This is another post in my continuing series of benchmarks while you are marketing your game. On Steam you can create a page for your game before it goes on sale. It is referred to as a “coming soon” page. This preview page is a great way to collect wishlists Continue Reading
Keep your free Steam demo up forever!
This is the story of how one indie dev left his demo up indefinitely and lucked out in getting a major streamer to cover his game yielding over 1800 wishlists. The rise of virtual festivals has incentivized indies to create free totally public demos. Overall these online festivals are super Continue Reading
Capsule Trends: Spring 2021
Valve just posted their monthly feature of the top selling Steam games. Click to see the list for February and March. I always like looking at the capsules for the top selling games because they set the visual style for all other capsules on Steam. Familiarity sells on Steam and Continue Reading
How to market your game using Steam’s Events system
Last week Valve held a virtual conference on their new site called Steamworks Events (if you have a Steamworks account you can log in and watch the replays). There were 4 main talks (which were recorded) and then a series of breakout sessions (which were not recorded). It seemed the Continue Reading
Yes you need to create a Steam page right now
You might have heard that I created an online class all about the things you need to do to create a Steam page. Check it out here: How To Make A Steam Page. A lot of students (before and after taking the class) ask me, ask me “Do I really Continue Reading
How to use Steam’s UTM feature to track the number of wishlists and sales your marketing is generating
Steam provides tons of stats and performance metrics – more than any other platform. But as much as they do, you could never actually close the loop on whether people were wishlisting your game. So for instance if you were doing a big marketing push and hired streamers, were sending Continue Reading
News from the Steam Q&A April 2021
Last week, three Valve employees who work directly on Steam did a Q&A about the current state of the platform. The event was hosted on the Game Production Community Discord server. The event was organized by Juney Dijkstra who is a Portfolio Manager at Paradox Interactive. You should follow here. Continue Reading
What to do if Microsoft buys Discord (Step 1 don’t panic)
Last week it was leaked that Microsoft is in negotiations to buy Discord for a reported 10 Billion Dollars. Discord is one of the best mid-funnel marketing channels that we game makers have to directly contact people who have heard about our game but are still on the fence and Continue Reading
How to run a mailing list without Mailchimp’s high fees.
Twitter recently acquired Revue – a service that allows you to run an email list for free. Is it any good? For the last month, I tried it out. I migrated my list over to Revue and sent 3 of my weekly newsletters from it instead of through my typical Continue Reading
Was the Steam Winter 2021 Festival Worth It?
Valve held its third Steam festival at the start of February 2021. You can see it here. As with all festivals I tracked down as many devs as I could to share with me their game’s performance during the festival. How many wishlists, how many impressions how many visits. The Continue Reading