Feel Confident marketing your game
If you look at the raw numbers, it seems like demos do not directly lead to wishlists. But demos are still the most powerful marketing tool for generating wishlists. Wait? What? Demo play stats are one of those weird paradoxes you have to wrap your mind around when you are Continue Reading
Let’s talk about Personal Calendar. Earlier this month, Valve raised the requirements to appear in Popular Upcoming from 7,000-ish wishlists to somewhere around 100,000 wishlists. In Valve’s words “The contents of this tab have been updated in response to player feedback in order to better capture the most anticipated releases Continue Reading
Monday was the first day of Steam Next Fest. Now that participating games have about 24 hours worth of data, the first question out of developer’s minds is “Is this normal?” I have been collecting wishlist and impression data from several past festivals and today I am announcing a little Continue Reading
On Monday Valve announced that Bullet Heaven is now an official tag. I am so happy there is finally an official name for the Vampire-Survivor-Brotato-like genre. I have been checking in on the genre for years because it is fun to see how a once white-hot-genre ages years after the Continue Reading
Throughout the year I like to take the temperature of Steam to answer common questions I get such as“How many games are releasing?”, “what genres are doing well?”, “Are we in a AI-generated slopocalypse?” The following is my Q1 report on Steam. These are games that were released January, February, Continue Reading
IndieGameJoe is the only person I know who can actually make twitter work. Nobody else can tweet once and earn a game thousands of wishlists. 4 Years ago I talked to him about going Viral on Twitter for his own game Hypercharge: Unboxed. Lately Joe has been tweeting about random Continue Reading
We are now half way through my annual inside conference. This year I am focusing on the current “golden age” style games that I have written about: rapid release, high earnings. We are going through a period right now where players will buy and enjoy games with short and fun Continue Reading
Last week I updated the benchmarks with the latest data from the February Next Fest. In today’s post I wanted to look across the raw data and make some wild ass assumptions (somewhat supported by the data) and see what it means about where SNF is headed. The upper bounds Continue Reading
How well does DLC do? Answer: It scales with your game’s performance, but for games that will earn at least $10,000+ it is probably worth doing some minor supporter-style DLC in time for the launch of your game. If your game is on the path to making $150,000 or more, Continue Reading
I have always wondered how to stay on the front page of Steam in Popular Upcoming / New & Trending the longest. Launch on Weekends? Mondays? Seasonal Sales? January? December? So I built a little script that every day scrapes Steam’s front page launch widgets and records what games appeared Continue Reading