As I wrote in my last blog post, Valve will remove all URLs that are embedded in your game’s Steam page. Valve’s aim is to declutter Steam pages that are no longer about the game itself. For the most part, this is a very good, proactive move. It keeps Steam Continue Reading
Valve just took away a valuable visibility tool
Last week Valve outlawed excessive cross promotion and other visual noise from Steam store pages. Here is their official blog post announcing this change. I am not sure this is a great idea. In today’s post I will look at what they are changing and why I don’t think this Continue Reading
Big in Japan
Twitter still works in Japan Strangely, Japan still loves Twitter. They also love reading blogs about games! I love Japan. If you look at stats you will see Japan is the #2 user of the site. If you do the math that means the number of accounts is about 50% Continue Reading
What Steam’s big demo update means for your marketing strategy
Valve just radically changed the behavior of demos. You can read all about it here. The TL;DR of the changes are as follows: This is the button that launches the emails: So how does this change your marketing strategy? Should you launch your demo when you launch your Steam page? Continue Reading
When “Mostly Positive” games don’t sell
I see this a lot. I have worked on games like this: A well-crafted game releases that have sales that are ok, but not great. And these games did everything right! They followed the basic marketing meta of entering into festivals, sending their demo to content creators, creating a tiktok Continue Reading
What games are selling on Steam: The Q2 Report
At the end of every year I go back and look at all the games that reached at least 1000 reviews (old blog posts see my 2022 recap and 2023 recap). Here is a preview of my 2023 recap: This year, instead of doing one post in December, I am Continue Reading
Should you launch your game immediately after you appear in Steam Next Fest?
For the past 3 months one of the most common questions I got from developers was “I am participating in the June Steam Next Fest (SNF) where I will get the most exposure to my game, should I launch it right after it to capitalize on my HYPE?” At the Continue Reading
Steam Next Fest June 2024: Top demos and genre
At the conclusion of the June 2024 Steam Next Fest, Valve created a special page commemorating the 50 most-played demos during the fest. In this mid-week mini-blog I am taking a look at some of the trends I noticed while browsing those charts. (The first thing I noticed was there Continue Reading
Do demos help earn wishlists? Steam Next Fest June 2024
One of the longest running mysteries around festivals like Steam Next Fest was whether people deliberately play games and carefully evaluate each or do they just spam the “wishlist” button as they browse? For instance Valve has made it exceedingly easy to wishlist games: they added that blue button with Continue Reading
The double jump trick to Steam Next Fest
Steam Next Fest is over and I had a chance to talk to Xalavier Nelson Jr. about his company’s latest game I Am Your Beast and the strategy they used to propel it to the 16th most-played-demos during the June Steam Next Fest 2024. In less than a week I Continue Reading