The Steam algorithm is tied to promotion: the more external traffic you bring to Steam, the more confident the algorithm is that you have an interesting game and will promote it.

Last week I recapped my survey of the developers who participated in the October 2024 Steam Next Fest.

In my survey I asked a simple question “What promotion did you do in the weeks leading up to Steam Next Fest and did you have a high velocity of wishlists leading into the start of it?”

I got a wide range of responses. The funny thing was, when I sorted the survey results by the number of wishlists earned, the top earning games had very long and detailed answers. The lower-performing games had rather short responses.

Curious, I graphed the number of words developers used to describe their marketing during Next Fest. Each blue bar is a different game. The height of the bar is the number of words they used. High-earning games were on the left side, low earners were on the right. 

Low performance responses

For the most part, the low earning games had survey responses like:

“No promotion”

“Close to none”

“little promotion on twitter/reddit, low velocity”

I am not trying to pick on the devs who are new to this and didn’t gain many wishlists. It just becomes blatantly clear how important it is to do more than just “posting to social.” I know it’s hard if you are a solo or small team working hard on just getting any game out there, but promotion requires working with any contacts you can to get them to show your game.

Top earning games just did more promotion. They tried more things, they documented the results more, they keep better records of what they did. It was quite striking to see.

Top earning responses

So if the top earning games had longer, more detailed marketing plans, what did they say? What worked? 

I summarized the responses, and cleaned them up for brevity. If I saw the tactic multiple times I marked how many times I saw it.

  • Cross promotion from developer’s previous games
  • Promoted the game on Redbook (a Chinese media platform)
  • Launched demo 3 weeks early and reached out to content creators (x3)
  • Posted a “Quit My Job” post on a genre-specific subreddit such as r/tycoon 
  • Shared the trailer on genre-specific subreddits (such as r/fireemblem)
  • Launched the demo months in advanced and participated in several festivals to get feedback. Then worked that feedback into a new version that they launched for Steam Next Fest. 
  • Playtesting the game with an existing audience
  • Released a new trailer for the demo launch
  • Uploaded demo to gx.games and got featured on the front page for multiple days (GX is a site that hosts gamemaker games that can be played in-browser).
  • Updated existing demo with a new mode (x2)
  • Emailed IGN and they wrote a story about the game
  • Updated game’s tags
  • Paid ads on Twitter / Reddit / Facebook / Instagram (x3)
  • Announced game as part of Gamescom
  • Released a new youtube devlog
  • Coverage in PCGamesN
  • Coverage in PCGamer

Note that sometimes I saw low-earning games list some of these same tactics as the high earning games. So there is no guarantee that trying this will work. Good coverage depends on a mix of your game having great graphics, an interesting hook, and fun to play. 

It was striking how many more marketing activities the top earning games were performing. They even admitted that they tried some things and they didn’t work. That is ok. This isn’t school where you get graded based on what percentage of what you do is successful. Instead you just have to try a bunch of things and one will work and that will make all the difference in the world. You must take a lot of shots on goal. Not all of them will hit.

You can’t tweet yourself to success

For the most part, effective games marketing is not about tweeting at your audience. Marketing is all about reaching out to people who have big audiences and asking them to promote your game to that audience. For example: content creators, IGN, festivals have huge followings and if you are granted permission by the corresponding gate keepers, you can share your game with them. Re-read the bullet point list of actions above. Even when the top-performing devs just “did twitter” or “reddit” they targeted specific sub-groups or they tried different social media channels until one worked.

If you have a previous game, you can cross promote to your old audience.

If you are struggling to promote your game I list every single way I know in my masterclass which will be going on sale on black friday (so don’t buy it yet)

Here is another blog I wrote on how to market a game

Don’t launch your demo as part of steam next fest

I mentioned this in my Steam Next Fest FAQ, but Steam Next Fest should not be the first time players have access to your game. You should be doing alphas, betas, uploading it to itch, participating in other festivals, and launching the demo weeks or months in advance. You need to work out the bugs and design flaws before Next Fest.

Here was one response that I summarized which shows off why it is so important to have a tested and polished demo before Next Fest starts:

I was rushing bug fixing with the demo (which apparently I didn’t do it enough), since lot’s of bugs went unnoticed and the start of SNF was bad in that regard for me… The amount of bugs was sad to see (as the overall perception of the demo was that it was unpolished due to them), but I’ve been constantly fixing those bugs and making adjustments to the demo during the event.

A developer

Also, having a tried-and-tested demo means you aren’t crunching (as hard) and frees you up to do more marketing activities.

In most cases, for first time devs, Steam Next Fest should not be the debut of your demo, it should be the grand finale. It is the swan song that carries you into launch.