Feel Confident marketing your game
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I know I know I write about wishlists a lot. But, if you are a heart surgeon you have to talk about blood a lot too. Pre-release, wishlists are an integral factor in Steam visibility. After release, total sales are the most important factor. Sometimes people misinterpret my extensive writing Continue Reading
Today I am excited to have a guest post written by my friend Ryan K. Rigney who heads up marketing at Odyssey Interactive. You should definitely subscribe to his weekly newsletter for game developers, Push to Talk, which highlights people doing interesting work in and around games. There are many ways Continue Reading
I always say that the Steam player base is “hard core.” They love deep games with lots of content. They like UIs that are complex and cluttered. If you asked me for a screenshot that perfectly encapsulates the types of games that the Steam player base loves, it would be Continue Reading