’t make your game free.